Publisher: Anaconda
Developer: Centauri Production
Platform: PC
Price: $29.99 at Got Game Entertainment
Pros: Pretty decent looking environments for the most part. Story is O.K.
Cons: Poor animation that takes forever to play out before you can control the game.
Verdict: Only buy if you finished all other existing good adventure games on the market.
Memento Mori is a Latin phrase meaning “Remember you are mortal”. As a mortal, you have a limited time to exist in this world. Given that your time is so precious, why would you spend it playing the game of the same name? Let us explore this topic to find the answer.
Story
The game starts out presenting players with an art-theft and shower scene with the lead female. Somehow these seemingly unrelated events are connected. The point of the game seems to be to get said female dressed and solve the mystery surrounding the painting snatching. Ok, there is more to the story than getting dressed, but it goes to underline the point that the game seems to focus on performing various mundane tasks that seem to have little to do with the story as a whole. Finding a place to charge your cell phone is an excitement best left to the real-world. The story was pretty interesting with a bit of a M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist at the end that I honestly didn’t see coming. Depending on the choices you make, or do not make, there are eight different endings you may get.
Puzzles are relatively easy and make perfect logical sense, at least to myself. There are a few which seem a bit like busywork, but I didn’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time solving them. There was one puzzle in particular that you could solve before you would logically want to do so within the confines of the game’s narrative, but that is nothing new with adventure games. Certain puzzles require you to look at an object in full 3d and sometimes can only be solved by looking at it in a specific way to find something to click on.
Graphics
Memento Mori features wooden characters that make the animatronic creatures that inhabit Chuck E. Cheese seem lifelike. To make matters worse, mouths barely move when they speak, and they speak a lot. They’ll even talk to themselves like a hand-gesturing schizophrenic when you click on an object.
The previously mentioned be-toweled lady is named Lara and bears more than a striking resemblance to a certain member of the Croft family. The other character you take control of is Max, who looks like a French version of Ryo Hazuki with down syndrome. Thankfully, you will not have to drive fork lifts or ask about sailors. The characters look like they were created in Second Life by a first-time user. Some characters have glaring modeling errors in them, such as Lara’s aunt who has a huge dent in the back of her skull. Humorously enough, this startling imperfection is put right in your face a few times due to the camera angles during cut scenes.
Next to the low-grade, early PS2 era character models, the environments are a stark contrast. For the most part, they are quite beautiful and meticulously detailed. Some set pieces are modeled after real locations, such as the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg, Russia. Unfortunately, you do not get to explore much of this museum, but the bit that is featured in the game made me wish I could visit it at least once in my lifetime. I wonder if it is as mysterious as Memento Mori makes it out to be.
The only exception to the gorgeous environments are certain trees in the enviroments. This foliage features the same flat planes at different intersecting angles with the same mottled green texture that has been plaguing games since the inception of 3d graphics. It seems that not many developers can find a better way to render a more acceptable looking tree. Even though trees the trees in Bethesda’s Oblivion aren’t perfect, the leaves look the same from any angle; but if you aren’t staring at the leaves as you’re moving past them, it looks much more acceptable than n64 era foliage.
Vocals
There are decent voices used for the characters, but they seem half-heartedly acted. They tend to match the characters and their respective nationalities, but have little emotion or sincerity behind them. It isn’t so bad as to stick out like a sore thumb, but I do wish they tried a little harder, because it may have made the overall narrative stronger.
Speaking of narrative, there is this creepy-sounding old man speaking to the characters throughout the game. It’s as if he were trying to guide the character’s intentions, though they themselves cannot consciously hear him. The speaker even seems to get frustrated when the characters does not do as he suggests. It comes off as a little odd, but somewhat interesting, as I haven’t seen an example of this in other narratives. I would have liked to see this aspect fleshed out more, as it could have potentially woven a more mysterious tale.
Gameplay
The control scheme is a mixed bag. While there are some aspects which I count as a definite win for the P&C Adventure genre, there are others that detract from the experience. First and foremost is the inclusion of a feature that eliminates pixel-hunting. If you hold down the Tab key, all of the objects that you can interact with in an area are marked with an icon. Hovering your mouse pointer over an interactive element brings up an animated cursor that explains how you can interact with it, either looking, using, or both depending on which mouse button you press. Clicking on the object makes your character walk toward it, while double clicking makes them run. Double clicking on an exit to an area does a quick fade-out and in to the next area instead of wasting time watching your character run all the way there, which is nice.
However, the developer’s attention to animating the simple actions for each character creates an exercise in patience. You must wait for EVERY single animation to play out before you can make your next move. The length of time for each animation can be rather excruciating and made me wish that I could bypass them somehow. Attention to these small animations probably took quite a bit of time to create, which I respect, but why couldn’t they have been more efficient with them?
For example, while in the Hermitage at night, you have your lighter out to see, but when you want to make a call on the cell phone, Max must first close the lighter, put it in his jacket, take his cell phone out of his jacket, (slowly!) open it, and turn it on. After you successfully make a call, Max turns off the phone, closes it, puts it back into his jacket, takes out the lighter, opens it and flicks it alight. Hopefully you didn’t want to call two separate people on the phone as this animation happens automatically after the call ends.
With as much attention that the artists paid to creating the myriad of minute animations, it seems they missed a few things. Strange errors in animation create strange model warping, such as a spike growing out of a person’s hand when their thumb moves.
Conclusion
So, should you spend your precious remaining hours of life playing a mediocre adventure game? If you have no other big-name point & clickers to play, and you MUST have something more to click on, you may have some enjoyment with Memento Mori. If you lack patience or require a faster paced game, you may want to pass on this one.
Popularity: unranked [?]
