[b][u]This game was reviewed using Version 1.0.28. Your experience on other versions may vary.[/u][/b]
[h3][b][u]Short Answer:[/u][/b][/h3] A really interesting concept for a mystery game, with some very clever puzzles and solid execution of its more experimental ideas--the only problem being that it's a mobile game that still tries to emulate touchscreen-style controls with just your mouse. Numerous puzzles become much more tedious as they're designed to accommodate a smaller phone screen, and the constant usage of click-and-drag "swipe" movements got bad enough to cause wrist pain that cut my playthrough short. You should definitely consider picking the game up on mobile, but don't waste your time fighting against the controls on this version.
[b][u]UPDATE (2023-01-04)[/u][/b]: A second attempt using the Steam Deck made controlling the game much easier, but the portrait-style visuals designed for mobile make the text small and hard to read, and certain in-game buttons become harder to press. Even despite the Deck's extra features, you're still better off just grabbing it from your phone's app store instead.
[h3][b][u]Long Answer:[/u][/b][/h3] [i]Unmemory[/i] is a mystery game about a person trying to hunt down the man who murdered his girlfriend--the only problem is that a recent injury has left them with a severe form of memory loss that causes them to constantly forget everything, prompting them to take extensive notes to try and piece everything together. This means the narrative is a bit disjointed, and it's gonna be tough to wrap your head around what's going on at first. It plays almost like an interactive book, presented mostly through text with interactable objects sprinkled between paragraphs. This isn't just a stylistic choice, though; [b]the emphasis on text is frequently used in puzzles to great effect[/b], using tricks like coloring, hiding, or redacting words to hide solutions in plain sight. It's a game that encourages you to take written notes, read between the lines (sometimes literally), and think outside the box as [b]it balances puzzles that are complex enough to get the gears turning in your head, yet logical/telegraphed enough to not be impossible to solve[/b]--and if you're really getting stuck, there's a hints system buried in the Chapter Select screen that helps a lot. The concept behind this game is really interesting, and it's very well-executed for the most part--there is, however, a very critical flaw in the game's current build, and it's one that ultimately led to my dropping the game before I could reach the end: the controls.
See, what I didn't realize before picking this up is that [b][i]Unmemory[/i] is a game designed for mobile phones that was also ported to PC, which wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that it still uses touchscreen-style controls[/b]. This means that all navigation is done by clicking and dragging the mouse as though you were swiping with your finger, and that in and of itself has its own problems: moving up and down is very sensitive, so you're prone to progressing past scenes before you've actually finished reading what's in front of you; and letting go of left-click mid-drag will cause the screen to scroll autonomously at whatever speed you moved the mouse until you hold your cursor steady and click the screen to get it to stop. Another issue is that many interactables still operate as though you're playing on a smaller mobile screen--let's use a phone keypad as an example, since that's the first in-game object that demonstrates this issue. You can't just push the buttons on the phone itself to dial a phone number, you have to use these big left/right arrow buttons below the phone to scroll through each number one by one until you land on the one you want to press, then push a "confirm" button to input it into the phone, rinse and repeat until you've jotted down the full phone number. This makes sense when you're playing on a mobile phone, since the actual number pad would be too small to use accurately; but on a desktop computer, it's a needlessly complicated process that happens to rear its head in some form or another in nearly every chapter. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was a puzzle in Chapter 6 that involves [spoiler]using a telescope on a heavily zoomed-in landscape image to find small clues hidden within it[/spoiler], demanding so much click-and-drag movement that it actually started to cause pain/tightness in my wrist and I had to stop playing. You can't remap any actions to your keyboard to reduce the dragging motions; and there is no support for controllers unless you want to jump through the hoops to try and get Steam Input to work, which I was too frustrated by this point to do.
The store page boasts 8 hours of total gameplay, but HowLongToBeat clocks in the average playthrough at 4-6 hours; and given that I made it through 6/8 chapters in ~3 hours, I'm inclined to believe the latter. [strike]I'm still very much invested in the concept behind this game, so I'll more than likely grab the mobile version at some point to see how the gameplay evolves and the story ends[/strike] [b](see below)[/b]. That being said, [b][u]I cannot recommend the Steam version of [i]Unmemory[/i], at least not until the current mobile phone controls are completely overhauled for better desktop play.[/u][/b]
[h3][b][u]UPDATE (2023-01-04):[/u][/b][/h3] So I decided to give the game another shot, this time on the Steam Deck--[b]unsurprisingly, using the Deck's touch screen made controlling the game [i]much[/i] smoother[/b]. The section I had to give up on before due to strain was significantly easier, navigating those problematic interactables was faster, and everything just felt a lot more natural to control; though it still does that autoscroll thing since it's a touchscreen mimicking a mouse mimicking a touchscreen. [b]The downside, though, is that the text becomes very small, making it harder to read and harder to accurately push buttons[/b]. Because the game is built with mobile devices in mind, all the text is localized in a narrow column in the middle of your (presumably) 16:9 display window; and the unused screen real estate thanks to this "portrait in landscape" orientation, for lack of a better term, is even more blatant on the Deck's 16:10 display. When comparing it to the mobile version via in-game screenshots from my phone's app store, the text on the Deck is significantly smaller than the mobile version, like it's been zoomed out in an attempt to fit more on the screen--and I'm now convinced that this zoom out is the reason why cutscene cues triggered by your scroll position were activating prematurely this whole time: because you're not supposed to be seeing as much text on screen as the Steam version provides.
So in short, it's kind of a lose-lose situation on the technical/control side of things. As for the game content itself, [b]the puzzles continued to innovate in a positive way from start to finish, but the story kinda floundered at the end and left me with more questions than answers[/b]. I don't regret giving it a second chance--if anything, it reinforced my belief that this is a genuinely good puzzle game--but my previous point still stands: [b][u]If you want to try a unique and interesting puzzle game, pick up [i]Unmemory[/i] on your mobile phone's app store of choice--don't play it here on Steam.[/u][/b]
[quote]For more game reviews, check out my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42524563/]Curator page[/url]![/quote]
