Memento: What You Forgot

Memento is a psychological narrative game with a card-based combat system. You play a man with no memory. To find yourself, you must recover what you’ve forgotten: each memory you reclaim becomes a card in your deck, your means to face those who marked you. Your journey will lead you to relive the defining moments of your past, moments tied to eight primary emotions. But to discover who you are, you will be forced to sacrifice something.

Exploration and battle. Memento moves between two modes. In exploration, viewed from an isometric perspective like classic JRPGs, you walk through the settings of your past, speak with those who inhabit them, examine objects, and gather fragments of memory. In battle, you face the figures who marked that season of your life through duels fought with cards.

Cards that tell a story. Every card is a memory, and every memory carries a fragment of the past: reading your deck means piecing together, bit by bit, your own story. Each card belongs to one of the eight primary emotions defined in psychology by Plutchik, and each emotion has its own signature ability: the Flare of Anger, the Patience of Anticipation, the Dead Weight of Sadness. Cards evolve over the course of a run. But to play a memory is to relive it: every card has a cost, and that cost is the pain of the one who plays it.

Emotions as architecture. Every level is a different setting: an era, a place, a season of the protagonist’s life, and an emotion. The journey leads toward familiar places you only recognize after you’ve passed through them, and toward faces that shaped who you are, and that you no longer recognize. Every boss embodies an emotion, every encounter puts something at stake that cannot be recovered, and every deck you build is a different version of yourself: a different way through your own story.

What are you willing to sacrifice to discover who you are?