Remember Me evokes a strange nostalgia for itself. It's better to recall it with fondness than with accuracy, because the highlights are so much more endearing than the truth. What makes this especially awkward is the game's central sermon: beware of discarding reality in favor of phony memories.

There's a lot to take in before you start fabricating flashbacks. Remember Me's protagonist, Nilin, first takes a disquieting, drowsy walk through the bowels of a sterile prison, which keeps its occupants under thumb by inflicting amnesia. She escapes, returning to eloquence and to a futuristic Paris in which the affluent's memories are softened, shared and monopolized by a sprawling corporation. As a former "memory hunter" - the game's sci-fi lexicon only gets clumsier from there - Nilin gets back in the brain-hacking business alongside Edge, an enigmatic leader looking to shake the status quo.

What you do and what the game is about align briefly whenever Nilin is within arm's reach of a few important characters. Instead of punching experience points out of them, as she does with almost everyone else, she remixes their memories to instill an insidious change in their outlook and personality.