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Memoria, when placed in the pantheon of adventure games, may not ever sit with the greats, but it is nevertheless a solid and, for the most part, engrossing tale of love, the power of memory, and the ambition to rise above one’s own origins.
In what is essentially a sequel to The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, Memoria tells the tale of the previous game’s hero, Geron, and that of Sadja, a princess from 450 years ago whose story appears to Geron in his dreams.
Memoria plays very much like a traditional point and click adventure in which you scan the environment with your mouse and grab, combine, and use items to solve the various puzzles thrown in your way. The puzzles themselves are usually quite logical in their solutions, but sometimes I was left rolling my eyes at how the game would seem to break its own rules, thankfully however these moments are relatively rare in the 10-12 hours or so it should take to finish.
As is largely the case with these games, it is the story that counts for the most, and Memoria, at least in its opening chapters, does an admirable job at making you care about what’s going on. The characters are interesting, the story has intrigue, and the pacing keeps things moving along at a nice clip with various little twists to keep you on your toes. What really helps the game is that the story is a personal one, and the tension in Geron’s and Sadja’s situations lend themselves very well to making you want to see more.
The game also looks fabulous, with the lovingly drawn backgrounds full of detail and colour. Travelling through the beautiful landscapes and vistas is a delight to the senses and gives the world the kind of depth and character needed to pull you into it.
It is a disappointment then, that around chapter 5 and 6, the game starts to come unstuck a little, where the pacing slows and where character tensions get replaced with a little too much exposition and lore. Story elements also start to shift in their apparent significance, making it confusing as to what to give more attention to, and scramble the clear sense of direction the game had up until that point.
What also undermines the game’s ambitions is the mixed quality of the voice acting. While the main leads are solid, some of the other characters line readings actively hurt the drama. In one instance of real significance, a character takes a dramatic choice out of your hands, but the motivation for that choice gets undercut and made to look ridiculous by the voice actor’s complete inability to make you believe them or care. This sort of issue crops up a few times and is very disappointing as the story itself is a good one, and has a lot of well thought out and intricate plotting. Thankfully the game concludes rather well, and has a degree of emotional satisfaction that I feared might not arrive after the rather saggy chapters preceding it.
Memoria so often feels like it’s on the cusp of something, something special, but ultimately the way in which the narrative is presented keeps it from being anything more than merely good. Your mileage will obviously vary with a game like this, story often impacts people very differently, so it may well be that you find more or perhaps less to Memoria’s tale than I did, but I do certainly believe it is a tale worth discovering, even if the storyteller sometimes stumbles over the telling of it.