No, this is not the most beautiful game ever, but being pretty isn’t what makes something art. Vladimír Kudělka’s Rememoried indeed has a unique look and its own visual style which is sure to impress, but judged also by the merits of its gameplay it’s certainly art before beauty.

Briefly, Rememoried is a first-person surrealist art game that dismisses the notion of object permanence. Turning away from an object and then back often renders the object in a different place, vanishes it completely, or reveals new objects. This mechanic essentially translates into spinning your camera around until things appear as you need them in order to solve a simple puzzle.

Playing Rememoried had me thinking about games in a foreign way. Where usually the gameplay, visuals, and audio combine into a single experience, my attention was distinctly drawn to all three aspects independently. Where the gameplay was routinely weak and awkward, the sound and visuals carried the experience in their own ways. Where trying to follow a narrow black path above a black void would normally challenge my patience I was distracted by the way the music corresponded to my footsteps, similar to the way the music responds to the time-rewinding mechanic in Braid. When searching the ruins of a blackend city for the tiniest trace of my goal against only the distant light of the moon I found myself enamored with the silhouettes and didn’t even stop to realize how tedious the task was. The gameplay though was sometimes more arduous than the other two aspects could cover up for: a monotonous section that required the player to walk a narrow path of spinning platforms for essentially a mile while stopping every few feet and trying all the while not to fall into a void was particularly painful.

Perhaps the most awkward aspect of the game, besides the controls, was the dialogue with its reverb set firmly to stun. “Space is a dogma. A dogma is logic.” It was pretentious and meaningless to a surprising degree, and in the end I chalked it up as nothing more than ambient gibberish. The voice-overs felt like they belonged in an insert-words-here kind of way, regardless of what they were actually saying. “And my eyelids become curtains that hide unexpected discoveries beyond the borders, reached by only the strongest thoughts.” Nonsense.

What really struck me about Rememoried was the question of what it would be without the clunky platforming. I can imagine the talent behind the game imagining a world of digital beauty that challenges our human senses. Something that gamers haven’t seen before, something that art hasn’t been able to present before. A living, changing world that would shift and transform in the single instant we looked away from it. But unlike traditional visual art, where you look at it and then away, this is something you need to experience. You experience it by ambling around the level and taking in what you can. But then what? Should the game have a big “next” button to click after you feel you’ve experienced a given scene? Or should there be some arbitrary goal to accomplish in this world, whose achievement is met with the next surreal stage? In that latter sense the game’s goals are almost unimportant, secondary to the experience of just playing the game, which I think is exactly what Kudělka was going for in his push to upend walking simulators.

Whether its platforming and puzzles are simple by design or not, the game will definitely be challenging to an inexperienced player or really to anyone who doesn’t like precision platforming. Though some of the puzzles are indeed straightforward, making that tiny jump to the next platform can be an infuriating endeavor. The lack of shadows and suprematistic color schemes made even basic movements uncomfortable and unfair, which may be an acceptable challenge to some but also severely limited the game’s appeal. As a whole, I enjoyed Rememoried as an art piece and found its shortcomings (and short play-time) bearable. I’d be quick to recommend it, but reluctant on who to recommend it to.

6/10.