Bright memory
This actually feels relatively unique compared to a lot of the game’s fairly uninventive mechanics. The reason the sword can’t be used entirely instead of the gun, however, is that it’s on a cooldown. Your sword acts as another ranged weapon, which shoots beams that slice through enemies much more easily than your bullets. Outside of the three guns (a pistol, assault rifle, and a shotgun), you also have a few other combat abilities that could potentially provide interesting layers to the combat if they were given time to be fleshed out in any meaningful way. At one point, there’s a bonfire that seemingly does nothing, but when you interact with it, it shows the “Bonfire Lit” screen from Dark Souls. Most of the enemies in the game that aren’t generic, futuristic military dudes are generic FromSoft characters. In fact, there are multiple parts of the game that feel like they’re borrowing from FromSoftware’s style, but not in the form of deep, interesting, and challenging gameplay - it’s just random. The cutscenes didn’t have much to brag about before the technical issues either – one moment you’re fighting a bunch of futuristic military guys and the next you’re being teleported to generic ruins where you fight enemies that look like knockoff Dark Souls enemies. I even encountered what can only be described as the ghost of scan lines dancing down my monitor and TV (yes, I tried multiple displays), mocking the already underwhelming cutscenes and undermining the experience more and more as my time with the game went on. The game opens with an extremely cryptic cutscene that presumes a level of familiarity with the game, its world, and its story that just isn’t there. This feeling that Bright Memory was a PC game haphazardly thrown onto the Xbox with no discernible level of quality assurance or care never left my mind throughout my entire playthrough. I was on that title screen for a few minutes trying to start the game, but the cursor just wouldn’t show up on the screen.
What took it from just kind of slow to infuriating was that there was no indication that there was a cursor. For some reason, while laid out like any normal menu in any console game, Bright Memory’s menus (yes, all of them) use a cursor instead of the standard highlighting for whatever option is selected, but that’s not that out of the ordinary for a lot of games these days. Starting the game on my Xbox Series S seemed pretty standard at first until I got to the title screen, which was the first warning of things to come. Considering been in early access and hit its final build a while ago, it should be a lot better.įrom the onset, one thing was painfully clear the game was not ready to be played on a console.