Remember Me is such an unusually experimental and auteurist debut project that I'm honestly surprised the more 'realistic and grounded' Life is Strange was the hit that put Dontnod on the map. Remember Me is so wildly and so vastly unlike Life is Strange that your only clue that the two titles share a developer is the strange, uncanny, half-cringey and half-poetic dialogue that defines both Remember Me and Life is Strange's character writing. Apart from that and some mindfuck plot moments, Remember Me is literally nothing like its far-more-successful sister project. Gritty cyberpunk theatrics take the place of Life is Strange's serene slice-of-life trappings. Nilin's combat and parkour skills define Remember Me's gameplay loop, whereas Maxine relied on puzzles, fetch quests, and dialogue trees. Time travel was Life is Strange's defining gimmick, whereas memory-alteration is Remember Me's calling card. So much is different, and yet two things ring true above all else: Dontnod is a company that is overflowing with good ideas, and Dontnod is a company that has no idea how to execute those good ideas.

On first blush, the cyberpunk world of Remember Me's "Neo-Paris" is striking. There's a sharp divide between the rich and the poor here: the upper crust live in sleek, sterile metropoli dominated by holographic billboards, hospital-white architecture, and digital displays around every corner, whereas the poor neo-Parisians are forced to rot away in rain-heavy, flooded slums adorned with crumbling metro tunnels, crowded marketplaces, and hand-me-down neon signs littering the landscape like a flashy scrapyard. Memories are a tangible thing in this universe; a giant megacorporation named Memorize created a 'sensation implant' device named Sensen, and with your Sensen, memories can be sold, exchanged, shared... and easily hunted down and stolen. Memory theft is such a common problem, in fact, that not only is "memory hunter" an actual profession you can have in this world - our protagonist Nilin's profession of choice, as point of fact - but the rampant abuse of memory theft and a growing addiction to Sensen has created a subset of severely mentally-ill human beings that have lost all sense of self and stability called "Leapers". Social tensions have reached such a boiling point that when the game begins, we're smack dab in the middle of an enormous social upheaval being led by a group of anti-Memorize revolutionaries called Errorists, and our amnesia-induced Nilin is thrust into the thick of this chaotic uprising with only the instructions of a distant, enigmatic Errorist figurehead named 'Edge' to follow and a mystery to uncover.

On paper, that sounds like the dopest shit ever. It's radicalized Ghost in the Shell, how could you not be on board with that? Unfortunately, however, the alluring and exciting world of Neo-Paris is only skin-deep. Crucial questions about this world are never truly answered. Why do Leapers happen? What causes them to get addicted to Sensen compared to other, more well-adjusted human beings that have the same device? Why did the government allow this invention to happen in the first place? Who are the Errorists? Where are they located? Why don't we meet more than, like, three Errorists throughout the entire plot? And what the actual fuck is up with the robots? There are multiple points in Remember Me where Nilin will run into robots, but the game never bothers to explain anything about them. Who invented them? What do humans think about them? Why do they just stand there and do nothing whenever Nilin breaks into an apartment, a lab, a facility, a prison, or a high-tech cybercompound? That last part is particularly strange: the robots seem to be pretty subservient to their 'owners' (rich human beings), and yet they will do literally nothing if Nilin bursts into a location she's not supposed to be at. If the robots aren't going to matter in the slightest, then why are they even part of the setting? Remember Me refuses to answer a lot of the pressing questions on its plate, and that inherently cagey attitude towards worldbuilding hurts the legitimacy and believability of Neo-Paris as a setting. On paper, Neo-Paris is so fucking cool; it's a shame, then, that the story is so inconsistent and the world is only superficially appealing.

The parkour winds up being more of a chore than anything else: it's the same bland, automated spectator sport that it is in Uncharted, serving more as spectacle than actual substantive gameplay. The combat has a few worthwhile ideas - customizable combos! - but Remember Me has an obnoxious tendency to throw way too many enemies at you at any given time, gradually turning combat encounters into more of a chore in the later levels and watering the pretty fleshed-out combat system down into button-mashing sludge.

I've heard a lot of praise on here for the memory-altering gimmick, and I'll be honest, while it's cool as hell on paper, it's easily my least favorite mechanical part of the game due to how unintuitive and repetitive memory-remixing winds up feeling. You have to rewind and fast-forward through the exact same scene several times in order to spot 'memory glitches' in order to alter the memory, but sometimes those glitches are a red herring and won't lead anywhere, so you have to use your intuition in order to rearrange the scene before you. Honestly sounds pretty cool on paper - noticing a trend here? - but in execution, some of the solutions to these memory puzzles are fucking obtuse. The fact that there's only four of these puzzles in the game is perhaps the strangest thing; on one hand, that means you don't have to deal with them very often, but on the other hand, it feels like a waste of a clever and thought-provoking concept. Yahtzee was 100% on the money here: the memory-alteration gimmick could have sustained an entire game, but the fact that it has to rub shoulders with the oddly hack-n-slash-y combat and the Uncharted parkour means that the mechanics have no choice but to feel pretty underdeveloped and annoying. The gimmick has no room to breathe and naturally grow on its own.

And as for the plot beats themselves... much like the rest of the game, they're a mixed bag. There's definitely a stronger understanding of scale and scope here than the confused and histrionic Life is Strange, but the further the game went on, the more confused I became. Remember Me throws a lot of cool-sounding characters on screen and then either refuses to develop them any further beyond their initial hook or proceeds to ruin them by turning them into a clown. Remember Me's dialogue is a unique blend of poetic, goofy, pretentious, and the unnatural but charming way of speaking you get from someone whose first language clearly isn't English. One moment, characters will wax poetic about the morally gray nature of what they're doing and the horrors of the world they live in, and the next moment, they'll spout out garbled one-liners so headass stupid and crazy it'd make the MCU blush. It's a whiplash-inducing story, fluctuating rapidly from fun to frustrating to fascinating to fucking stupid in the span of an entire level. Our protagonists are strong enough, I suppose: the confused, conflicted Nilin and especially the mysterious but passionate Edge help keep the delirious story grounded, and their dynamic and shared history is easily the strongest and most comprehensible emotional core of the plot (Edge's story in particular is genuinely pretty fascinating). But Nilin and Edge aren't enough to salvage what winds up being a cathartic but convoluted trainwreck of a plot. It was fun to watch, but hard to grasp.

In spite of all my complaints, there is something about Remember Me that's hard to hate. The visual presentation is utterly jaw-dropping (especially for 2013), the core themes and ideas at the nexus of Remember Me's plot are strong and interesting, and sometimes the customizable combat is punchy and inventive when you get a good flow going and the enemy placement is just right. But more often than not, Remember Me is hindered by its ambitions: it wants to be everything and everywhere all at once, and this spiderwebbing mindset ultimately stretches and thins out Remember Me's good ideas to the point of almost shattering. Credit where credit is due, though, this was a hell of a debut, and I honestly feel kinda bad that history seems to remember the stilted and awful Life is Strange over the colorful but pretentious Remember Me. It's hard to call this a hidden gem - too much Triple-A bullshit and too much stuff going on at all times - but there's something worth treasuring about Dontnod's cyberpunk debutante darling all the same.

I doubt I'll forget this game for quite some time. Remember you soon.

Very unique platformer that has you move a heavy chariot around its levels. Having to take care of this chariot makes for very unusual platforming challenges, and so the game really manages to stand out.

Earning a Gold Medal in each level was easy but fun, with one exception... The Hidden Level 5-5.

The Hidden Level is the longest level in the game, with a speedrun Gold Medal time of 30 minutes, and completing it that fast is not easy at all. Additionally, the level has to be completed without gadgets, which I did via Shareplay with a friend, as doing it solo would have been torture and the game doesn't feature online-coop.

My time on Mirror's Edge was :
1/3 "where do I even have to go"
1/3 of Inevitably falling to my death because I wasn't at that exact precise point/direction I needed to jump
1/3 actual fun parkour

Also the gun shooting and fighting in this game sucks even if it's just something mostly optional

Cool story and setting though

not sure what i'd rate this. not sure if i'd even buy it.. i got it as a gift.

i did play it for 10 hours straight, but it does feel a little icky to play. so many things seem "ripped off" .. you discover an area & it sounds just like BOTW. the point redeem system looks just like ark's. some of the designs look pretty close to pokemon. there's barely a 'parody' here, they just threw a bunch of stuff from other games together, added guns, & it worked. it's a soulless pile of other stuff you know you like.

i don't believe this was 'ai generated' like a lot of people said.. if they were ai generated pokemon.. they'd probably look more original lol. if they didn't tag it with ai on steam & got away with it, that would be pretty disappointing.

it's garbage slop that's easy to digest, & sadly it's a little entertaining. the hype will probably die down in a week & it'll probably never leave early access. tons of glitches & a shovelware feel to it. but i did have fun with my friend. this isn't going to replace pokemon, botw, ark, lego fortnite, or anything else in any fan's mind. maybe it'll set a fire under game freak's butts (it won't) to try & create something better than the glitchy scarvi game we just got.