The heady, earnest Remember Me was action game storytelling at its best
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21028814/remember-me-dontnod-action-game-retrospective-cyberpunk-life-is-strange
Reported today in The Verge.
The heady, earnest Remember Me was action game storytelling at its best
2019 is coming to a close, and with it comes the end of the decade. Prestige TV has never been better. Marvel turned on-screen superheroes into the biggest (and most profitable) trend of the era. Streaming is the new battlefield for viewer eyeballs. To close out the 20-teens, Verge staffers break down their favorite moments, media, and what they believe was the most overlooked in entertainment from the last 10 years.
Me, an intellectual gamer, 2013: interactive storytelling needs to break out of big-budget action game conventions. Just stop filtering so many narratives through violence, you know? Retire those old clichés like "amnesiac protagonist." And ugh, does anybody actually like quicktime events?
It's been six years, and story-based video games feel stronger and more diverse than ever. But it's also gotten easier to appreciate how well those old conventions could work. And there's no better example than Remember Me.
Remember Me is ironically one of the least-remembered titles from Dontnod, a French studio known for the critically acclaimed Life Is Strange and the more recent Vampyr. The PC and console game exemplifies tropes that many narrative projects - including Life Is Strange - have since evolved past. There's the creative, intellectually heady premise necessarily built around hundreds of barely differentiated people trying to kill you; the bosses with glowing weak points and combat finishers where buttons flash on the screen and you hit them; the box cover art where the hero is facing backward but sort of looking over their shoulder in profile, like no human in real life would ever do.
But while Remember Me never earned the near-universal acclaim that Life