Bright Memory is a very short, sub-$10 experience on the XSX. I enjoyed it, but the solo developer effort by FYQD Studio needs to rein in their focus and tighten up a lot of gameplay elements before the ‘full version’ of the game releases next year. Originally slated for a Q4 2020 release on PC/PS4/X1, Bright Memory: Infinite will now punt to next year. But for $8, you can play about a forty-five minute slice of the game now.
I wish I could tell you about Bright Memory, but it’s all pretty confusing, both in story and in gameplay in some respects as I’ll explain shortly. The experience begins with a futuristic cutscene with Shelia, the protagonist, snooping around and watching some generic future soldier dudes. Moments later Shelia is teleported to a strange land, exactly where and what time is unknown. Even stranger creatures begin to attack, including wolves, the undead, Egyptian-mythology themed enemies, knights, half animal-half man, uh, things, and large creatures that look like they were borrowed from God of War — oh, and future soldiers, too. This blend of mythical beasts and future soldiers is pretty weird, especially with so little information to go on, but keep an open mind.
Shelia carries three weapons — a fifteen round semi-auto pistol, 500+ round assault rifle, and an automatic shotgun. You also have a light blade; this blade is like a sword, but, when you press RB to use it, a curved projectile comes out from the sword and slices through any foes in its path, even if they’re stacked. This weapon, as some of your skills, has a cooldown, but the cooldowns are timed as such that you can use them pretty often. The light blade can be swung several times before its eight second cooldown kicks in, and the UI in the lower left corner shows you how many seconds before you can use it, or the other abilities, again.
Other abilities, or skills, include an EMP that can knock enemies into the air, or with some limited environmental use to create a path. You also have a grappling hook to zip across chasms in predefined spots, and it can pull some enemies towards you, too. Another skill that can be unlocked, even in the course of this limited ‘demo,’ include time freeze (slows or freezes enemies down inside of a sphere for several seconds). I also used some of my XP to unlock extra health, and there are a few other goodies to unlock that I think will be more interesting in the complete game next year.
Oh, Shelia also has a dash ability which is critical to use because the enemies are both bullet-sponges and do a lot of damage quickly. Two issues with the dashing are that you cannot dash forward, just to the sides and back, and several times in one of the early mid-tier boss encounters I died simply because I dashed backwards and fell off the edge of the playing area — just something to get used to I guess, but some way to notify the player that they don’t have room to dash backwards might be nice.
With all of these not-so-typical extra gameplay mechanics, Bright Memory felt a little bit like Crysis. Then again, with the random collectibles laying around that had no explanation (like the jade statue), it felt a little bit like Uncharted, especially given how players are raiding caves in a pretty nice looking outdoor environment, and coming across other armed treasure hunters. Then again if you look at the Lord of the Lost Forest boss, he seems like something directly out of Dark Souls, knight armor and all. Painkiller comes to mind as well when you’re fighting waves of enemies. So this game is really just all over the place, like a smattering of ideas just all tossed into the mix. Somewhere in all of that (and, granted this release is only about an hour long), I felt no attachment to any of the characters, and I have no idea who Wake (apparently an ally) or Carter (bad guy) are, or what they’re doing.
So there’s any awful lot going on in Bright Memory in a very short period. I can say that I had fun and I am looking forward to the complete game, but with some caution: I do hope and anticipate that FYQD will do a lot more to tighten up the experience on console as the cursor-driven menus are no fun, and this feels like a rushed port from its original platform (PC). Gameplay has got get more focused as well; I’m all for such an unusual mixture of enemies and cross-genre gameplay blends and inspirations, but it’s got to tie together somehow to make some sense and matter to the player. I don’t need a grand story, but I am hoping that the full game makes a lot more sense than this current offering which seems like someone brainstorming out loud, so to speak. All that to say, for $8, and with very limited new game+ options, you could do worse — but it might be just as well to wait until Bright Memory: Infinite launches in full next year.
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