This is a very very very French game.
It explores memories as a commodity and has a really interesting angle on cyberpunk, since it's set in Paris and not "made up city #44" like Cyberpunk 2077's Night City. The same goes for the fashion in this game. It's all certainly cyberpunk and certainly fiction, but it's grounded in realism just well enough to keep you in it and make you see the world as something that could really be in 60 years.
The main character fights a mixture of capoeira and french kickboxing, which is quite fun to experience, and the combat iself is, on the hardest difficulty, very enjoyable, punishing mistakes easily and making you use all of its mechanics, because there, they aren't crutches as much as they are survival tools. The combo lab isn't really a Street Fighter 6 style avatar creation system, it simply changes what each hit in a combo does, with attacks further into the como, and thus harder to land - giving you better rewards, so the challange comes from doign the right combo at the right time, without dropping it, and without being interrupted. As for the combat feel itself, think less "Arkham" and more "Insomniac's Spider-Man,"
The game itself is very beautiful, like walking through a concept art album. Literally, several of the camera angles almost 1:1 with the concept art. To me, this makes the simplistic, almost automated parkour that was VERY prevalent at the time worth it, since the game is feeding your senses with music, visuals, characters giving you moral questions, and NPCs talking about their lives while you go through this simple, but well integrated movement system. It's even got a couple puzzles when it wants to shake things up, but nothing like the water purification puzzle. You won't break your head, is what I'm saying.|
The soundtrack was digitally corrupted before being rearranged, so it feels very unique, and it's reactive in combat, too, like the new Doom games. The sound itself has hints of Matrix and a bit of Tron, but it largely sets itself apart by the usage of surprisingly smooth synths as a motif, as well as the techno beats that hit very hard the further you get into the game. It's a soundtrack to remember, for sure.
The story itself was also very interesting. In it, Nilin - the main girl - escapes a prision after being brainwashed and is made to work with a rebel group that wants to take down the big bad corporation that this this to her and reclaim her memories. Throughout the course of the story, though, her and her group do increasingly questionable and damaging things to individuals and collectives, which gives both Nilin and the Player pause, but the beauty comes in how it contrasts itself, how it sells you on its vendetta almost like the original Zorro comic, though nowhere near as intense. The story has got a few very hard-hitting twists that never settle for just being twists, they always give the story more depth, not contempt with just the shock of the moment. It's a very beautifully written story with lots to love, though I'll admit, it start off farely slowly. I'd say it only really hooked me by the end of episode 2/start of episode 3, and THEN it really gets going, but that's still easily an hour of gameplay where the game puts you through setdressing, walk-and-talks and lots, LOTS of unskippable cutscenes. They tone it down by episode 2, sure, but it does spoil the mood of any 100% fresh playthrough. I start in episode 2 and I suspect some of you will do/have done the same.
All in all, Remember Me is quite a darling, if I'm being honest. It sets out to tell a very compelling, very French story, and the biggest shame really is that, structuraly, it's a 2013 cinematic game, which time hasn't been the kindest to. It, however, executes the premise quite well, minus a couple of less engaging gameplay bits like spotter drones that are quite fast and fleeting to get through. The combat stays difficult, the characters are well written, the game is gorgeous (and has an uncapped framerate for those of you with high refresh-rate monitors), and it kept me thinking for days after I finished it.
Would it have been more interesting as an immersive sim? Probably, but I can say that about most games, so it's not really fair, and it executes its cinematic edge quite well, however dreaded that term may be nowadays.
