“The past is a different country,” says a character with the deliciously preposterous name Johnny Greenteeth. This incomplete and ironically misremembered quote is not a reference dropped into the script here for a dose of unearned gravitas. Rather, while Remember Me is ostensibly a platform beat-’em-up set in a gorgeously fractured futuristic Paris, it is also an exploration of the power and fragility of human memory.
With the 22nd century visible on the horizon, a company by the name of Memorize develops a technology known as Sensen. Memories, once the ultimate form of privacy, have been untethered from the human mind. Memories can now be easily removed. They can be lent to friends and loved ones, used as currency in transactions, and generally manipulated to enrich the human experience. Naturally, there is a dark side to this.