Remember Me is brimming with promise. It desperately wants to play up some big ideas – the fallibility of memory, the constructed nature of identity – and while its ambition is admirable, sadly its best ideas don’t really find their way into the gameplay itself. They’re limited, on the whole, to ponderous cutscenes, while the action between is straightforward and not terribly well executed. Similarly, the world that’s been created is vibrant and distinctive – a futuristic version of Paris where memories have become digital commodities, huge corporations have dubious access to everyone’s past, and junkies addicted to the recollections of others subsist in the fetid sewers. It’s an intriguing dystopia where the mind has soured, but we never really get to explore it.

Remember Me only occasionally makes the most of its interesting subject matter to make us feel like the skilled manipulator of memories that our character, Nilin, is supposed to be. These are the Memory Remix sequences, of which there are just four in the entire game. In these sections you don’t control Nilin directly – instead you scrub through an interactive timeline of someone else’s past, changing seemingly insignificant details to effectively rewrite their recollection of history. In one sequence, for instance, you must make your target believe they've murdered someone they love – there are different ways of achieving this, but one step involves removing the safety catch from a handgun. Even though there’s a significant element of trial and error to these sections, they work really well – I felt like I was dabbling with the memories of others, reshaping their version of reality. The scrubbing through the past works fantastically well, and it’s during these four sequences that Remember Me really feels like a distinctive experience. Loading

But again, Memory Remixes are few and far between. The bulk of Remember Me’s gameplay is composed of competent but unremarkable combat and some quite bland platforming sections. Combat just isn’t expressive, and consists largely of learning four pretty straightforward combos. Simple combat can be satisfying – take Rocksteady’s Batman games, for example – but Remember Me forgets to include a parry system, so it constantly makes me feel like I'm evading my attackers instead of taking them on. Equally disappointing, Nilin’s fighting style isn’t that interesting to watch, and barring a huge mech that projects an image from a black-and-white movie as its mouth, ironically none of these enemies are very memorable.

What nuance there is to combat comes from entering the Combo Lab, a place where you can freely customise your attacks with effects that inflict damage, regenerate health, or cool down one of your more powerful attacks. If, say, you’re extremely low on health, it’s useful to jump into the Combo Lab and quickly construct an attack entirely composed of "Regen Pressens" to restore part of your health with every attack. This system does make the relentless combat situations a tad more interesting, as you actually have to tinker with your combos when facing particular types enemies early on. But once I unlocked enough Pressens to dedicate a combo to each perk, I pretty much forgot about visiting the Combo Lab ever again.

Combat gains a touch of variety in the form of S-Pressens, extremely powerful attacks that are gradually unlocked. But while they provide nice visual flourishes, they don’t really add much to gameplay in general. They’re solutions, you see – special moves designed with a very particular enemy or situation in mind. Sensen D.O.S reveals invisible enemies and cancels special powers, and unsurprisingly you’ll only ever use it when you meet this particularly type of foe. It’s because they don’t elegantly fold into the existent combat system, granting you more creativity; they each have quite long cooldown periods, making it impossible to integrate them into your fighting style. Loading

When you’re not fighting, you’re climbing – up drain pipes, across window ledges, and between rooftops – but none of this traversal is remotely exciting. There’s no suspense. Nilin makes every jump. Even if you’ve slightly misjudged the distance, don’t worry: you’ll be pulled, almost magnetically, towards your destination. But what’s most undermining is the pair of orange chevrons that constantly tells you which ledge you should jump to next. It’s meant as benevolent reminder, I’m sure... but it’s so insistent, so vibrant, that it has quite a destructive effect on the atmosphere. I involuntarily focused on it so intently that the world around Nilin began to fade – all I saw is that nagging sign beckoning me to the next ledge. I want to explore, to rummage around in all of the interesting shops and back alleys, but there’s no scope to do so – those orange markings are always waiting, ready to move you along.

It’s such a shame, because I’m genuinely curious about the world of Remember Me. The decline of its city into madness and the plight of its forgetful people is suggested in the lovingly crafted cutscenes. Each shop sign has been thoughtfully designed, the camera angle is artfully controlled – but it all lacks a degree of real interactivity to really flesh out this intriguing dystopia. Gameplay is perfectly competent – it all works, I hit no significant glitches – but it fails to really satisfy or thrill, and after a while, fighting horde after horde of similar enemies becomes tedious.