Remember Me: Memory Overview.
Feb. 21st, 2014 02:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlRemember Me from 50% of the way (or about that) through the game is pretty damn good so far. It is about the cyberpunkiest thing I've played in a long time, and I'm not just using that as shorthand for "futuristic". By "cyberpunk" I mean that the main character is a member of an underground resistance fighting to overthrow a global megacorporation in a dystopian world of hypertech and robots.
Spoilers below.
So. It is The Future, 2084 (not 1984, that's a different story) and the setting is Neo-Paris, which is all shiny and glossy on top and rotted underneath. The Memorize Corporation has popularized an implant called the SenSen. It records and interacts with people's memories, letting them block out the bad ones, collect and trade with their friends, or even sell the good ones for a spare euro or two.
(Of course sometimes the implanting goes wrong or people develop a crippling addiction to memory abuse and become insane murderous street people, but Memorize is working on a way to reformat them into brainless drones, so that's cool. Soon they won't bother the important rich people anymore.)
Let's talk about the main character. Nilin is an "Errorist", which is exactly what it sounds like. She's the most gifted of her band of terrorists-minus-T in that instead of simply stealing or erasing memories, she can "remix" them. She picks out data points in memories and alters them, then lets events play out as the logic of the human mind dictates they would.
F'example, the first time she does it in-game is an assassin hired by Memorize, looking to kill her for the bounty money because said assassin has a comatose husband on life support and needs to pay the hospital bills. Nilin remixes the memories until the corporate doctor aiding the husband has accidentally killed him through medical malpractice, and suddenly the assassin flips sides and wants to take down the Memorize Corporation too.
Man, now... that is an ETHICALLY WEIRD situation, isn't it? You'd think that's the kind of thing they'd really lean on for pathos, right? Yeah not so much. Nilin takes a passing curiosity in the ethics of what she's doing, but she isn't interested in walking the road of angst and existentialism. "Only a militant believes the ends always justify the means." she muses briefly after stealing someone's memories and passing them back to her Errorist leader, who uses them to open a dam and cause a high-death-toll flood.
Then she goes back to spinkicking security guards in the face and overwriting their memory implants with random junk data so she can liberate huge amounts of memory data from a brain-wiping prison called La Bastille to help her friends back in Slum 404.
(This is not a subtle game, and did I mention it's French as HELL?)
Nilin strikes an important balance to me. She's not totally unsympathetic, but she's also not sugarcoated. She acknowledges she's doing really awful things to people but seems to really feel it's for an eventual greater good. I -like- her, but I'm a little scared of her and for her. I worry about where she's gonna end up.
So... there's that, sure. What "Remember Me" REALLY is though is a delivery system for VISUAL DESIGN. This game is AMAZING looking. I've been keeping a running screenshot gallery myself. This ALSO contains spoilers, but it's a big collection of shots I've taken as I play. Mostly looking at the cityscale, to be honest.
You can find that album here.
I'm not the only one who thinks this game is gorgeous, though. For really REALLY high-end visual-marvel screens, head to Dead End Thrills and check out their Remember Me gallery. They have the advantage of development tools and super-high-res textures I don't.
So! That's Remember Me so far, as of Chapter 4. ... Oh and there's combat. You make combos and do them over and over. Don't care really. Not what I'm playing for.
Spoilers below.
So. It is The Future, 2084 (not 1984, that's a different story) and the setting is Neo-Paris, which is all shiny and glossy on top and rotted underneath. The Memorize Corporation has popularized an implant called the SenSen. It records and interacts with people's memories, letting them block out the bad ones, collect and trade with their friends, or even sell the good ones for a spare euro or two.
(Of course sometimes the implanting goes wrong or people develop a crippling addiction to memory abuse and become insane murderous street people, but Memorize is working on a way to reformat them into brainless drones, so that's cool. Soon they won't bother the important rich people anymore.)
Let's talk about the main character. Nilin is an "Errorist", which is exactly what it sounds like. She's the most gifted of her band of terrorists-minus-T in that instead of simply stealing or erasing memories, she can "remix" them. She picks out data points in memories and alters them, then lets events play out as the logic of the human mind dictates they would.
F'example, the first time she does it in-game is an assassin hired by Memorize, looking to kill her for the bounty money because said assassin has a comatose husband on life support and needs to pay the hospital bills. Nilin remixes the memories until the corporate doctor aiding the husband has accidentally killed him through medical malpractice, and suddenly the assassin flips sides and wants to take down the Memorize Corporation too.
Man, now... that is an ETHICALLY WEIRD situation, isn't it? You'd think that's the kind of thing they'd really lean on for pathos, right? Yeah not so much. Nilin takes a passing curiosity in the ethics of what she's doing, but she isn't interested in walking the road of angst and existentialism. "Only a militant believes the ends always justify the means." she muses briefly after stealing someone's memories and passing them back to her Errorist leader, who uses them to open a dam and cause a high-death-toll flood.
Then she goes back to spinkicking security guards in the face and overwriting their memory implants with random junk data so she can liberate huge amounts of memory data from a brain-wiping prison called La Bastille to help her friends back in Slum 404.
(This is not a subtle game, and did I mention it's French as HELL?)
Nilin strikes an important balance to me. She's not totally unsympathetic, but she's also not sugarcoated. She acknowledges she's doing really awful things to people but seems to really feel it's for an eventual greater good. I -like- her, but I'm a little scared of her and for her. I worry about where she's gonna end up.
So... there's that, sure. What "Remember Me" REALLY is though is a delivery system for VISUAL DESIGN. This game is AMAZING looking. I've been keeping a running screenshot gallery myself. This ALSO contains spoilers, but it's a big collection of shots I've taken as I play. Mostly looking at the cityscale, to be honest.
You can find that album here.
I'm not the only one who thinks this game is gorgeous, though. For really REALLY high-end visual-marvel screens, head to Dead End Thrills and check out their Remember Me gallery. They have the advantage of development tools and super-high-res textures I don't.
So! That's Remember Me so far, as of Chapter 4. ... Oh and there's combat. You make combos and do them over and over. Don't care really. Not what I'm playing for.
