Memoria – Preview

Memoria is a game made by Daedalic Entertainment, the same developers who brought us The Night of the Rabbit, Deponia and the Edna and Harvey-series. All those games have something in common; they’re all point and click adventure games. This genre is quite popular these days so let’s see if Memoria is memorable enough to distinguish itself from the competition.

You start the game as Geron, a young man who tries to transform his girlfriend Nuri  -who is trapped in the body of a raven-  back to normal. If you would like to know the full story behind all this, then I recommend playing the prequel “Dark eye: Chains of Satinav” as it’s not always clearly explained what exactly happened in the past. Luckily, it doesn’t hinder too much if you start the game without any knowledge about the previous events.

Geron meets the daughter of a traveling merchant and after he has proven that he’s capable of using magic, she brings him to her father Fahi. The merchant explains that, every night, he dreams of Sadja, the last princess of Fasar who vanished about 450 year ago. Apparently there is a certain riddle in those dreams of which Fahi is eager to know the solution. He proposes a deal to Geron. If he’s able to solve the riddle within 3 days, Nuri shall be brought back to her human body. And so his quest commences.

The story of the game is divided in two separate timelines. Geron’s story is situated in the present time and the adventures of Princess Sadja take place 450 years before that. The switching between the two timelines happens quite smoothly and it’s pleasant to see how certain events are connected, even though there is a huge time gap between them.

Graphically, the game is a real beauty which isn’t so surprising as the developers are quite known for their artistic touch. Each time you visit a new area, you should take at least 5 minutes to oversee the stunning surroundings. Color is richly present and the amount of detail Daedalic Entertainment has put in the environments is really magnificent.

The music is the icing on the cake when it comes to creating an engaging atmosphere. Depending on where you are, you’ll also hear background noises like crickets, flowing water and so on. Unfortunately speech was all in German and it tended to distract me while reading the English subtitles. I ended up decreasing the speech volume so it wasn’t too dominating. Apart from that, the audio was very enjoyable.

Then for the puzzling part. In the beginning of the game, the puzzles are quite straight forward and not too difficult to solve. However, they get more and more challenging as you progress through the story. Chances are that a puzzle seems unsolvable, but it’s all about having a creative mind. However, if you keep struggling at a certain point remember to hit the spacebar, this causes white orbs to appear wherever an action is possible in the area you’re currently at. By “filtering” the clicking possibilities it spares the player from clicking every inch of the screen, praying that something might happen.

The options menu looks basic but complete with the most important features present. Speech and music volumes are freely adjustable, the same goes for the screen resolution. For those who like to chat or browse the web while having the game on, windowed mode is also available. The only hick-up that I’ve noticed was that accessing the inventory –which you normally do by moving the cursor to the bottom of the screen – wasn’t working in maximized windowed mode as the Windows bar beneath somehow overlapped the game itself. This prevented the cursor from going all the way to the bottom of the game screen and thus not opening the inventory. It’s a small annoyance but worth looking at.

A couple of things I liked less about this early build were the rather stiff animations of the characters and the fact that English voices weren’t implemented yet. The lip synchronization was quite off at some parts as well and I’ve noticed some minor graphical glitches. Fortunately, Daedalic Entertainment is still working on those items so I think it’s pretty safe to assume that everything will work out just fine.

Conclusion

Memoria shows a lot of promise. It’s still in need of some fine-tuning and polishing but overall, this early build brings the right idea of how the game will turn out. Having partially played this game, I’m eager to know what it’s prequel, as mentioned before, “Dark eye: Chains of Satinav” has to uncover for me. For those of you who are into artistic point and click-games, I’d say, keep an eye out for this one.

Elexus

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