Over the the last few months I have been going back to much older video games to pick up where I left off and finally complete them. Among those games I’ve returned to is Remember Me, a 2013 video game developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published under Capcom. I had forgotten that the studio behind the widely successful Life Is Strange series were the same people who did Remember Me seven years ago. After playing the game and beating it a few weekends ago, one of the things that stood out in my mind was the recurring theme of memories that has popped up in the French studio’s later titles.
Remember Me was the first video game from Dontnod Entertainment that didn’t quite garner the same critical success that their Life Is Strange game ultimately became for the studio. Despite the lukewarm reception, Remember Me was the foundation from which they would develop and publish Life Is Strange in 2015 through Square Enix.
Being able to properly finish Remember Me and getting reacquainted with the game controls made me realize the similarities between this game and Life Is Strange. For one thing, the heroine Nilin is a memory hunter who has the ability to remix someone’s memories, altering and manipulating them to either make the target an ally or to incapacitate them.
If you haven’t played both Remember Me and Life Is Strange, you wouldn’t realize that Dontnod Entertainment had already hit upon a really ingenious and unique game mechanic from their very first video game. Reading older reviews of Remember Me almost always mention how reviewers very much enjoyed the memory remix feature, which was severely underutilized in the game.
I tend to agree with this assessment. Out of everything Nilin could do the one thing I wanted to spend more time on was the memory remix. Figuring out the right combination of objects to use to create the new memory in someone’s mind was the best part about playing Remember Me. It also offers something to think about as you play the game, what would you do if you had the power to alter someone’s memories or a version of events as they remember it?
While Life Is Strange 2 doesn’t touch upon memory or altering events as overtly as Remember Me or the first Life Is Strange, it does follow how brothers Sean and Daniel Diaz cope with the trauma of losing their father and the painful memories associated with it. Their recent Tell Me Why returns to memory and how time and traumatic events can cause people to suppress what they don’t want to remember or recollect the past differently. Even their upcoming Twin Mirror in December seems to offer another journey through the mind where an investigative journalist named Sam will use something called a “Mind Palace” to hunt for clues.
Coming back to Remember Me does show how far Dontnod Entertainment has come since then, and how much they continue to grow and develop as a games studio. Their drive to be a trailblazer in storytelling for video games is the reason they are the ones to watch in the industry, and why I’ll keep on buying their games with every new release they have.
Have you played any of Dontnod Entertainment’s video games? Which game have you enjoyed? Which game have you enjoyed least?