Remember Me

I went into Remember Me expecting a mid-tier brawler dressed up in cyberpunk clothing, and what I got instead was a game that kept stopping me mid-fight to stare at the architecture. DONTNOD's debut is set in Neo-Paris in 2084, where a corporation called Memorize has turned personal memories into a tradeable commodity via a neural implant called Sensen. You play as Nilin, a former elite memory hunter who wakes up in a Memorize facility with her own past stripped away, and the game's central tension, figuring out who she is while dismantling the surveillance state that erased her, is genuinely compelling once it finds its footing. The star mechanic is Memory Remix: Nilin dives into a target's mind, scrubs back and forth through a recorded memory, and manipulates specific objects or events to rewrite how that person remembers the outcome. Change a joyful recollection into a traumatic one, and a pursuer becomes too grief-stricken to keep fighting. It is a puzzle-and-narrative hybrid that lands with real emotional weight in its best moments. The problem is that there are only a handful of these sequences across the entire eight-chapter campaign. Every time the game hands over that mechanic it feels like the truest version of what Remember Me wanted to be, and every time the sequence ends, the game retreats into safer, flatter territory. That flatter territory is mostly corridor combat, built around a system called Pressens. The Combo Lab lets you manually slot individual Pressen attacks into combo chains, assigning each hit properties like health recovery or special-ability recharge. On paper this is clever customization. In practice, Nilin's auto-targeting gets confused in crowds, longer combos break if she clips the wrong enemy, and the camera works against you in tighter arenas. The combat is not unplayable, but it is the most generic thing in the game, and it occupies most of the runtime. Platforming fills the gaps, with orange marker arrows pointing at every ledge Nilin is allowed to grab. It is hand-holdy to a fault and the linearity is suffocating for a world this visually rich. What saves Remember Me from being a curiosity and nothing more is the total package of Neo-Paris itself, Olivier Deriviere's orchestral score (legitimately excellent), and Nilin as a protagonist. She is a rare lead in this genre, nuanced, morally complicated, and voiced with real conviction. The themes, memory as commodity, identity under corporate surveillance, the ethics of rewriting someone's emotional history, were ahead of their time in 2013 and feel sharper now. For players who care about world-building and concept, this is the kind of game that sticks around in your head long after the credits roll, which is ironic given the subject matter. Alex, Scout Team