Memoirium Preview
Have you ever had a dream where things didn’t exactly work the way you expect, but sort of did, too? Of course you have, that’s kind of what makes a dream a dream. Now, apply that same dream illogic to a game, and you have something close to the upcoming Memoirium. Squarely in the middle of the action RPG Soulslike subgenre, Memoirium transposes familiar mechanics into a dreamlike world of barely recognizable figures and liminal spaces.
Ghostly apparitions
That’s a fancy way of saying that Memoirum has a distinctive art style in which reality is stripped down to its most basic shapes. Human figures are faceless forms, the environments are pixelated and jaggy and the color palette ranges from day-glo to black. Honestly, Memoirium’s visuals will probably be a bit divisive. No doubt, some people will vibe with the surreal landscapes and primitive character models. Others may not.
The preview demo included two levels, a collection of school room-type environments and a castle. Both had some secret areas to find, doors that needed keys found by exploring, and goodies, weapons, and armor to pick up. The dreamscape feel was magnified by seemingly random objects floating in the air. There’s also a room — possibly not part of the dream — to which you can return, level up, and decorate with found objects.
A Platform for Combat
Memoirium is explicitly a Soulslike, with light and heavy/charged attacks, blocking, dodging and rolling, stamina management, and all the rest pretty much as you’d expect it. Even the controller is mapped to familiar Souls-inspired inputs.
At least in the demo and at this stage of development, combat is a mixed success. When they make contact, hits feel pretty good and movement is fluid. The biggest issue is that the art style gets in the way. It’s very difficult to judge the distance between a weapon and a figure, so a lot of attacks just whiff. The weapons themselves are so abstracted that they really have no character as weapons. Sound design — which in most Soulslikes does a lot of heavy lifting to make combat feel impactful — is pretty anemic in Memoirium. All pickups, whether a weapon or consumable, are represented by blobs of pixels.
I’m sounding a little down on Memoirium, but in fact combat is pretty fun. It manages to capture a bit of Soulslike challenge. It doesn’t try too hard to reinvent mechanics that we all know work well, but adds a few new ideas like collectible masks that change or enhance abilities.
Where I think Memoirium is most interesting is from a design perspective. Just how far can you push abstraction and still retain enough reality to make things click? It’s the stuff of dreams, just like Memorium. I’m interested in seeing beyond the demo and whether developer GoldenGratus can sustain a full Soulslike experience built on dreams.
***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***
