French studio Dontnod Entertainment earned the love and recognition of the masses with a story about a strange life Max Caulfield And Chloe Price, and now the name of the studio is primarily associated with interactive episodic adventures. But the studio’s first game was an adventure game in the cyberpunk genre beloved by many.
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For the first time the game was presented to the general public with a little informative teaser at Gamescom ‘11. Then the game was called “Adrift”, and all that could be understood was the year in which the events take place, 2084.
This is how Dontnod Entertainment first showed Neo-Paris to players in the “Adrift” teaser
A year later, at the same Gamescom exhibition, the game was re-presented, under the wing of the publisher Capcom, with a new name – Remember me.
It’s 2084, as I already said. The setting is Neo-Paris, which has gone through a lot in modern history, and in the world of the game was partially destroyed as a result of the European civil war, and declared a free city, until the mega-corporation “Memorize”, the new rulers of this world, the creators of the “Sensen” implant, which allows you to digitize, download, or delete any of your memories, chooses it as the location of its heads of headquarters.
Due to Sensen’s commercials, Memorize is beginning to vaguely resemble the major media giant of our day – Apple
We play for Nillin, which in the prologue of the game comes to life in the bastille of the future – a fortress that was once used as a prison for state criminals has slightly changed its purpose. Criminals are not just kept in prison here – prisoners who end up here have all their memories erased. No memories – no personality, no person. But in Nillin’s case, the operation doesn’t go quite according to plan; during a routine check, the girl remembers her name. And while we are being led through the corridors of the bastille, for a repeat operation to extract memory, the mysterious “Edge” gets in touch with a simple and understandable offer – trust me if you want to escape. Almost like the cult “come with me if you want to live”
Nilin will be able to avoid the repeated process of erasing her memory thanks to a new, and at the same time old, friend.
Once beyond the walls of the fortress, Edge gives us a little more information. We are Nillin, not just a poor girl who found herself without memory. Nillin is a memory hunter, one of the most famous members of the “errorists” group, derived from the word error, T.e. mistake, not what you thought. Edge, the leaders of the terrorist group, was the only one who did not end up in the bastille during the capture, in which the main character and almost all members of the group were detained. Together they are the most notorious criminals of this new world, and wanted posters hang on every corner of Neo-Paris.
But as if that weren’t enough, Nillin is no ordinary memory hunter. While her rebellious colleagues can only steal the memories of those in power to use them for their own purposes, Nillin has a special talent – she can change the memories of others. The events that happen to us throughout our lives are reflected in our personality and character, they are the basis of who we are. But what will happen if we have no memories of these events?? Or they will be changed?
Before each mission, you will find a small scene in Nillin’s thoughts – in an abstract environment, the main character asks questions about her own strength, her lost life, and most importantly, is the return of her memories and the overthrow of Memorize worth what she and Edge will do on the way to these goals.
Nillin finds himself in something like this situation, on both sides of the coin at once. On the one hand, she was deprived of her memories. She doesn’t remember who she was and why she sided with the terrorists. Does the end really justify the means in the fight against “Memorize”?? On the other hand, Edge offers a solution. He knows how to return her lost memories, but to do this, Nillin will have to use her special talents and help him in overthrowing Memorize, using rather controversial methods, invading other people’s memories along the way, at times radically changing other people’s lives.
Unfortunately, most of the time you will https://betcakecasino.co.uk/mobile-app/ be fighting not with a powerful corporation, but with the game camera, which in every battle strives to take the most inconvenient view of the battlefield. And this despite the fact that battles with opponents are half of the entire gameplay of the game. The entire combat system clearly spied on Batman in his Arkham adventures, but with some reservations. Firstly, these are always purely battles, there is no stealth in the game as such. Plus, the authors decided to add something of their own. The game has a mechanics of “links”. The techniques in the game are divided into 4 classes – combat, causing maximum damage, healing, restoring a little of Nillin’s health upon impact, techniques aimed at accumulating an energy scale, for using special techniques, and, excuse the tautology, connecting ligaments, multiplying the effect of the technique that comes before them. The player collects his own combos from these 4 types and enters into battle with them. It’s not that it adds too much of a tactical element to the battles, but at first it does seem somewhat fresh and moderately entertaining.
Several times during the game you will encounter patrol drones – there is no talk of stealth, your only task is not to step into a specially designated area.
After just a couple of chapters, the combat starts to falter. If the inhabitants of Arkham Asylum and their imitators usually behaved like gentlemen and attacked mostly one at a time, the adversaries in Remember me are very fond of huddling together in a mighty group, and, if possible, attacking the heroine at the same time. As a result, quite often, instead of carrying out a successful combo, you have to jump back immediately after the first hit and knock down the combo counter so as not to fall under the hot hand of your enemy’s partners. They try to diversify the combat with new types of opponents until the very end of the game, but it’s also not entirely successful. New types of enemies are mainly tied to knocking them out with a certain special move. As a result, towards the end, fights seem to be artificially prolonged, you spam combos on the cooldown of special abilities, use a special ability, spam combos again on the cooldown of special abilities, and, if necessary, add variety with combos to heal the heroine. Boss battles look about the same.
But at the same time, the battles are quite easy and don’t pose much of a challenge, so combined with the short duration of the game they don’t bother you much. This is clearly not a mechanic for which you will start a second playthrough on a higher difficulty.
The mechanics of boss fights are painfully classic – Nillin always has one special ability up her sleeve, which makes the boss especially painful, or opens him up to regular attacks. Repeat 2-3 times. Sad restoration of a special attack due to the beating of pawns in the set.
The second half of Remember me’s gameplay is local freerunning. Remember me is a completely linear adventure game, clearly looking at the early releases of the Uncharted series. But even in comparison with Drake, local parkour seems very… corridor-like, not allowing you to take a step to the left or a step to the right, and does not pose any challenge. It’s just a path from one fight to another, during which they even mark the next ledge for you to jump on Nillin.
Apparently, following Drake, Nillin adopted total bad luck while conquering the peaks. Either the pipe will break, or the ledge will collapse right under the heroine’s strong grip.
During development, they also tried to promote the game through interactive scenes of changing other people’s memories. These are small scenes where you do not have direct control over the situation, and you, interacting with some elements of the memory, try to bring the situation to an alternative ending. If you suddenly played Ghost Trick, then this is it. The scenes are terribly scripted, and you just need to find the right combination of objects to click on, and there is no difficulty in them. Moreover, there are criminally few of them in the game, one at the beginning and a couple more closer to the final credits, so they don’t make much difference.
The outcome of changing someone else’s memory is always the same, thought out in advance by the scriptwriters. And you can get to it only in one, pre-thought-out way. All you need to do is guess which one.
And it would seem that both parts of the gameplay are quite passable and do not particularly arouse enthusiasm, but at the same time they do not cause irritation. Then why the hell am I bashing?
The point here is that it will be created with love to keep you glued to the screen Dontnod Entertainment world of the future.
When it comes to cyberpunk, many modern works in this genre largely replicate the structure of future worlds as they were conceived at the turn of the 21st century. Required "low life – high tech", gray cities where the night sky is not visible behind huge iron skyscrapers, androids that can no longer be distinguished from people, and mandatory augmentation of every second person. Dontnod for our world, we took as a starting point the moment in which you and I live. Well, not exactly this one, but the one in which the development of the game began.
Despite all the technological progress by 2084, fashionistas still spend hours arguing about which dress to choose in boutiques. At least something in this world is forever.
Science fiction writers of the last century would probably be upset, but we still aren’t flying around in flying cars in 2019. We have not yet created full-fledged artificial intelligence, which will one day enslave us, but we are moving towards this by experimenting with machine learning. Holographic Ana de Armas will never brighten up my loneliness, but Alice can you call me a taxi. And the idea of robot assistants seems somewhat unnecessary when there is the Internet of Things, and I can make myself coffee without getting out of bed, while my refrigerator itself orders the missing products for Amazon.
But most of all we have advanced in all types of social communications and information transfer. The Internet has some kind of huge bandwidth, and this figure increases from year to year, but it’s never enough for us. We strive to transfer every aspect of our lives into the digital space in order to be able to share and consume this information as quickly as possible. It no longer matters where a person is from, borders do not prevent you from meeting and communicating with people anywhere in the world. We are ready to share our most intimate moments and let strangers into our personal lives through social networks, for the sake of their approval in the form of likes. The authors started from this concept.
So by 2020, in an attempt to find an even faster way to exchange information, it is possible to carry out the first exchange of information in the form of images directly from a person to a machine, and a little later, the technology grows to the direct exchange of images from one person to another. The company responsible for the discovery, Memorize, is turning its technology into a kind of new kind of social networking – millions of people are happily installing the first versions of the chips “Sensen”, exchanging thoughts, feelings and images, no longer needing words to do so. A little later, it is possible to digitize human memories.
Don’t be afraid, “Memorize” hasn’t forgotten about humanoid androids carrying bags for you either.
Storage banks for digitized memories are created, and they themselves are turned into goods. Now anyone can, for example, get rid of memories of some tragic events from their life, or, conversely, relive other people’s pleasant memories.
The authors work very subtly with the details of their world and its elaboration, but unfortunately for the most part all this is hidden in scenes that are easy to run past, or news reports that can be found during the game. You might see drug addicts in the slums who need just one more memory, or you might see someone buying someone else’s memory of their first kiss from a vending machine. It also reminds us of the past incarnation of “Sensen” in the form of social networks, finding various news about events in the world of the game, each will have a counter of local likes and dislikes in the form of the number of those who remember these events, and those who chose to forget. It’s clear that in articles about the war experienced, the number of those who decided to forget far exceeds those who remember.
I want to praise Remember me most of all for the world and details. For example, there are no holograms here, all these pop-up tips, or advertising blocks are elements of augmented reality that are projected by the sensor, now something similar but on a smaller scale can be done by your smartphone. Or news releases from a local Eliza Kassan, which are broadcast on city screens only in the form of previews, and the full version is only by subscription, directly to your sense. Hello Netflix and other subscription digital distribution platforms. Once in someone else’s apartment in a wealthy area of Neo-Paris, you can see the life of the average wealthy resident – one android cleans the apartment, another plays live music for the owner on the piano, and another one lies in bed… for some purpose. There is, of course, a local red light district with androids, with a laconic name “Babes in the shell”.
If you suddenly perked up, waiting for the topic of sex with androids to be revealed, then you can return your hands to the keyboard. Things won’t go further than posters and rooms with leather sofas.
The artists responsible for the art and design of the game deserve special praise, because it looks amazing. Remember, I mentioned the “corridor” parkour game, leading Nillin by the hand? So, the only advantage of local freerunning is that it leads you through incredibly beautiful scenery. The camera often does not hesitate to move further away, taking an inconvenient position for controlling the character, just to show you views of Neo-Paris. The city combines both a part of the present Paris, with its classical architecture, and a monstrous, sprawling metropolis of the future, with skyscrapers rising up. And this combination of antiquity and the future in the appearance of the city can be seen both in poor slums and wealthy areas and does not get boring until the end of the game. True, enjoying the monuments of the past is often hampered by various signs and advertising blocks, the design of which is also hard to find fault with. Very often I caught myself thinking that instead of running to the next mark that the game points me to, I look at the graffiti on the walls, read the signs or stop to listen to the latest news broadcast on the city streets.
Getting stuck for a couple of minutes, looking at graffiti and advertising is a standard situation in “Remember Me”.
Before I go too far from the appearance of the game, a few words about the graphics. The French were one of the first in the interactive entertainment industry to use the principles of PBR (physically correct rendering), which has already become a standard in the current generation. Without going into details, this means that the authors tried to reproduce as accurately as possible the interaction of various materials with light, including the amount of absorbed and reflected light. It’s not that the game became the most technologically advanced at the time of release, far from it, but not least thanks to the attempts of the authors in PBR, the game looks pretty good even now, when we are spoiled by all the delights of the current generation. The authors are especially good at small rooms, colored with light from small “colored” sources. By the way, someone was indignant about sunny cyberpunk at the time of the trailer’s release Cyberpunk 2077, saying that night is mandatory for the genre? You can launch Remember Me right now and see what cyberpunk it is like, flooded with sunlight, fortunately the game does not lose its atmosphere at all during the daytime. Yes, it’s worth mentioning that the heart of the game is the engine UE3, but here you won’t recognize him right away. The situation reminds Mirror’s Edge on the same engine – both games are distinguished by a sun-drenched city, which still looks nice, and does not betray the previous generation of the engine from Epic.
6 years after its release, “Remember Me” is not at all repulsive with the picture. This is largely due to the artists and designers who designed the scenery surrounding Nillin
The musical accompaniment does not lag behind the appearance. The music in the game was provided by an incredibly talented Olivier Derivière, former composer of the reboot Alone in the dark and series Obscure. In all seriousness, the music written for Remember Me is one of his best works. To record the soundtrack, Olivier first recorded the orchestral motifs that were familiar to him, and only then began to change them beyond recognition, changing the sound, and adding a large amount of “electronics” alien to the classics, as if Nillin was changing other people’s memories. At the same time, the final compositions sound harmonious and do not seem like “Frankenstein’s monsters”, fashioned from pieces of two different genres. Well, needless to say that this sound fits perfectly into the scenery of Neo-Paris, emphasizing both the duality of the city itself and the main character.
The title theme of the game, which immediately makes you feel the mixture of classics and electronics
I would also like to say something about the battle music theme. Although now no one can be surprised by dynamic music in games, Remember Me has one of the best executions of this idea. Even when towards the end you get tired of the core gameplay with local fights, it’s pleasant to listen to how a new dynamic-sounding layer appears in the music, and with a successfully executed combo the vocals begin to break through until the credits. And it’s doubly disappointing to lose pace and interrupt a combo when the world around you “goes silent” and only quiet ambient music begins to play on the battlefield.
Antiquity and the future are intertwined in the game into a common, harmonious picture.
In the world of Remember Me, you want to explore every corner, spend as much time in it as possible, plunge into it headlong. But it doesn’t work. In the early stages, while the game was called “Adrift” and was being developed with the support of Sony, the developers had an action RPG in their plans, and the developments remaining from those times clearly benefited the world of the game when it moved into the adventure genre. But they are clearly cramped in a linear bit map – they want more immersion in the world, greater influence on the events that happen in it, more exploration of Neo-Paris, instead of a quick run past the main attractions. I would like a greater revelation of the work that the authors put into developing this world, I would like that same role-playing game, or at least greater opportunities to study and get to know this world better. It’s no joke, even in the form of a linear bitmap, the RM setting looks so fresh and not hackneyed that thoughts arise that under other circumstances Neo-Paris could compete with mastodons like Deus Ex.
Unfortunately, there is practically no chance for a potential role-playing sequel, with a larger scale of development, in which the authors would continue to play with the established principles of the genre. I would really like to. But even as a linear adventure for a few hours, the world remember me able to make fans of the genre fall in love with themselves. If you suddenly missed it at one time, like me, or are tired of the open worlds that filled this generation, spend a little time in Neo-Paris, fortunately the game is now sold for just pennies, and will cost you one average shawarma. And in return you will get several interesting characters, a good local plot, and one of the most unusual, richly detailed and sunny worlds in the cyberpunk genre. At least until release Cyberpunk 2077.