You probably don’t remember Remember Me, but its one brilliantly unforgettable idea lives on

Poking fun at forgotten brawler Remember Me‘s name is low-hanging fruit, but it’s hard to get anywhere without acknowledging the irony. These days, developer Don’t Nod is instead remembered primarily for its two Life is Strange games. Remember Me is lucky to be a footnote.

In retrospect the studio’s debut game seems like the truest expression of its original identity—creative, stylish, off-kilter, and so French. But its middling reception and disappointing sales left the company in dodgy financial straits that only Life is Strange saved it from, ensuring it would never get a sequel, direct or spiritual—and setting Don’t Nod on a very different path.

The game is set in Neo-Paris, essentially a dystopian, sci-fi version of the view the developers would have had out of their office window. In this dark future, memories have become a commodity—they can be traded, shared, erased, or even altered via a device called a “sensen”. The rich and powerful hoard knowledge and experience, while the poor are left with jumbled brains, slowly losing their humanity as they devolve into cannibalistic “leapers”.

With that set up, I can for once forgive the amnesiac protagonist trope. Hero Nilin wakes up as a prisoner in some sort of memory laboratory, having just had her mind wiped of all but scraps. Before long she’s escaping the facility, rediscovering her past, and, of course, turning out to be some kind of memory-power chosen one of the revolutionaries trying to bring down this corrupt society.

I found Remember Me very charming when it first released—in my own mind palace, it has long enjoyed the position of underrated gem. Coming back to it in 2024, I can certainly still see what I liked about it, but I find it a lot harder to forgive its obvious flaws. It’s style over substance, and while the style has aged well, the substance feels more lacking than ever.

Despite the tampering with her brain, Nilin remembers her judo well. The game’s martial arts battles with leapers and armoured cops are the only element with any depth at all, and even then only relatively speaking. You button mash through basic combos, dodge, and activate magic sci-fi powers once you’ve built up enough meter, and that’s basically it. A system that lets you craft custom combo strrings—loosely justified as another expression of memory control—is too lightweight to elevate it. Ultimately in motion it all feels distressingly weightless, like you’re boxing with oven mitts on.

But really what you spend the majority of your time doing isn’t even fighting—it’s just moving through the city. When you’re not simply walking slowly down the street, you’re performing straightforward and over-telegraphed climbing sequences. It’s the most aggressive of filler. The goal, clearly, is just to get you to drink in the visuals alongside some minor button pushing, but the game doesn’t do nearly enough to justify holding your attention.

And yet… they are truly fantastic visuals. Even 11 years on from the game’s original release, Neo-Paris is absolutely gorgeous, with that concept-art-come-to-life look so few games achieve. The effects of the sensen are similarly striking, represented as glitchy holograms that flow around character as memories are transferred or manipulated—or blasted out the front of a cop’s face in one of the game’s unique finisher animations.

French style suffuses everything, creating a unique feel in the sea of US-influenced action-adventure games. Every outfit is chic and glamorous, evoking Jean Paul Gautier’s sci-fi costume design in The Fifth Element. Iconic landmarks pepper the city, breaking up the sleek and futuristic with elements of the old and gothic. Nilin herself is an ethereal runway model with a bottom the camera cannot get enough of—give her a cigarette to hold and she’d be ready to break a leading man’s heart in a subtitled black-and-white art film.

What’s perhaps most disappointing about returning to the game, however, is rediscovering quite how little real world-building there is to bring together all this style and flair. The city of Neo-Paris simply doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The sensen device seems to be the source of all ills in this future, but there’s precious little explanation of why. What is it about digitising memories that is causing society to collapse so rapidly? The answer is a vague “It’s a bad idea” with no real specifics.

Mind over matter

In Nilin’s hands, memory tech is just magic, enabling a wide variety of thematically disconnected superpowers. Elsewhere, the loss of memories causes physical mutation into the long-limbed, deformed leapers. A metaphor, perhaps, for how memories empower us and define our humanity, but without any underpinning it all just feels a bit of a mess of ideas. In some cases, that leads to unintentionally silly or even offensive implications—why, for example, is real-life skin condition vitiligo a symptom of devolving into a monster? And if leapers are just victims of the system, why am I spending so much time punching them in the face?

Every character and location is given a name either completely on-the-nose, or utterly nonsensical. A contact named Headache Tommy is found at The Leaking Brain bar. The revolutionaries are called Errorists, and seek to infiltrate the St Michel Comfortress. Funny and memorable, but none of it feels grounded in any kind of reality.

Whatever actual point the game is trying to make about our relationship with memory and technology is lost in the muddle. Is it a critique of social media addiction? Is it warning us not to cling too tightly to the past? Or describing the dangers of trying to suppress your worst memories? Two years earlier we were watching Black Mirror’s “The Entire History of You” expertly pick apart our obsession with recording and rewatching our own lives—Remember Me takes 10 hours and an awful lot more money to very beautifully fail to articulate anything anywhere near as clear.

And yet there is one element that feels in harmony with the game’s theme. At certain points in the story, Nilin is able to “remix” the memories of key characters—diving back into an important moment in their lives, and tweaking parts of the scene to make it go a different way. In the present, their disposition is thus altered, demonstrating how core these moments can be to our personalities.

One early sequence sees her hijack the mind of a bounty hunter about to bring her in. The killer is going for the reward on her head to pay for treatments for their husband, who’s turning leaper—but by scrubbing backwards and forwards through a memory of him in the hospital, and adjusting small details, you create a version of events where he died instead. Returning to the present, the bounty hunter is now motivated to join forces with you and seek revenge for his death.

It’s not a perfect concept, for sure. Executing the fairly simple puzzles takes a bit too much of going back and forth through relatively dry footage, and there aren’t enough of the sequences over the course of the game for Don’t Nod to build on the idea. From a story perspective, it also seems morally dubious in a way the game has oddly little interest in addressing.

But there’s the seed there of something really compelling and interesting. As you try different adjustments to the memory you get to see different outcomes of the scene, playing around with cause and effect until you get the outcome you want. It’s easy to see the potential.

Two years later, Life is Strange would realise that potential, simply reframing the idea as time travel instead of memory hacking as protagonist Sam uses her powers to rewind and change the past. The result was critical acclaim, millions of copies sold, and a future for Don’t Nod secured. So, Remember Me might be forgotten, but one of the strongest parts of it lived on, remixed. Maybe there’s a point to be found there after all.