3/5 ★ – DaysposableHero's review of 11-11: Memories Retold.

11-11 Memories Retold got on my radar when I heard that Hollywood actor Elija Wood was going to voice a character in a video game made by a small French studio which had partnered with the Wallace and Gromit people, and that the game was going to be set during the First World War. All these facts are somewhat interesting by themselves. But taken together, I figured I had better check this one out. By the end, I felt about the game much like I feel about WWI itself: not convinced it was a worthwhile endeavor. World War II games are a dime a dozen, as everyone knows. The industry has been putting players in the shoes of the Greatest Generation almost since its inception. Castle Wolfenstein in 1981 and Silent Service in 1985 are stone cold classics. The third biggest video game franchise of all time, Call of Duty, started as a World War II series. And even after it caught its big break by updating its setting to the current era of combat – some might use the term “modern warfare” – it has still returned to the well of the early 1940s thrice more, with Call of Duty: World at War (2008), Call of Duty: WWII (2017), and Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021). As seemingly oversaturated as the industry is with reenactments of the largest, deadliest conflict in human history, it’s pretty easy to see why. WWII has several characteristics that lend it to the video game genre. Its timeline is a sweet spot where weapons and vehicles are modern enough to be recognizable and fun to simulate and play with. Driving tanks, flying fighter planes, and emptying the magazine of a Thompson submachine gun are classic video game activities. But it’s also primitive enough that warfare was both up close and personal, and on a grand and sweeping scale. Targeting grid coordinates with a cruise missile from 300 miles away might sustain a level or a set piece. But that kind of warfare won’t sustain a whole game. And though it’s been tried, melee combat has never lent itself well to first person perspectives. Also, taking forty seconds to reload a single shot musket does not provide for the kind of pacing that modern wargame players expect. But the first world war, the Great War, seems to occupy this same space, doesn't it? Its tanks and planes and guns might not be as modern as those available two decades later, but they’re modern enough, right? You can shoot bullets one right after the other, drive over fortified positions, and do a barrel roll, can’t you? So, what gives? Why are shelves saturated with games about the second world war, while WWI gets hardly a nod (Battlefield 1 notwithstanding)? I think I know: WWII has a very clear moral component. There are good guys, and there are bad guys. The bad guys literally wear skull motifs on their uniforms. Actual people really needed to be liberated from a for-real evil empire. In a medium very focused on the hero fantasy, half of the work of getting the player invested is already done. No one needs to be told why the Axis powers are bad, we already know. No one is going to have a moral dilemma shooting the enemy, we all agree it’s necessary and in service of the greater good. But World War I isn’t like that. World War I isn’t a story where an underdog hero held off a belligerent bully until the cavalry arrived. WWI doesn’t have the same “heroes and villains” aspect to its participants. In the end, no one could even be sure if anything was lost or gained, by either side. Just millions and millions of deaths, shattered lives, and destroyed families, and all for…..what? 11-11 Memories Retold seems to be trying to make this point. That neither side are the “bad guys” and that there is no “greater good” that anyone is fighting for. Nothing that this conflict is really “about”. You alternate play between Harry Lambert, a young Canadian photographer who joined up because the girl he liked was impressed by the uniform, and Kurt Waldner, a middle-aged German engineer who enlists in the army when he learns that his son’s unit has gone missing. Over the course of about eight hours or so, Harry and Kurt’s stories weave together and apart again as one unlikely coincidence after another sees them thrown together and then torn back apart. From the trenches of Vimy Ridge, to the gas-blasted wastelands of Passchendaele, Harry and Kurt continue to encounter each other over the course of the last year or so of the war. Your decisions decide which parts of this story you experience, as well as which of several endings you’ll see. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for me to describe the issues I had with this narrative without spoiling major events in the story. Suffice to say, I could never really become invested in the character’s journeys because it was all just a little too contrived. More than just a little. This game was made, I can only assume, by people who not only have never been in the military themselves, but have absolutely no idea how it works and didn’t care to ask anyone. Now, I’m not the sort of gamer that needs my games to be realistic. Far from it. I’m quick to suspend my disbelief as long as I’m convinced that’s the tone the game is going for. Here, I was not. As the narrative progressed, I just found myself in more and more disbelief. At one point, a young Canadian soldier, in full Canadian Army uniform, is walking freely around a medium sized German village, getting bread in exchange for ration tickets, while at the same time, the German army is in full retreat, and German and Canadian soldiers are being killed in the thousands every day. While both protagonists of this story are in non-combat occupations in their respective armies, each find themselves – multiple times – on the front lines, ready to go “over the top”, nary a rifle in sight. At one point, one of the characters finds themselves in the thick of battle, occupying the main objective of both sides, and he acts a bit surprised and put out, because he was just trying to find a cat. Like, I’m supposed to be a uniformed soldier at the front of the most horrific conflict in history at that time, and I’m acting a bit miffed that these other soldiers are trying to carry on a war while I’ve lost my pet. It’s absurd. Nothing that happens in 11-11 Memories Retold has any relationship whatsoever to anything that actually happened to soldiers on the front of World War I. It’s just silly. Mechanically, the game isn’t even sure what it wants to be. Is it a walking simulator? Is it an adventure game? Is it a visual novel? It can’t decide. Ultimately, it doesn’t do any of those particularly well. It could be a good walking simulator if it didn’t insert little puzzle-tasks to complete before you can advance, like resupplying a machine gunner, or fixing a broken radio. It could have been a good adventure game if its puzzles were anything more than a mechanical task to complete. Seriously, “fixing” the radio consists of picking up a spool of wire and clicking on the radio. Done. Fixed. One time, you have to “spot” some people in the trenches for your sniper to shoot. But all you actually do is pan the camera over to them, and then the scene plays out without you. It could have been a good visual novel if it didn’t have dozens of collectibles to find in order to see all of the story. 11-11 Memories Retold does have one thing going for it. The visual style is striking and intriguing. The entire thing plays out like a moving oil painting. It’s like any still frame from the game could have been produced by a veteran turned artist, rendering his memories on canvas. I assume that’s what the game was going for, and in that regard, they pull it off. The scenes are beautiful, whether they take place in the shell-torn hellscape of no-man’s-land, or behind the front lines on a small family farm in rural Germany. In either case, just looking at the game is a treat. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for me to be satisfied. Though, it might be for some, that I can’t deny. I’ve spent a lot of words talking about what this game gets wrong, but I acknowledge that those gripes are mostly specific to my personal tastes. I’m not sure I’m ready to say that 11-11 Memories Retold is a bad game. I think it’s just trying to do something I’m not particularly interested in. No, not quite. Rather, it doesn’t value the same aspects of a narrative that I value. Or at least it isn’t interested in catering to those values in this case. But it isn’t bad. Despite my repeated eye-rolls at the absurdity of the events taking place, I still wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to know whether Harry would make it home to his girl in the end. I wanted to know if Kurt would find his son or not. Earlier, I said I wasn’t able to be invested in the narrative because of how ridiculous it was. I guess that’s not true. I guess I became invested in it despite how ridiculous it was. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is a great game. But it’s not a bad one. Okay, mechanically speaking , it might be a bad one. But I still came away appreciating it. It’s bold and different, and it’d doing something you don’t see very often, and tackling a subject that is fairly fresh territory for video games. And I think that’s worth something. Probably.