Unmemory: It's Pussy Riot Meets The Spice Girls

I love getting free games. I'm not that great at remembering to collect them. I went to the trouble of installing the Epic Games launcher well over a year ago but months go by without me thinking to click on the desktop icon to see what's waiting there.

I'm better with Steam but only because there's a banner across the front page. If it wasn't for that I'd never pick up any of their freebies. I won't make a Microsoft account so I missed out on all those XBox-on-PC titles when Bill Gates was handing them out. Does Bill still work there? He never writes, he never calls...

About the only place I routinely, reliably remember to pick up my allotment of free games is Amazon Prime. I'm not sure why that is. I think it might be because when Amazon acquired Twitch and started giving games away it seemed like a big deal, somehow. I felt I should make the effort. Also, they did it exactly on the first of the month, every month, which made it very easy to remember.

Then they transitioned from Twitch to Prime and now I get emails from Amazon reminding me I have games I could be playing for free under my sub. They still add new games on the first of the month and generally they remove them when the month ends but some hang around for a little longer so there's not so much pressure. 

When it says "playing" it means "taking screenshots".

Naturally, now things have become more flexible and customer-friendly I forget to claim my games more often. Or, I should say, I forget to claim them on time. To date I haven't actually forgotten altogether. 

A whole month never goes by without I open my Prime Games launcher to sift through the freebies, see if there's anything I might want to play.

It's an interesting aspect of the whole "give games away" thing. The companies don't just give the games away. You have to ask for them. 

The way it works with Prime is, when you log into your account, you see all the titles priced at "£0 with Prime" just sitting there next to a big, blue button that says Claim. Press that button and £0 changes to a green circle with a tick next to the word Claimed. You now "own" that game in the same way you own any games you actually gave Amazon money for, which is the same as saying you don't own them at all.

You can, however, play them at will for as long as Amazon offers the service, which these days is about as close to owning a game as any of us is going to come. There's one more layer of ownership to go through before you can finally play the games, of course. You have to install them.

It's quite a long process when you look at it, isn't it? The games may be free but you have to be quite determined to walk away with them. It's not like the login freebies in some free-to-play mmorpgs I could name, where your bags fill up with stuff the second you load into the gameworld whether you want them to or not. I guess someone learned something from that U2 free album debacle after all.

Much though I like to get something for nothing, I've learned over time to consider the cost. Free does not always mean free. 

Pass. Next?

In the case of games, the main expense is time and space. I have three hard drives in my PC, giving me four gigabytes of onboard storage. I've filled up more than three-quarters of it. I don't see any benefit to me in storing games on my hardware that I'm never going to play but equally I don't want to miss out on "owning" games I might want to play some day, just not yet.

That means triaging the offer. This used to be a relatively awkward process that often involved me typing the names of the games into Google and tracking down reviews. Amazon have made it a lot easier by including brief descriptions of every title plus links to the publisher's website and trailers on YouTube.

Often I can see immediately from the base description that I wouldn't be interested. Other times the opposite applies. For edge cases I click the links and try to learn enough to make an informed decision. Since it's ultimately going to cost me nothing but this time I've already spent, I tend to err on the side of "It's free! Gimme!".

Chekhov needn't fret.

That's why I currently have fifty-three games on my Prime account marked as "Claimed" but not yet "Installed". To be fair to myself, seven of those games were once installed. Three of them I played, enjoyed and finished and the rest I played and didn't like. I uninstalled all seven of them but, logically as I now realize, uninstalling just sets the games back to "Claimed" status and there they sit, waiting to be re-installed at some future time.

Some months there's almost nothing in the free pot that I want to pull out. Other times there can be a lot. September, the pot was full. There were six new titles up and four of them were Adventure games of one kind or another.

Of those four, The Secret Files: Puritas Cordis is the follow-up to a game I already own but haven't yet played. Sam and Max Hit The Road is a supposed classic I'd read a full playthrough of in one of Syp's retro-gaming series. Both of those were Point & Click Adventures, probably my favorite genre after mmorpgs.

Puzzle Agent was more of a long shot, being a "Casual Puzzle Adventure". It's a Telltale game, though, and while I don't think I've ever played one of theirs, I have heard good things about them. 

I claimed those three and then I looked at the fourth, the clumsily-named Unmemory. Despte that flat-footed title it seemed like it might be the most interesting of all. Also, by a very wide margin, the most pretentious, always a selling point with me but maybe not for everyone. Judge for yourself from Amazon's description.

"Game"? Seriously? What, like pheasant?

I thought it sounded interesting, at least, so I claimed it, installed it and over the next few evenings I played it. Or read it. Or solved it. I did something with it, I know that much.

There are a few glowing reviews of the game online. It does have its moments and overall I enjoyed it but at times it can feel stilted and unsatisfying. Partly that's because the many puzzles don't always seem to be particularly well-integrated into the text. More damningly, it's because Unmemory doesn't always present that compelling a narrative. 

The setting is the 1990s, ostensibly, although I didn't find there was much sense of either time or place. The game has a fogged, dazed feel to it, not at all inappropriate given the confused mental state of the protagonist, who has one of those handy cases of literary amnesia that means he can't remember anything that gets in the way of the plot.

The voice acting is quite flat but not in the lack of affect flatness way that appeals to me, more like an early table-read that somehow ended up being recorded and used even though none of the actors had really nailed any of the characterizations yet. The puzzles are mostly very similar, involving the opening of numerous locked boxes by way of increasingly abstruse and artificial clues involving numbers and symbols. I generally found them logical and fair but too often I didn't find them all that interesting. That might be because there are just too many.

The game is structured like a novel. It comes in eight chapters and there's a lot of reading. The prose style isn't bad, a kind of art-noir that mostly trips along. I've read a lot worse in published genre paperbacks.

I'd read that.

By far the most innovative and successful aspects of the enterprise are the many and manifold tricks and glitches in the way the text and illustrations move and shift and change as you read. There are words you can click on that open other passages of text. Sometimes those are obvious, sometimes less so. As you scroll the page things out of sight can change so that when you scroll back other passages reveal themselves. Text is redacted and then revealed according to whether you've set a particular piece of music playing by starting a jukebox or turning on a radio.

All of this works really well. It feels natural and it adds layers of nuance to the reading experience.
Whoever coded this part is really on to something. This is the sort of thing I was imagining writers would do with digital technology a decade ago, when eReaders were supposed to be killing the printed novel, only few of them seem to have been interested (or skilled enough) to try. 

I would very definitely like to read an actual eBook using these mechanics. It would need to tell a more engaging story to hold the attention past the novelty value, though. Unmemory's storyline is comic-book in the pejorative meaning of the phrase. The characters are so one-dimensional they can literally be diferrentiated best by the different colored balaclavas they wear. 

The plot is supposed to be smoky and tangled but for a whodunnit to work you need to care who done it. I didn't. I could barely remember who the options were. When the final twist appears it's so unsatisfying it lands exactly right, strangely enough. The ultimate kiss-off to the reader. You cared about this stuff? More fool you, then.

The experimental nature of the project extends beyond the ending, not that I'd have known had I not
needed to resort to a walkthrough for the later chapters, largely out of boredom with the never-ending sequence of box-opening puzzles and their comprehensible but tedious solutions. I do have to own up to getting stuck at least twice on puzzles that were fair and solveable. There isn't much in the game that I'd call unreasonable. Just some that isn't a lot of fun.

No, she won't.

Although I'd finished the game and seen the credits roll I noticed the walkthrough had another page to go. I read that and found you can use an email address in the game to enter into real-world correspondence with someone that can lead to other revelations and explanations. It's a nice metatextual touch but once again you'd need to care about these characters and this plot more than I did to make the effort.

One thing I noticed that the walkthrough writer didn't was a name in the long list of major Kickstarter donors that scrolls down the screen after the game ends: Jason Epstein. Hmm. Could it be that Jason Epstein? 

If so, it's evidence that he does like games. It was always a pet theory of mine that he bought the SOE portfolio, or got himself involved in its purchase at least, not becuase he wanted to make a fortune out of it or for any of the more nefarious reasons that have been suggested by some, but because, like Curt Schilling, he was a rich gamer who wanted a game company to play with.

I have absolutely no evidence for the theory except that it's nicely romantic, something I certainly wouldn't say about Unmemory. It's a fairly bleak, cynical lope through a sketchy 90s underworld that mostly exists in the minds of advertising copywriters and media studies graduates. For all that, it's an unusual and curious game, worth playing just to see what could be done with the form but mostly isn't going to be.