MEDIA MONDAYS: REMEMBER ME.

When Remember Me came out, I  had my usual excitement for a bigger release with a female protagonist. Then when reviews were lacklustre and the game was overshadowed by the release of Beyond: Two Souls and the Tomb Raider reboot (how dare we have multiple female leads in one year!) I put it to the back of my mind... until it was disgustingly cheap on the Steam store a few weeks ago.

The game is set in Neo-Paris in the year 2084. The population is now addicted to a brain implant known as Sensen, which enables users to share, trade and remove their memories. It also gives Memorize, the corporation responsible for Sensen, the ability to establish a surveillance state. Our heroine, Nilin, was a member of a rebel group known as Errorists before she was imprisoned and had her own memory erased. As Nilin, you continue working to bring down Memorize while trying to regain your own memories.
Remember Me opens with a bright, airy "advertisement" for Sensen. Emotional people talking about their life-changing experiences with the product. It's a very intriguing and interesting way to open a game before cutting to Nilin being tested and then lead to her doom. Here you experience a brief tutorial of the basic game mechanics. I'm starting to wonder why developers give you a difficulty option if they're then going to show you how to walk. After escaping the compound, there's a combat tutorial that explains the combo lab - where you combine attacks or "Pressens" to create chain attacks - then doesn't tell you what your attack buttons are. Do you want to hold my hand or not, tutorial?

Mild irritation aside, I did enjoy the combat style. There are four types of Pressens - regenerative, power, chain and cooldown - and tailoring them to your needs and fighting style has an interesting learning curve. It seems silly at first but as you slowly learn more Pressens, bigger combos and S-Pressens (special attacks that allow you to stun enemies, corrupt robots to fight for you or attack enemies with greater speed) the combo lab starts to make more sense. You can't just button mash your way through combat, you need to time the attacks, dodge and keep an eye on the cooldown of your S-Pressens. You also have a projectile weapon which can be used against robot enemies and to open doors - functionality!

The varied enemies mean you also have to adapt your fight style - not all of them can just be beaten to death. They range from basic leapers - citizens who have become so addicted to Sensen they've lost their minds - that jump around almost as much as you do, to invisible leapers or ones that feed on lesser enemies to make them almost indestructible, a range of guards including ones that do you damage if you hit them and a range of robot enemies. While the difficulty does slowly increase, most of the challenge comes from sheer numbers and having to assess your priorities. Boss fights tend to be dodge and attack until their health bar is depleted and a quick-time event is made available.

Pretty early in the game you're shown why Nilin is integral to the Errorist cause - with the aid of her Sensen Glove, she has the ability to not only steal other people's memories or Remembranes (an ability you use to re-live private conversations or break into facilities) but alter them altogether. You rewind and fast-forward through memories, looking for "glitches", seemingly meaningless things you can manipulate to your advantage. It might be the movement of a bottle or turning off the safety on the gun. Manipulating different glitches yield different results, you just need to find the right combination. It's a thrilling and interesting piece of gameplay and the outcomes do give you pause. Sadly you only get to use Nilin's skill a handful of times.

Neo-Paris is a beautiful backdrop for the game - from the depressing and dirty slums to the homes and offices of the social elite. The little bits of technology, like text that pops up as you walk by, are well integrated without feeling like a forced futuristic environment. The graphics do feel a little dated for a game that is barely two years old and I'm always bothered by a game that basically forces me to follow a linear path to my destination when I want to see what's behind this door or that railing (we're a little spoilt nowadays) but it's still a pleasure to look at. Some of the platforming also stinks of classic problems I had hoped we'd gotten past - camera angles that confuse Nilin's direction or restrict your field of view. It's basic stuff that pulls you out of the game and makes you want to punch your monitor a little.

Nilin is a welcome protagonist - she never stops questioning her "partner" Edge's motives, or her own choices for that matter. There are cutscenes between each chapter of Nilin walking through her shattered memories, trying to piece together her past and why she would take up the Errorist cause in the first place. Refreshingly she isn't even the only strong female character in the game - though most of your basic enemies such as guards and leapers are male, a good percentage of your more important targets are women with interesting stories of their own. And the men you interact with? Not a romantic sub-plot in sight. Edge is like a brother - never anything more - and though one minor character has a crush on Nilin, it's more admiration of her skill than sheer interest in dat booty.

The verdict? I regret skipping it at time of release. Despite some frustrating gameplay and slightly dated graphics, overall it was a very enjoyable experience and one that I sped through desperately to find out what the heck was going on, with combat that was interesting and evolving (mostly) without becoming tedious. If you haven't checked it out, it's only $10 $5.99 on the Steam store (80% off) at the moment!