Ambition is a fickle beast. It can lead you to the heights of success or leave you ensnared by your dreams. In some cases, a bit of both; such is the fate of Memoreum. Now Patient 8 Games has already made a name for itself with a BioShock-themed mod for Half-Life: Alyx, and initial previews for Memoreum were quite promising.
The premise is simple but enticing: a doomed colony ship flees a dying Earth, only to meet an alien parasite on their new homeworld. Now this twisted parasite, Ichor, threatens to corrupt the last of humanity. Only one doctor, awoken hastily from cryo, can stand against the tide of mutants and a dogmatic military general. And maybe, just maybe, ensure that his child makes it out of the chaos alive. It’s great stuff on paper.
However, the final product is neither outstanding nor terrible. In a way, that thematically resonates with its themes of success by any compromise necessary. I just can’t help but imagine how much better this game could’ve been at a more modest scope.
For a first commercial release, Patient 8 certainly aimed high. Memoreum boasts roughly seven to ten hours of survival horror shooting, depending on how thorough you are about exploring. That’s before getting to its optional collectibles, various unlockable weapons, and multiple difficulties, with an additional difficulty mode and New Game Plus being added via patches. It sounds like the sort of game you’d expect for PS3 or Xbox 360 back in the day. That kind of experience is difficult to achieve with a hundred developers, let alone a brand-new, much smaller team.
There’s no getting around it – Memoreum is almost equal parts endearing and rough. The most consistently top-notch aspect is the art direction, and the recent patch makes it shine brilliantly on Quest 3. It’s an all-around success there, offering a unique blend of body horror and paranormal scares to make you jump. The animation work is solid as well, supported all the more by the sound design, perfectly selling the vibe. When a creepy little hallucination of a ghost girl is waving to you from around a bend, it’s enough to make your skin crawl as you brace for something worse. It’s when you get into everything else that you start to encounter issues.
Every other upside ends up having a usually comparable downside. Weapons feel fantastic, but the balancing leads you to rely solely on a handful. There’s a solid enemy variety, except their AI pathing sees them stumbling around far more than gnawing your bones. The voice acting is great! Everyone brings a solid-to-fantastic performance. Yet the story they’re performing ranges from rather average sci-fi horror to pulpy nonsense in dire need of another draft. Like a zombie trying to pass as a human, whenever it starts to find its rhythm, Memoreum almost immediately stumbles again.
Even the scares can vary wildly. A few subtle ones made me jump, while other in-your-face ones landed poorly. There are these weird red-filtered flashback dioramas you walk through that are the least effective; yet one of the best involves looking back and forth from a window. Despite the original intention of this being a mod adapting Dead Space directly to VR, I wouldn’t say Visceral Games’ series is the best point of comparison. If anything, there’s a lot more J-Horror going on.
Comfort
Memoreum is playable standing, roomscale, or sitting. Of the options, standing and roomscale are the most advisable, but it’s feasible to adjust the height and position of most of your equipment to play seated. The biggest pain with seated play is having to reach behind your chair to withdraw your virtual tablet, which is critical to be reminded of some door codes to progress.
Player movement is well implemented. There’s teleportation for those who’d prefer it, as well as smooth or snap turning. In general, I found the pace of movement to be just in that sweet spot of slow enough to not be overwhelming but fast enough to be responsive.
Weapons can be wielded by either hand, but you cannot swap your ammo dispenser from the left shoulder. You equip your primary weapon from the right shoulder, and reach around behind your left shoulder to withdraw your backpack with your inventory. This is also the only way to swap your primary and exotic weapons.
There is a limited range telekinetic grip functionality with lootable items. They will gain a faint yellow outline when they can be pulled towards the player. Certain key moments require mantling vertically and horizontally. Expect to be giving your middle fingers a workout. Weapon hitboxes are fairly generous, so precision accuracy isn’t paramount to successful play.
Overall, it’s a more involved experience, but not overwhelming. That said, there are very few visual options, so those who rely on screen-edge fading or other accessibility aids may want to approach with caution. Especially since some enemies can knock the player down rather suddenly, which can be rather jarring.
You can see bits of F.E.A.R., from the creepy little girl haunting you to the gunfights with soldiers in claustrophobic offices and residential areas. Yet far more can be traced back to The Evil Within. The campaign’s arc and pace, the escalation of combat from frightful to action-packed, collecting a mysterious gel to unlock upgrades for your Chimera gun, a story about a neglectful father and his troubled daughter – just a few parallels. It’s not that I can’t see the other inspirations, and the narrative goes in a unique direction, but it’s a better point of reference. If anything, I think diverging from expectations further would’ve been for the best.
This isn’t to say the campaign underwhelms, even if the story does. A brief zero-g catwalk section is visually arresting, the infectious Ichor’s toughest variants are some truly nasty monsters, and the range of industrial tools for puzzle solving is outstanding. There are some clever ambushes that’ll catch the player by surprise. The worm boss fight is one of the few moments evoking Dead Space, yet in a distinctly Memoreum way that keeps it fresh. However, some very predictable scenarios are thrown at you, and often not as well as they could be.
An unkillable stalker enemy that looks goofy rather than threatening is a recurring pursuer. He’s so scripted that you have to be actively stumbling through the motions to get caught. Zombie children enemies are unsettling in their introduction but grow tiresome quickly. The residential level in particular is so superfluous and repetitive that its key elements would be better stitched into a different level.
These could be forgiven if the combat were as varied as the threats you face, but that’s where the design problems really become apparent. While Memoreum boasts a wide arsenal to choose from, only two options, a DMR with a drum magazine and the LMG, are worth using. Every shot from each also has limited recoil, so you can wield your Chimera one-handed while running around enemies. Collectible exotic weapons can be more interesting, though you spend so much of the game with the first one that it’s fair to forget that there are supposed to be several exotics. Then they start throwing them at you so fast you’re naturally hesitant to trade up.
Yet what both initially saves and then breaks combat is the recharging pistol, the Hikari. The Hikari is a great semi-auto energy weapon. The recharging animation and flick back up to ready it for firing prove deeply satisfying. And the second you figure out how to stun enemies with enough shots from it, the undead become helpless fools.
It’s no exaggeration to say that, with patience and relatively decent aim, you can clear rooms with just the Hikari. Most rooms only have one to two enemies at a time, so unless you try to run through several in a row, you can just clean up. The only downside is waiting for the recharge while behind cover or backing away from enemies. Then the game starts giving the Hikari free upgrades to boot. It’s fun, but it’s no Plasma Cutter, so it makes everything exceedingly one-note. And thanks to the constant feed of gel, ammo, and medkits, you can get one of the two best forms for the Chimera before you’re four hours in by just being frugal.
This leads to combat becoming a monotonous drumbeat. I have no doubt that in previews, this feels great, because for a time, it does. Except when the solution to combat is almost always the same – with the Chimera thrown in when you’re in a hurry or fighting human enemies – it’s like hearing the same joke a hundred times. It doesn’t matter that enemies can mutate spider legs or Venus flytrap heads if you mow them down in short order with a pistol aimed generally in their direction. It actually takes more effort to dismember enemies than to just kill them with general shots to the torso.
As a result, the greatest combat hurdle is merely waiting for the option to toss the starter Chimera attachment, a pump-action shotgun, for anything else. To be fair, you can also unlock additional character perks at an open bar between chapters. However, the only truly useful perk there is a personal shield generator. Every other perk is just “50% more of X” from loot or “get 50% more health from a health injector” when said injectors already give you almost full health restored. Given how frequently you find new items, they’re all redundant. A shield is useful.
I’m playing primarily on Normal difficulty as well, running through several of the same chapters a good few times. Granted, upon comparing, there’s not a substantial difference between the Easy and Normal difficulties; enemies just take slightly less damage to kill, while the player can shrug off a few more hits. In some cases, the alterations are surprisingly negligible.
Yet the potential for a deeper experience is there, because the puzzle tools are remarkably fun. Sure, the electrical wiring scanner is useless, but everything else is great. Removing industrial bolts, cutting through locks, realigning frequencies = Patient 8 could make an outstanding sci-fi house remodeling game if it builds from these foundations. I mean that with complete sincerity. My favorite gameplay moments in this action survival horror game are what should be the most boring. I’m still processing the weapons-grade irony of that. Pun unintended.
I don’t want to spoil the story, but the tale of Dr. Otto Hudson’s journey to save his daughter certainly leaves me underwhelmed. There’s a late-game twist in particular that feels so contrived that all it does is unmoor me from any investment I have. There’s a promising setting here of a post-Earth society struggling to find a new home, though between how hopeless everything feels and how dystopian this future society has become, it starts to feel pointless.
So much of the real context required to understand things is found by taking out a virtual tablet and reading like you’re consulting a wiki. I don’t understand why this can’t be a hologram we summon in front of ourselves with a button press or something. Something this critical shouldn’t be easily forgotten. Audio logs strewn about aren’t nearly as important, typically conveying a bit of flavor about the crew or maybe a passcode to unlock an optional locker.
None of these aspects are deal-breakers. Rather, the greatest hurdle Memoreum threw at me during this review was its bugs. On one hand, they’re actively being squashed, which is appreciated. Still, it makes me keenly aware of how the save system only lets you access your most recent checkpoint. A chapter select function, or manual saves, would be a very welcome addition in a future update, if possible. There’s also a smaller bug right now that resets the exotic weapon’s ammo upon every level transition. That Patient 8 is patching as quickly as they have been is admirable; it’s just a shame it launched with these kinds of issues.
Another thing worth addressing is some of the signposting. Whether it’s a key object being on the floor of an otherwise unremarkable stasis pod or a vent expecting me to just know to make a 180-degree turn in darkness, a few crucial moments are more opaque than necessary. I’m all for respecting a player’s intelligence, but players stumbling over something they aren’t expecting isn’t ideal.
Memoreum Review – Final Verdict
You can feel the passion behind Memoreum, but there’s a lack of cohesive precision needed to fully drive that in the right direction. For every artistic flourish or fun moment, there’s often a technical floundering or an odd design choice. It’s a persistent tug of war that, while an earnest effort, shows some growing pains of taking on such a sizable endeavor.
I hope that this doesn’t discourage Patient 8 – the studio has the right ideas and enthusiasm, but its debut game stumbles over itself at times as it shoulders those high hopes. Regardless, there’s going to be someone out there who will love Memoreum, even with its rough spots, and they’ll have a sizable experience to dig into.
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