{"id":123490,"date":"2022-04-02T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-02T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/#article-129222"},"modified":"2022-04-02T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-02T13:00:00","slug":"mini-review-a-memoir-blue-annapurnas-latest-is-short-but-just-not-sweet-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2022\/04\/02\/mini-review-a-memoir-blue-annapurnas-latest-is-short-but-just-not-sweet-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Mini Review: A Memoir Blue &#8211; Annapurna&#8217;s Latest Is Short But Just Not Sweet Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/4662a47f45889\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/4662a47f45889\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<aside class=\"picture embed pictures\" id=\"screenshots\"><a href=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/121530\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/121530\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"A Memoir Blue Review - Screenshot 1 of 10\"><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>We&#8217;d be lying if we pretended we hadn&#8217;t experienced impressive games published by Annapurna Interactive in the past; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/what_remains_of_edith_finch\">What Remains of Edith Finch<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/outer_wilds\">Outer Wilds<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/sayonara_wild_hearts\">Sayonara Wild Hearts<\/a> are just scratching the surface of the critically acclaimed titles that have passed through their avowed art-game doors. The hit factory though, such as it is, seems to be on a bit of a stumble lately. The hotly-anticipated <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/twelve_minutes\">Twelve Minutes<\/a> was the dampest of damp squibs, your mileage will absolutely vary with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/artful_escape\">The Artful Escape<\/a> and now we&#8217;ve got <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/a_memoir_blue\">A Memoir Blue<\/a>, a &#8220;interactive poem&#8221; (<em>red flag emoji<\/em>) about a competitive swimmer&#8217;s relationship with her mother.<\/p>\n<p>Is that too cynical? Perhaps. We fear that these introspective games \u2014 while certainly having their place in this enormous, diverse, joyous hobby \u2014 need to offer a little more meat on the bone to be truly worthwhile. And we don&#8217;t mean in their core gameplay, necessarily; storywise, this is a flaccid experience, on top of being mechanically uninteresting. We can forgive one, but not both.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the real nail in the coffin of A Memoir Blue; if it were a movie, it&#8217;d be an uninteresting one. The &#8220;gameplay&#8221; here (oof, we put gameplay in scare quotes, that&#8217;s never a good sign) consists of, essentially, <em>fiddling around<\/em>. Let&#8217;s examine the first scene \u2014 you&#8217;ll see your character (Miriam) receiving a medal for a swimming competition, and you&#8217;ll use the left stick and buttons to move the assembled press&#8217; microphones and take photographs. Miriam flinches at the camera flashes. Could this possibly indicate a discomfort with success!? Next, you&#8217;ll be rifling through Miriam&#8217;s bag, receiving texts messages in an obscured, Wingdings-esque language. Could this be somehow related to <em>issues with communication?<\/em> The next segment, in which you tune a radio which displays various abstract-ish scenes rather hammer this point home. Sound a bit bland and obvious? You&#8217;d be right, but it&#8217;s okay \u2014 you&#8217;re already almost 10% of the way through the game.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, on top of being a rather leaden, obvious piece of software, A Memoir Blue is just under an hour long. This is probably not the worst decision, all things considered, but if it fails to grab you in that short time, there&#8217;s precious little to recommend here. We&#8217;d say some of the visual design is interesting \u2014 and there is inarguable skill in the compositions \u2014 but it&#8217;s in service of something that just didn&#8217;t hook us. There&#8217;s some nice mixed-media stuff where 2D animated flashbacks appear alongside the fully-CG Miriam, but they just gave us the impression that they&#8217;d given up being esoteric and just decided to show us what happened instead.<\/p>\n<p>This will probably be held up as anti-intellectual in some way, or part of the crowd who scream every time they see a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/guides\/best-nintendo-switch-walking-simulators-and-narrative-games\">&#8220;walking simulator&#8221;<\/a> (a grossly reductive label), but really, this just <em>isn&#8217;t good art<\/em>. Of course that&#8217;s subjective and sure, maybe you&#8217;ll be profoundly moved in a way that we didn&#8217;t experience, but we&#8217;d wager it&#8217;s unlikely. It&#8217;s a game that seems to coast along and then just&#8230; fizzle out with no major revelation or real hook. What&#8217;s a generous word for that? Meditative. It&#8217;s meditative. Really meditative. Sort of like&#8230; sleeping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;d be lying if we pretended we hadn&#8217;t experienced impressive games published by Annapurna Interactive in the past; What Remains of Edith Finch, Outer Wilds, and Sayonara Wild Hearts are just scratching the surface of the critically acclaimed titles that have passed through their avowed art-game doors. The hit factory though, such as it is, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}