Remember Me

This was written before I had the games section. I’m bringing this over from BlueSky and adding a few additional thoughts.

Let’s kick off the Back on My Bull Shit 2025 (BOMBS25) with a PS360 gen game deved by Don’t Nod (née dontnod). It has a bunch of interesting ideas & handles great, but oh my god the story is A HUGE mess and the combat system falls flat, relying on a lot of waiting for certain moves to cooldown.

The setting and art direction are great, the parkour stuff works wonderfully and is an intriguingly fun 6 hour romp through French game design (replete with some questionable enemy design). The english VO can be pretty bad! Voices do not match these characters. Play it in French. Excellent 7/10 game.

To expand on this, Remember Me succeeds at being a fun beat-em-up character action game full of parkour and a fairly unique world and level design. What it fails at, unfortunately, is this unique combo building mechanic. The core of this is you have some empty combo strings (x-x-y or x-y-x-y-x) and it’s up to you to unlock different pressens to fill each of those slots (like pressin’ a button, get it?). You have damage, health and cooldown pressens. There is also a modifier pressen that works to multiply those that come before it.

This seems like a good idea in theory, but it begins to suffer because they dole this out so slowly that you only have really specific pressens available at key points in the game, they might as well just unlocked the combos, at that point they could have made them attack differently. Because even though you are making your own combos, they are just punch/kick/repeat. What they aren’t are various interchangeable moves that setup enemies or finish them in any specific way. So if you are hoping to built the ultimate frame-cancelling air juggling combo that would make Danté blush you’ll be disappointed.

The repetition of the combat aside, the thing it’s trying to do is get you to balance powerful punches with punches that heal you and reduce the cooldown time on your special moves. This is where the game starts to lose its footing. Some enemies can only be attached after you use a special move to stun them or make them visible. And after you do this the cooldown on that move starts (90 seconds, maybe more, depending). So you have enemies you can only hurt with the special, but then you have to wait for these moves to come back, and to make those cooldown pressens useful they start throwing waves of neverending guys at you to farm health or cooldown from. But sometimes those guys down’t show up? So you are just dancing around trying to not get hit for a few minutes in between bouts with the stronger enemies. It can be not fun! It’s a shame too because when Nilim doesn’t have to rely on the gimick and can just use the environment and her nimble attacks to do some damage, her attacks are very fun, even if a bit shallow.