Bright Memory: Infinite Review (kuba)
This is a bizarre game - it feels like playing the middle 3 hours of a AAA shooter campaign from an alternate timeline. You get dumped into the story with very little explanation about the setting, characters, factions, etc, and by the time it's finished you still aren't entirely sure what's happened or why. It's cheesy, it's short, it doesn't explain anything, some of the setpieces seem shoehorned in (driving section? why not? stealth section? ok but make sure it's only about 3 minutes long), and it has a few quicktime events in it that seem questionable in their responsiveness. Why, then, do I still recommend it? Partially it's because I got it for less than a tenner on sale and partially it's because there's Steam Workshop and it seems to exist exclusively to allow you to play with less clothes on (or play as 2B or Tifa which amounts to the same) which is so utterly shameless that I'm compelled to respect it. But there's more to it than that. They really lean into the aforementioned cheesiness in a way that ends up becoming likeable, like a peak-form Nick Cage movie. You grapple onto a burning passenger jet as it crashes and have a gunfight on the wing! There's an evil general guy who wants to use the MacGuffin for Unspecified Bad Things! Warriors from the past teleport in and attack you! A helicopter flies by and drops off your car with missile launcher attachment! You cut giant demon warriors to bits with a katana! There's a black hole in the sky and everyone talks about it like it's not a big deal! Bits of the landscape break off and turn into floating islands in the sky! You can run on walls but you barely use it! It's all ridiculous silly fun and as the screenshots on the storepage show, it looks great too. Additionally, the combat mechanics have way more depth than you'd expect from a game this length - the gunplay feels quite meaty, there's parrying and dodging that requires careful timing, magic-y nanotech powers, all the weapons have interesting and unique alt-fire modes, and the enemy variety means that you'll have to change tactics to respond to threats. It's the kind of game in which, if you really invested yourself in it, you could become superhuman: never taking any damage and dancing from enemy to enemy swinging your blade, headshotting enemies and recording your Youtube compilation video. How odd that it's so tiny. Maybe not worth full price but if you see it at 50% or more off and just want to engage B-movie mode then you could do a lot worse.
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