Memoriae

People owe a lot to their memories, because that’s how we learn new things and remember them when we need to. On the other hand, it’s not a perfect system, and it actually fails a lot over the course of a lifetime. In more serious cases, the brain actually starts to lose the ability to recall memories, or they become too jumbled to make sense of.

Memoriae is an interesting puzzle game that challenges you to put memories back together piece-by-piece, although the actual idea is a bit simpler than that. In fact, the whole game can be finished in a couple of minutes if you understand how the mechanics work, because there’s not an awful lot of content included. On the other hand, this was designed for a game jam, so it’s not a fully-fledged production.

The main idea is that you have to complete four different puzzles, but they are not as you would expect them to be. In fact, they appear to be full images from which a single piece is missing, and your job is to find that piece. In order to do that, you have to move around the image and observe where the missing part might be hiding, only to take it and take it to its proper place.

Unlike in a classic puzzle game, you have to move around the screen using the classic WASD control scheme, which might be a bit unintuitive at first. However, it gets easier after a while, especially since the explorable area is quite small and difficult to get lost into. This is also a problem, because boredom sets in rather quickly, unfortunately.

As for the graphics, all you need to know is that there are only a handful of images presented in the game, but they are all pretty nicely drawn and quite engaging. They seem to represent certain moments frozen in time, such as a kite above a tree, a clear summer night, as well as a few other such events. The music is pretty nice as well, but don’t expect anything that sticks with you for years to come.

When it’s all said and done, Memoriae is not a riveting experience, but it can be pretty calming and enjoyable if you want to relax for a while. However, it’s too short and meaningless to make an impression on you.