Remember Me was Misunderstood Says Creative Director

[Souther Thorn]

People remember it as that game with an interesting premise with broken combat that was wholesomely unnecessary and didn't do anything REALLY interesting with its concept. I also hear that traversing the landscape was irritating and inefficient, but it DOES look good when it comes to detail, clearly the love was put in by the artists and not the designers.

Not just inefficient, but didn't make any bloody sense as far as any kind of urban geography goes.
If you remember 'The Perfect Weapon' back on PS1? Reminded me a LOT of it, just with a graphics update and pre-rendered awkward and antifunctional landscape.

 

[ryukage_sama]

I don't think people "misunderstood" the game. People just didn't like the gameplay. I hear the same criticism of Bioshock, some people felt that the shooting mechanics were inferior to other games. I was intrigued by the concept for the game and was interested in having a female protagonist, but I decided not to buy it because I heard that the combat wasn't fun.

 

[nondescript]

My "Totally Professional Review" of Remember Me:

Like others, I haven't touched Last of Us yet. I'll get to it, I'm sure, but I watch for a game that peaks my interest. And Remember Me grabbed my attention from the first preview.

I wasn't in love with the plot, and the mechanics were standard enough I didn't even need the tutorial to figure it out. Platform crawling, little melee action, and some puzzles for good measure. It all sounds bread and butter. I can Thief- I mean think of several that match if I Persia- sorry, peruse my game stack.

There were some parts I rolled my eyes about. Like the Slums vs Upper city. I figured we would visit both ends of the spectrum. I was surprised how quickly I went from escaped criminal to common riffraff in the Capitol. Especially with the news lady blaring about my daring escape. No one looked at me odd? No one?

What I fear truly disenchanted me with the game was not all these, however, but the one, awesome thing it had. Memory remixing. I played a demo of that and new this could be a contender. But it's strength was it's downfall. I was halfway through the game, and the remixing mini game showed up one time. I understand you don't want to remix everyone, or have people get tired of the novelty, but I tore through hours of mutants. Overloaded hundreds of guards. Not to mention putting up with a boss fight with a WWF wrestler. Throw me a bone, DONTNOD! This was what set you apart, use it!

Totally professional Reviewer (in training),

Nondescript <---- (Remember Me)

 

[kortin]

I didn't have fun with it, so I stopped playing it. I didn't play the Last of Us, I just got bored with your game, guys.

 

[rob_simple]

I played the game enough to platinum it, so I feel I am qualified to say that what harmed the game was that it was pretty ordinary in every single respect.

Everything that could have been good about it didn't get fleshed out enough:

-Interesting combo building system, but ultimately broken because you can't carry your combos between enemies like Batman, the lock-on system was horrendous and you can just spam healing attacks and never be in any danger. Also, making you fight an enemy that you can't damage without hurting yourself before giving you either of the special moves that can take them out, damage-free, is extremely poor design.

-Really cool memory-altering mechanic that you only get to use a handful of times in the game, and which in at least one case seemed to have a completely arbitrary solution.

-Buggy insta-death traps during scripted action sequences.

-Interesting environments that are completely boring to explore because of the rigid movement system meaning you can only jump from highlighted ledge to highlighted ledge.

-Unique and engaging main character who barely gets any character development because she is just constantly ordered around by other people and is also saddled with some truly abysmal writing ("This little red riding hood has a basket full of kick ass." lolkillmeplz)

-Unskippable cutscenes in a game that is designed to be replayed, and forced dialogue sections where Nilin slows to a crawl; again extremely aggravating when you're only replaying a level to pick up the collectibles you missed.

That's just off the top of my head, I can copy-paste the full review I wrote if anyone cared to hear more.

So no, the game wasn't misunderstood, it just didn't live up to what it could have been. The good thing about that though, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's much better than a game just being shit because it is shit, I'm still really looking forward to what this developer does next, I just hope they take the time to either flesh everything out or just nail down and focus on a single core aspect.

 

[Callate]

Given that Remember Me was available on at least two systems on which The Last of Us was not, that seems like a tough story to sell.

It wasn't a bad game, but I found the entirely linear platform-navigation/climbing sequences dull and irritating, and given a premise like memory manipulation, they could have done far more interesting things than they actually ended up doing. I think I commented elsewhere that the movie Blade Runner did more with the conceit with less focus and time actually devoted to the concept.

Beyond having a female protagonist of mixed racial heritage, it was kind of unremarkable.

 

[unstabLized]

I could see where the average reviews came from, but I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Story was nice, combat was simple yet executed nicely, good settings, good characters. It was a pretty good game.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

Picked it up cheap on XBL. I thought it was good and had potential, but it just didn't execute things as well as other games of it's ilk.

Firstly the free running / jumping would have been great had it been more "free". I could only jump and scramble where the little arrows told me to. Anything else resulted in insta-death; even if I could see a seemingly better path to my objective that should have been within reach.

Secondly the combat needed more fine tuning. More than half the time I was spamming the "A" button and flipping all over the place just to get some breathing space between leapers, so I could launch my eight hit combo. When there was anything more then four leapers I just found myself executing the three hit combo adnauseum as that was all I could squeeze in before risking being hit. I would have preferred it if I could dial the combos out at my speed, rather than the timing the game dictated because it was just too slow when faced with more than two leapers. Also the other main enemies, the soldiers, were little more than filler.

That said, I really liked the memory remixing sequences and would have loved to see that fleshed out to its fullest potential. Also, the ending was not bad.

 

[Tilted_Logic]

every new area was a joy to explore

a joy to explore

explore

Huh, I must have played a different game, because all the "exploring" I remember was running down dark, narrow and samey corridors.

To me, that was the game's greatest sin. It gave me a glimpse of the vibrant world of neo-Paris and, as soon as I built up some excitement, thrust me into The Endless Hallway. It should have been open-world, or at least semi-open, with more freedom to run around and explore the levels. What we got was a narrow parth with doors closing behind us every five steps lest we actually try and explore the setting.

Not saying you're wrong for liking it, just that I understand the Escapist's 3/5. The game probably needed around twice as much resources to realize the devs' vision.

I realize this is a super late reply (I haven't been around), but my definition of 'explore' is checking out every nook and cranny, and in this case, taking in the environment and what's going on around and above me (plenty of the city areas were breathtaking). There were plenty of scaramechs and stat patches that I missed, so obviously there were areas that I didn't find.

There was so much going on in the environments that it was fun to just see what all the NPCs were up to, or how they interacted with each other when I was near. If you felt the game was just the same thing over and over, then perhaps you weren't really taking in the atmosphere.

I do agree however that a semi-open world would have been wonderful for Remember Me, and that having the way you came from blocked was extremely frustrating when you felt like you may have missed something.