![]() But Memoria somehow knew that, and rarely stymies momentum with head-scratcher puzzles or random guesswork. Now, in the timeless words of Forrest Gump, "I am not a smart man." My tolerance for mindless or mind-numbing puzzles pegs me as an enemy of the state when it comes to many adventure games. Throughout Memoria, I sometimes had to take their word for it when they said, for instance, that a battle raged all around, or that wind was whispering among the leaves. And the minimalist theme music, a simple ditty plucked on a harp, sounds lazily lifted from The Elder Scrolls series. Walking through calamitous taverns or across grassy fields or over blizzard-whipped mountain passes never set right in my ears. On the other hand, the thin, tinny, clunky sound effects work hard to flatten the world. On the one hand, I’m glad developer Daedalic Entertainment put its money in its writers. The soundscape is sparse throughout, however. The past, where Sadja resides, is the stuff of epic magic and high fantasy, written larger than life, either through an effect of storytelling, or because the land truly flowed with greater magical energy than the comparative doldrums of the present. Princess Sadja’s story carries itself through maze-like forests, mountainous fortresses, and monolithic tombs. Geron gets the occasional breath of fresh air out in bright, deciduous woods, taking in a waterfall or two when the mood is right. Andergast isn’t lacking in magic, but magic is sequestered behind inner city walls, moody and trapped in books and libraries, neatly set apart from the gutters and pigpens and ramshackle medieval urban sprawl and unwashed masses. ![]() Geron’s present tense starts off in the vicinity of Andergast, a low-fantasy town known for its ability to form lynch mobs when things start smelling fishy. There are simple one-button ways to highlight hot spots, though, so you can spend more time parsing the story rather than picking apart pixels. Your muscle memory will whip out the good ol’ mouse crawl technique, zigzagging up and down, side to side, slowly looking for people and items to click on. You’ll combine items sidling up to one another in your inventory. You will, with varying levels of success, solve puzzles tucked into the environments. Nestled deep in point-and-click adventure land, Memoria travels across painted landscapes, its inventory bar breathing in and out at the bottom of the screen, while the steady soundtrack of your mouse clicks fill in the silence between clips of dialogue. But he’s posed with a riddle that bridges four and a half centuries, ties his side-quest-of-a-lifetime to Princess Sadja’s defunct memoir, and learns that the past can be as much of a blank page as the future. All he wants is to have his girlfriend slip into something more comfortable than raven feathers. She wanted to go down in history books, but the history books apparently thought otherwise.Īnd that’s where Geron the bird catcher unwittingly comes in. Something thwarted her plan to become a revered and worshiped warrior-princess. Funny thing, though, is that no one in Memoria’s present day remembers who Sadja was. She’s a princess, but you’d never know that from her ambition to become history’s most renowned warrior. Four hundred fifty years in the past is Sadja. His singular drive is to restore his girlfriend’s normal fairy body because she’d been transformed into a raven. Geron, a tousle-haired bird catcher, resides in Memoria’s present day. Memoria weaves its narrative and its timeline between two main characters and two different eras. That’s okay, though, because starting in medias res-in the middle of its narrative-builds on Memoria’s chaotic theme of memory, false memory, and the stories we tell in order to connect them. Memoria is part two of The Dark Eye series, sequel to 2011’s The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav. Memoria doesn’t start from the beginning.
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