Memoranda is much more down to earth than Ice-Pick’s hellish afterlife, taking place in a sunny, coastal town of cafes and cottages.
In part, it reminded me of softer tracks from Ice-Pick Lodge’s The Void, another (albeit very different) game where the player is bombarded with strangeness.
MEMORANDA GAME 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. At no point did I ever find myself overly frustrated with the controls and that’s pretty rare for a game of this type.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. There is a nice feature where you can just click on the map and the location, where you want to go to, and hey presto you’re there, making for a significant change from the endless backtracking you end up doing in games of this genre. The UI is extremely friendly for a point and clicker.
I have to confess that during the latter stages of the game I had my head in an online guide in order to try and get me through… and even then I would have never guessed some of the required combinations in a million years. But be warned, for the first half an hour the puzzles and solutions are fairly normal and straightforward, but soon it becomes quite obtuse. A handy press of the LB button will highlight all the things you can play with and from there it is very much a case of using specific items with other items in your inventory, and then utilising these items with further objects or characters. Memoranda works like an old-fashioned point and click adventure game: each screen or area provides you with a number of things you can interact with or collect for your inventory. The game starts off slightly offbeat, allowing you to meet some strange characters, but soon the world dissolves into the unknown with strange anthropomorphic animals, talking objects, the morphing of time and the existence of ghosts. Seeking a cure to her isolation and sleep problems she heads out into the quaint town around her in an attempt to solve the problems of numerous fellows, hoping that it will help her loneliness and memory.
She starts to doubt which memories are hers and what is real, so decides to do something about it. She is a young woman living alone in her apartment, apart from a drunken sailor who keeps her awake all night, giving terrible insomnia. The story involves you playing the lead role of Mizuki. However, I’d fully understand if others might find it flippant and annoying. It’s a world where everything is in question, with nothing set in stone, and it’s the creativity of that world that I personally love. An elephant is found sitting in an armchair by the fire smoking a pipe, a man longs to be a fish, and a bunch of frogs hold the secret to the universe. Memoranda instantly makes you feel like you’re in a familiar environment, but then very quickly things don’t quite appear as they first seem.
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