Memoria Preview: Adventures in the past and present

Earlier this year, I had the chance to play The Night of the Rabbit, a charming point-and-click adventure game from Daedalic Entertainment. They’re making more waves in the genre with Memoria, the sequel to Chains of Satinav.

While I began the demo playing as Geron, players will actually spend most of their time in the game as Princess Sadja, 450 years in the past. After all, the game’s title in Latin does translate to memory. Players will need to look back to these memories of Sadja in order to turn Geron’s girlfriend from a crow back to human form. And just like that, the adventure begins.

The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s art style. Reminiscent of a painting, the visuals are smooth, crisp, and downright gorgeous… until the animations, that is. Maybe it’s just due to the fact that it’s a preview build, but something felt off and I lost the sense of immersion when I saw the characters move across the screen.

Thankfully, the gameplay more than makes up for these graphical issues. With any adventure game, there’s always that balance of providing challenging puzzles that manage to avoid impossible logic. Memoria fits that role well, offering puzzles with solutions that rely on both obvious logic and magical solutions as well. Now, that’s not to say you won’t ever pull your hair out over these puzzles, because that will happen. It wouldn’t be an adventure game if that weren’t the case.

There's a point of intrigue about Memoria that I'm curious about: I wouldn't be surprised to see some grand twist happen involving the connection between the stories of both Geron and Sadja. After all, they wouldn't be interwoven for no reason, right? Because of this, I wonder if people, including myself, would be putting too much stock in some sort of grand payoff; hyping up possible events could lead to disappointment.

Plus, let's not fool ourselves here; preview builds generally show off the best parts of the game. For all I know, Daedalic could pull an Assassin's Creed II and forget about Geron the way Ubisoft forgot about Desmond for much of the game. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm hoping there's a legitimate reason and payoff for the connection between the two characters. Not only that, I feel like there needs to be.

One of the issues I had with Night of the Rabbit was the dialogue: it bordered on cliché and cheesy. This is something that’s vastly improved on with Memoria, featuring the right amount of charm, the right amount of wit, and yes, the right amount of cheese. It all adds up to a wonderful experience I’m eagerly awaiting.

If they can polish the graphical issues, then Memoria is going to be a can’t-miss adventure. It has a world worth exploring, puzzles worth playing, and a story worth following.