On Remember Me: Let Them Eat Achievement Points

I have this theory that a piece of art—in this case referring to a movie, book, painting, picture, video-game, etc.—can described as a piece indicative of it’s country of origin outside of the basic imagery associated with that piece. What makes something like Great Gatsby, Citizen Kane or even Fight Club “american” is not just their inclusion of things like office life, the roaring twenties, etc, although that may be a part of it. They can also be very “American” in theme. For example, Great Gatsby explores the hypocracy of old money and what-have-you, and Fight Club looks at consumerism and the definition of masculinity, all of which are things that things American culture still struggles with to this day. This brings me to an obscure little videogame called “Remember Me” something which I could undeniably call a product of French culture, not unlike the works of Dumas or Camus.

            For those of you who, understandably, may not have heard of “Remember Me,” here’s the jist. In the not too distant future in the city of Neo-Paris, a major corporation has commodified human memory by digitizing it. Inevitably things go wrong, and this leads to people altering memories and such as well as a prison where they lobotomize you by taking away your memories, in other words what makes you you. Speaking of memory alteration, the player takes on the role of Nilin, one of the best memory hunters around, in other words, people whose job it is to steal corporate secrets Inception style. She can even alter the memories of others. In the end though, she was sent to said special prison for siding with the “errorists” (no, I wouldn’t be surprised if that word was supposed to be one t short of "terrorists", thank you very much), but is broken out and is now on the hunt for the truth of what happened to her and just what the hell is going on.

Now, this is a fairly standard cyberpunk fiar with the addition of memory alteration and what have for a nice hook, but on the surface, between the sleak looking character and clothing design and the over abundance of neon signs about, it’s hard not to mistake this for your standard issue cyberpunk setting. That being said, about half-way through, something occurred to me: this is all a metaphor for the French revolution. The distinct divide between the haves and haves nots, the cruel treatment of the have nots by the errorists later on, it all added up. The icing on the cake of course had to be the fact that the super-special prison was called “La Bastille”. I shit you not, it’s called La Bastille you can look it up.

What I’m getting at here is that what makes “Remember Me” ever so slighty note-worthy is its French flavoring, not the clunky platforming or the we-wish-we-were-as-smooth-as-Batman:Arkhem fighting, not the setting or even Nilin’s refreshing, if not uncunny similarity to Mirror Edge’s Faith, sexism free character design, but it’s French core. And while the French may stink on the outside, there’s always something intriguing on the inside.