Over the summer, during the never ending, drawn out not-E3 of this year, in one of the Xbox showcases, a little game called Bright Memory was shown. What was shown was a brief snippet and not much info was given but there was a nice crisp look to it and it seemed fun. It was a port of a PC game that had been in early access for a while and seemingly developed by one person in his spare time.
That small studio has now launched the game on the new Xbox Series consoles and I’ve finally gotten around to giving it a go. It doesn’t take very long.
Without context, the game tosses you into a hallway where some guards have been killed. You make contact with someone and then proceed to have a firefight with some black clad baddies. After dispatching them, you are transported to somewhere else and fight some wolves. Then things get weird.
Shelia, not Sheila, will come across zombie-like creatures, werewolves, mutant lions, and weird pterodactyl-like creatures on her journey to do something I’m not really sure of. Bright Memory was very much an Episode 1 of something larger to eventually come (now called Bright Memory: Infinite) so the fact that not everything is explained to the player is fine but even so, I think the game does a poor job of laying the groundwork. We get characters that obviously have history but no context. It’s a bit off putting.
Fortunately, the gameplay makes up for the incomprehensible narrative. Shelia, again not Sheila, has a small personal armory at her disposal. She has the standard pistol, an assault rifle, and a beast of a shotgun, but the crown of her arsenal is her light sword. The game encourages you to utilize the different weapons in concert with each other to create an adrenaline rush of action.
And then there are Shelia’s abilities. When defeating enemies Shelia will gain experience that can then be used as a currency to buy new abilities. Some of them are passive, like making XP gains bigger but others actually give Shelia powers to use in combat. Abilities like a force push, a time freeze, or a ground pound with an area effect. It all works really well together with the guns and allows for more complex combat.
The game feels like an old school first person shooter but looks like a modern day game. Think along the lines of the recent reboot of DOOM but not as fleshed out.
And that is the unfortunate thing here, Bright Memory is really short. We’re talking 30-40 minutes for a run through, of which three runs are necessary to get all the achievements. I played through it twice and enjoyed my time with it but by the third run I just was out of gas and ultimately bailed. Still for $8 or so, you could do a lot worse. For me however, I’ll be waiting on Bright Memory: Infinite, which I hope will make the story more comprehensible and provide a more blown out gaming experience because this Bright Memory is a great proof of concept.
This review was written with material provided from the developer for the Xbox Series X. For more on our review process, please read here.
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