I’m not sure I’d have released a game in 2025 about a sentient AI that comes to question its creators. It’s impossible to take the premise seriously at a point in time when the height of AI technology is used to tell people to add glue to pizza.
That aside, my first big problem with Memory Lost was figuring out if it was actually flawed or if I was just having a hard time wrapping my brain around it. It’s a splatterpunk twin-stick shooter with a unique rhythm, where you rapidly possess and discard the bodies of your enemies over the course of a typical fight. After a few hours, I concluded that it does have a few issues, the first of which is that it might’ve been rushed to release.
In Memory Lost, you play as N.N., for “Neural Network,” an artificial intelligence created by the Redsky Corporation. You first become self-aware in the tunnels beneath the city of Detraxis, where you’ve been sent to wipe out a local cult.
N.N.’s major asset is that, in this cyberpunk future, almost everyone has neural implants, even sewer-dwelling religious maniacs. She can hijack those implants to instantly take control of a person, then turn them against their allies. Once her current host is near death, N.N. must jump free to another suitable implant within line of sight, or she’ll die alongside her victim.
That sets up a layered sort of challenge. In addition to dealing with fast-paced combat, where enemies can come at you from any direction and tend to attack in suicidal waves, you also have to micromanage your own health bar. You’re just as fragile as most of your opponents, since you are most of your opponents, and it’s easy to drop dead to an unexpected wave of reinforcements or explosive trap. Rapidly shifting between bodies is both an offensive and a defensive tactic.
If you try to play Memory Lost like you would any other twin-stick shooter, it gets frustrating fast. You’re meant to deal with each wave of enemies by effectively turning them against one another, rather than simply circle-strafing to victory.
It’s a great hook for an action game, and when it works, it’s impressive. The problem I’m having, aside from just wrapping my brain around the mechanics, is an overall lack of polish. Memory Lost feels like it was released a version or two early, with a half-baked translation, a lot of jokes that simply don’t land, voice actors that all sound like they learned their lines phonetically, and a few simple presentation problems, like text that overflows its message box.
Its biggest issue, however, is simple inconsistency. To successfully hop into a new body, you have to either burn a charge from your Ultimate ability or weaken an opponent without killing them outright. In the latter case, that means many of the best weapons in the game are also the last ones you actually want to use, as they often land a one-hit kill.
Sure, it’s fun to wade into a crowd of oncoming enemies as one of the katana-wielding ninjas or the chainsaw guys, but anyone you dismember or decapitate is no longer a suitable host body. (One of the reasons I love this job is that sometimes I get to write some really crazy sentences.) As such, it’s easy to die because a new wave of reinforcements showed up and I’d already murdered everybody that I could’ve possessed.
Even when I’m not using one of the big weapons, it seems random whether an enemy just dies on the spot or becomes a valid target for a body swap. A cultist who drops to small-arms fire or a baseball bat to the dome might get killed on the spot or spend a few seconds as a potential new body before he expires. There’s no way of knowing which you’ll get until it happens.
When I die in Memory Lost, it’s typically because the game’s decided for no particular reason that I’m out of swap targets. In a game where my success or failure is usually determined by when and how I can possess people, I only have one reliable way to do so, it has to recharge between uses, and I can’t use it if I’m already on the verge of death.
The general concept behind Memory Lost is sound and the presentation’s decent, but it’s a couple of iterations away from the best version of itself. The overall experience reminds me of the zero-budget end of Xbox Live Arcade in the ‘00s, where you could find a reliable bumper crop of games from all over the world that might not have been playtested at all before release.
With another couple of patches and some mechanical tweaks, there could be something special here. If you’ve got a high jank tolerance and you like the idea of a grimy, violent cyberpunk shooter, you might have some fun with this, but Memory Lost feels like a beta test disguised as a full release.
[Memory Lost, developed by Magic Hazard and published by ESDigital Games, is now available for PC via Steam for $19.99, with console versions coming later in the year. This column was written using a Steam code for the game sent to Hard Drive by a Magic Hazard representative.]
