Deja View: 7 Minutes Of Remember Me
After watching 7 minutes of Capcom's sleek looking open-world hacking game, I'm pretty sure Ubisoft showed off something similar at E3. When I accessed my memories of that conference with my Memorinator (I keep my memories in there, so my brain has more room to think about kittens) it was all different: it wasn't Ubisoft showing off Watch Dogs. It was an hour of the Capcom logo, with Blueboy's 'Remember Me' playing. After seeing what Remember Me's Nilin is capable of, I think I got off lightly.
It is superficially similar to Watch Dogs: aesthetically, they share the floating UI, although in Remember Me it's a part of the world. Watch Dogs is more grounded, Nilin's parkouring through a world of floating drones and high-tech sparkly things. Both deal with you fiddling with things under the surface, but Remember Me looks to be more reactive to Watch Dog's malevolent, planned out hackery. In this instance it's a lot more slapstick.
Nilin can rewrite memories. Her goal in this playthrough is to make a high-ranking enemy kill himself. First she needs to find out where he is. Her movement is more akin to Prince of Persia than Assassin's Creed: deliberate and grabby, rather than sprinting and hoping there's something beneath her feet. She needs to find her target by finding a guard and yoinking the information out of his head. It looks like the lower level of her powers, and when she discovers where he is the real fun begins. Her most important skill is in rewiring memories, hopping into someone's thoughts and changing what happens. As it turns out her target is a rather sad and volatile chap: Nilin overhears a phone call that she uses to her advantage, hopping into a memory of a fight Frank has with his wife.
The memory stuff is interesting: the scene plays out then you rewind it, looking for ways to disrupt what happens to corrupt his thoughts: moving things around in the world to rebuild what occurred. Her goal is to get Frank to kill himself, so she starts prodding the memory to make the worst possible outcome of his fight with his wife. Watch.
I kept reminding myself that what she was doing wasn't going to end up with the wife actually dead, but that it was a remixed memory instead. I wonder how many ways the scene can play out? Are there a number of death scenarios, with an optimal path, or all you really doing is using the swooshy interface to find that one solution? It has possibilities, but if all you're doing it flipping switches till the correct outcome then it could be rather limited.
Remember Me is out in May 2013