8 Video Games That Wasted Genius Ideas

Now here's another sad case of combat completely overshadowing a potentially fascinating game.

Remember Me's story concerns the commodification of memory, with the citizens of a futuristic Paris able to upload and share their memories, or even remove unhappy or traumatic ones thanks to the Memorize Corporation. This attempt at a utopia has resulted in Neo-Paris (and possibly the rest of the world) becoming a grim corpocracy and surveillance state at the hands of Memorize's huge monopoly.

Protagonist Nilin, a memory hunter with the unique ability to hack people's memories, altering them and effectively changing that person's entire worldview and allegiances. The game does admirably attempt to grapple with the many ethical conundrums that this kind of action would present, and the memory remixing sections themselves are well-designed and organic; there are a great number of different outcomes and fail-states possible.

The only problem is that over the game's entire runtime... you only do this four times.

Much like Marc Eckō's Getting Up, the vast majority of Remember Me is made up of beat-em-up style combat encounters with hordes of goons, with the memory remix puzzles providing all-too-sparse injections of energy.

Granted, combat is well-designed and impressively modular, and Remember Me is definitely worth a look, but Dontnod really should have pushed their puzzle mechanics far more.