Remember Me
Preview
A thought-provoking premise
by Chris Priestman
previewed on PS3
A Teasing Team
Recently forming after a break away from Ubisoft, DONTNOD Entertainment has ambitious intentions. Revealing the premise of their third-person action adventure at Gamescom, the small team flaunted more than just an air of mystery surrounding their carefully chosen words. Prying questions led to raised eyebrows and muted lips, but we left the meeting optimistic and confident of the talent at work on their first effort, Adrift.
A Dystopian Landscape
Adrift is still very much in the conceptual stage, so any real opinion of the game would be an ostensible undertaking. However, the work of art director Aleksi Briclot (former Marvel and Darkhorse artist) was simply breathtaking. Depicted before our eyes was a bustling, futuristic Neo-Paris; complete with flying vehicles and dark architecture. The Eiffel Tower stood as a daunting centerpiece, beset on all sides by a familiar yet eerily distorted Bladerunner-esque city. The project's creative director, Jean-Maxime Moris, then began to elaborate on the dystopian vision of France's commercial hotspot that the team had presented. Influenced by 1984, Adrift is set in 2084 when, instead of fighting against the surveillance society, people have accepted it as a normality.
The hope is to create a realistic future, one that could potentially take place as a natural progression from the current state we humans find ourselves in. Moris explained the team's observations into the behaviour of today's society; we live in a time when we are happy to empower technology as memory banks. Mobile phones and social networking sites are extensions of our identity, as they hold personal information and a backlog of memories and communications. It is something that Orwell would have you fear, but as Moris says, we embrace the potential of this new technology with barely any sign of concern towards our privacy.
