Hey, remember Remember Me? No, not the movie that ruined Robert Pattinson for all of us. I'm talking about the gorgeous beat-'em-up game that came out last year. It was a great cyberpunk adventure. But like many ambitious sci-fi games, it didn't always make sense.
It sort of comes with the territory if you're telling a techno-thriller story set in a dystopian near future where people can alter their memories and hack into one another's, to be fair. In his latest video, YouTuber Dartigan broke down all of his pet peeves with the game and found some silly and thoroughly enjoyable things to nitpick:
My favorite is his point about how gigantic the air vents in the game are. I mean: Adam Jensen managed to get along just fine sleuthing through normal-sized air ducts in his dystopian cyberpunk near future scenario. Maybe they just do things differently in France. Or maybe—maybe—someone in the Remember Me universe actually played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, realized that air vents needed to be larger for badass hacker-warriors to crawl through, and altered the memories of everyone involved in making air vents for secretive military bases. Crazier things have happened!
Dartigan also makes a great point about how the game's "memory rewriting" conceit, for all intents and purposes, is treated like just another sci-fi time travel gimmick. That doesn't make it a bad thing—the memory hacking and dramatic flashbacks are a big part of Remember Me's charm. But as anyone who's watched the Terminator movies can tell you, time travel can do terrible things to narrative cohesion.
Let's just hope that Remember Me developer Dontnod Entertainment doesn't forget this as they go about making their next game, Life Is Strange.
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