Bright Memory Review: Dim

If you took every popular video game produced over the past two decades, fed it into an AI, and asked the artificial being to create its own AAA game demo, Bright Memory would be the outcome. From top to bottom, this is a game that borrows each of its components to make a (somewhat) complete game that is a mishmash of every popular trope that we all have come to know and love. The problem is, as the game stands, it doesn’t really stack up with any of them on a level that makes it stand out in any meaningful way. If you are looking at this and vaguely remember it from a big Xbox presser, that is because it was shown off as Bright Memory Infinite, which this experience is essentially a demo of… a demo that they ask you to pay $8 for.

You take on the role of Shelia. I wish I could tell you more about her, but the game drops you into what feels like it would be the second or third chapter of the full experience. There is some banter back and forth between her and supporting characters, but it doesn’t really add up in terms of a cohesive narrative. I understood that there’s a powerful relic, some dude wants it for some reason or another, and he has a lot of soldiers and has summoned some nefarious rat creatures and zombies to fight it out with you over the possession of it, but that’s all I could piece together. In all reality, it gave me flashbacks of sitting with my grandparents as they’d shout back and forth making absolutely no sense due to their long descent into Dementia.

Despite getting my Xbox Series X on launch day, I have only played a handful of exclusive titles for the system as of this writing, and this was the first of that group I have reviewed. Most of my time has been spent playing older games that the “World’s most powerful system” has upgraded in one way or another, and honestly, this looks more in line with the older games being played on a standard Xbox One console at its best, and unless you spend ridiculous amounts of time (and effort) tweaking the wealth of visual settings, it will look like garbage more often than not. This is primarily due to near-constant screen tearing, which appears to stem from the fact that Shelia always has condensation forming at the top and bottoms of the screen that just turns into a blurred mess when you look in any direction.

The enemies fall into another mixed bag, some of which look great, namely the low-level soldiers you face off with at the beginning, but others, like the amalgam of a large mammal with some reptilian accents look like they belong in a low budget Xbox 360 title from late into the lifespan of the console thanks to the lack of any semblance of realistic textures and wonky animations. Much like the quality of the animations, the thematic elements don’t match up either, as I felt like I was up against a best-of rogues gallery shooting up the mercenaries from Vanquish, the rat-folk from Vermintide, zombies, monsters from God of War, and rounded out by a lone knight from Dark Souls.

The gameplay is broken down into small segments that challenge you to face the normal FPS mechanics – shoot stuff, jump places, and occasionally flip a switch. The entire experience takes around thirty minutes to complete a single run (since this is essentially a paid demo, for those in the back who may have missed it earlier), and outside of a few short boss battles and a single puzzle that takes the brain aptitude of a toddler to solve, it’s mostly point, shoot, move forward, rinse and repeat until the credits roll at a really weird cliffhanger.

The one area the game excels in is the combat, which feels almost identical to Rage 2, both in terms of execution and the abilities offered. I was only able to use a total of four weapons (handgun, SMG, shotgun, and a sword), which can be used in tandem with a staggering amount of abilities that are mapped to the bumpers, face buttons, and D-pad which allow you to manage groups of enemies with minimal effort. Despite the story making literally no sense to me and the persistent screen tearing, I really enjoyed myself as I blasted my way through the encounters the game threw at me – it’s fast, it’s somewhat fluid, and the parts that matter all line up for what I would consider to be a decent FPS experience.

As a work in progress, Bright Memory is something that I would be hard-pressed to come out and say is terrible, because it shows promise behind a plethora of technical issues. In a world where next-gen console exclusives are in short supply and one of the few released is priced at less than a value meal at most fast-food restaurants, you could blow $8 on worse things.

7 out of 10

Pros

  • Fun Combat
  • Cheap Series X Exclusive
  • Some Great Looking Characters

Cons

  • Screen Tearing
  • Some Poor Textures/Models
  • Incomprehensible Narrative

Bright Memory was developed by FYQD Studio and published by PLAYISM. It is available on Mobile, PC, and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Bright Memory, check out the official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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