Eurogamer Expo: Remember Me Session

Revealed earlier this year during gamescom, Remember Me is a third-person action-adventure from new French studio DONTNOD Entertainment. Creative Director Jean-Maxime Moris spoke to gamers at the Eurogamer Expo about the game’s combat system, storytelling and design.

Moris and the team are concerned about the way we put all our life experiences online. “Today we’re all uploading entire parts of our lives and not really paying attention to what’s being done with that data,” he said. “Companies know who we were, where we are, our friends, our family, what we believe in, our political convictions. We wanted to ask questions about that and the way we chose to do that was about memories.”

Set in 2084, the game’s world of Neo-Paris is recognisable yet unmistakably futuristic. People no longer just store their photographs and banal thoughts in the cloud – entire memories are uploaded to and accessed from external storage. It’s all a bit Black Mirror. (No, not the one about the Prime Minister shagging a pig.)

Protagonist Nilin is an agent who has the technology to manipulate those memories. The DONTNOD team call this the “memory remix” and it’s a critical part of her arsenal. Here’s the footage from gamescom showing exactly how damaging she can be.

It’s not all about hacking and climbing. Moris says that the game is 50% action (i.e. melee combat, boss battles and platforming) and 50% adventure (puzzles, stealing memories and the “memory remix super-puzzles” shown above). It’s quite a linear game because the team wanted to focus on the human intimacy side of the story, over the lure of the technology itself.

That said, the melee combat system can be very heavily customised for a very simple interface. “The philosophy that Philip and I took was to make an action adventure game that has melee combat and then do a melee combat game that was more accessible to regular people – that you didn’t have to learn 200 combos to master.” Instead, they’ve provided a combo lab that lets you set up your own combos.

There’s more detail on Eurogamer:

You build combos from four types of Pressens: Regen (regains health), Power (does extra damage), Cooldown and Chain…

…Nilin has a Health gauge and a Focus gauge that are displayed within the same icon on the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, with the Focus gauge building when Nilin does and receives damage. There are five special Pressens, called S-Pressens, that act as super powers, and using one consumes one chunk of your Focus gauge. Examples include the Logic Bomb (plant a bomb on an enemy then move away quickly before it explodes) and Rust in Pieces (turns robot enemies into allies).

These S-Pressens are on cooldown after use, but you can build Cooldown Pressens into your combos to mitigate this effect. Pop a Chain Pressen into your combo and you will duplicate and double the effect of the Pressen that came before it.
– Wesley Yin-Poole, Remember Me has 50,000 different combos

It sounds like a fascinating system with plenty of depth for those who want it, and an auto-fill feature for people who just want to get on with the fights.

That menu view looks intimidating as all hell but I’m sure it all makes sense once you’re in it.

Remember Me will be published by Capcom and is currently scheduled for release in May 2013. Watch the full Remember Me Q&A on YouTube