Remembrance

Here’s our next entry in the review-a-thon as a jam of jams: Remembrance was originally entered in the Single Choice Jam, which, as it says on the tin, required authors to construct games with only one moment where the player has multiple options. There are several potential structures that satisfy this constraint, and Remembrance opts for what’s probably the most straightforward: the game consists of an initial linear section that previews and builds up the significance of the choice, then shunts the player into one of four short, somewhat-different endings based on what they pick.

The flesh that goes on those bones is anything but straightforward, though. The protagonist is a young woman – maybe in your early twenties – who lives on the world’s first asteroid-mining station, and whose mother has recently died; you’re going back to Earth to inter her ashes, and have to decide which of a quartet of objects to bring along to leave by her urn as a memorial. As the game tells the story of your relationship with her through each of the potential offerings, you get a sense of the challenges you both faced relating to each other: the gifts that pushed you to be someone you’re not, the art pieces that she didn’t know what to make of. It’s narrated in a compellingly wry voice that lets the grief show by its absence, and which combines worldbuilding and character work with impressive economy:

"It’s been about a year since she died; the trip can only be made within a narrow window every 370 days or so, and your mother’s heart attack happened right after the last shuttle left. Punctuality was never her strong suit."

The game also succeeds at making its situations relatable by leaning into specificity: I’m not a tomboy who isn’t into jewelry, but I’ve definitely had interests that diverged from my parents’ expectations; I’m not a Jew who can’t cook the family recipes because there’s no honey on the space station, but there are certainly a lot of traditions my family hasn’t been able to keep up due to time and distance. And there was one moment where the specificity was, in fact, my specificity: the worn wooden box the mother stored her recipe cards in seems on its face identical to the wooden box my mom stores her recipe cards in.

The endings are finely-tooled as well. The temptation with this structure would be to have the choice be a Bioware-style BIG CHOICE, with each of the objects directly corresponding to some specific aspect of your relationship with your mom that would then take primacy in the final sequence – leaning into rebellion, or acceptance, or spirituality, or what-not. Remembrance resists this temptation, to its credit; there’s clearly a particular cluster of associations and emotions bound up in each object, but they’re not simple to unpack, and while the ending text does change in ways that feel satisfyingly responsive to the choice you make, there’s no radical branching or splintering of outcomes. Everything goes just as you expect it to, it’s just that the details are different.

With that said, I do think I would have liked the game better if there was a broader set of objects to choose from – I don’t mean that four is necessarily too few, but it was notable to me that all of the objects are ones that are as much, if not more, about you as they are about your mother. Two of them are gifts she gave you, one is something you made, and the last is something of hers that it seems like she wanted you to have after she died. As a result, no matter what choice you make, the remembrance-offering winds up presenting your mother through the memory-prism of her daughter; for many parents, that might well be what they’d want, but I think it would have been interesting to have at least one choice that was more clearly focused on how she understood herself, and how she’d want posterity to remember her. I can see the argument that that might have weakened the game’s focus on the mother/daughter relationship, but who we are when we’re alone determines who we are when we’re with someone else, after all. Perhaps the stronger reason against such an option is that Remembrance doesn’t really strike me as being about mourning as such; the stories it tells are more about how we understand ourselves in the light of the people who helped us become who we are, intentionally or not. And yes, that understanding is a choice, but it’s not a clean one.