Memoranda game review full#
Memoranda game review Pc#

Memoranda game review full#

Instead, Memoranda has an unobtrusive ambient score, full of extended tones which evoke a dreamlike, slightly off-kilter state. The only Murakami trait arguably missing is a whole lot of 1960s jazz and pop records though an indie studio can easily be forgiven for skipping this expensive indulgence. Not being as familiar with his shorts as some of his novels it’s hard to say for sure, but it’s safe to assume there were more references I didn’t pick up. Certain aspects and characters are direct references to his short stories, including a missing elephant, a chap named ‘Superfrog’, and the abundance of cats. It’s been a few years since I read a Murakami novel ( Wild Sheep Chase and Kafka On The Shore are good choices for anybody curious about his work), but his influence is certainly felt throughout the game. 1993’s Sam & Max Hit The Road got this (mostly) right. It’s not quite a case of ‘anything goes’, but you can imagine how carefully an adventure game’s puzzles need to be constructed in a world where the bizarre is commonplace.

If a talking cat shows up, the characters tend to simply talk to the cat rather than exclaiming “holy shit that cat can talk, what is going on here, am I losing my mind?” Basically, it’s when strange or unusual events bleed through into an otherwise realistic setting, and the inhabitants of the story treat this as completely normal.

Memoranda game review Pc#

This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.Memoranda, a Kickstarted adventure game inspired by the short stories of Haruki Murakami, shows that while Magical Realism may be a terrific style from which to pluck characters, it can cause some structural problems.įor those unfamiliar with the term, Magical Realism is literature’s equivalent of the videogame Rogue-like it has a broad definition, and people will argue endlessly about whether an author or book fits into the category or not.

Sometimes, objects in inventory are closer than they appear. Even when I solved puzzles via brute force, I was often able to appreciate the cleverness of the solution in retrospect. I enjoyed making these leaps of logic, connecting the metaphorical dots even if they were unintuitive. But when they succeed there’s a poetical or metaphorical resonance to the solutions. Where this fails is when there’s no rhyme nor reason for a particular solution working, or when the surrounding dialogue or character observations fail to do their job in providing clues. They tend to take more from Murakami’s sense of the absurd than the everyday. The puzzles are all over the place, frankly. The former tend to be well-telegraphed and highlighted on the town map but the latter often require backtracking just to double-check if anything’s changed. New locations are unlocked as events unfold while certain actions can trigger changes to previously visited areas. You click to look at certain objects, to talk to various people, and to use or combine items you’ve collected along the way. Each of the slightly more than a dozen locations around the sleepy seaside town in which the woman lives is depicted as a single, static screen. The game plays out in as traditional point-and-click adventure fashion as possible. The only problem is: she’s forgetting her own name. She keeps old photos and scrawled-upon post-it notes pinned to her apartment wall-what the game describes as her memoranda-in an effort to hang on to her memories of the past. It tells the story of a 20-something woman who suffers from insomnia, thanks to the unnerving presence of a gap-toothed old sailor at her bedside each night.

Rather, it’s a pastiche of his style it borrows elements (characters, situations, cultural references, etc) from a selection of his short stories and reworks them to explore the same themes of loss and the fragile reliability of memory that often punctuate the author’s work. Memoranda isn’t a retelling of any particular Murakami tale. In one book, a man sits at the bottom of a dry well for chapter after chapter. His writing can feel plain, almost naive, yet at the same time-and certainly in my experience-can feel exhausting in its painstaking attention to minute detail.

Page upon page is devoted to describing banal activities such as preparing food while outside a second, moss-covered moon hangs in the sky. He typically portrays a contemporary real world where the mundane and everyday is punctured by the surreal. Murakami is a Japanese literary author best known for his novels Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. The end result only disappoints when it adheres too closely to the conventions of the adventure genre. So when the creators of a new point and click adventure claim to have been influenced by the short stories of Haruki Murakami, it piqued my attention. Video game developers all too rarely look beyond genre pillars like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings for inspiration.