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Apr 02, 2018 By Austin Trunick

The fiercely unconventional Rememoried is described as “a surrealist, explorative first-person adventure game.” Chances are it’s unlike anything you’ve played before.

Rememoried drops players into a world of memories and dreams, where images are connected through hypnagogic logic and your surroundings change each time you dare to look away. Your goal is to traverse a series of levels by solving their puzzles; sometimes, the most difficult aspect of solving the puzzle may be figuring out what the puzzle is. Rememoried does not hold the player’s hand or give copious directions, but that is a major part of the game’s enigma. Think of it as a strange dream from which you can’t escape lest you embrace the fragmented nature of it all and just explore.

Rememoried is one of the most unique gaming experiences I’ve ever had, and easily one of the closest things I’ve ever seen to surrealist filmmaking being translated into a fully interactive medium. It wasn’t a surprise, then, to learn from our interview below that cinema is an influence on designer Vladimir Kudelka.

Graphically, too, Rememoried is beautiful. In black and white with only the most striking dashes of color, you’ll explore one haunting locale after another. (On more than one occasion, I had to restart a level because I’d wandered off to take in the scenery and lost all bearing on where I was – and I was perfectly happy with that.) In one sequence, I wandered a shattered city of shadows in search of a masked chess piece; in another, I was inside a kaleidoscope, and every move twisted the hundreds of stars, mannequins, and shapes that surrounded into breathtaking patterns. The varied soundtrack is well-curated to match each environment.

We chatted with Vladimir Kudelka of Czech studio Hangonit, who is the creator of Rememoried. The game is now available across Windows, Mac, Linux, and Xbox One.

Austin Trunick [Under the Radar]: Rememoried is built on a central mechanic where the landscape moves and changes when you’re not looking at it. What inspired that idea?

Vladimir Kudelka, Hangonit: Inspiration was coming gradually from my dreaming, or rather from the process of my dreaming, when the same dreams kept repeating over and over but in more or less modified forms. During the day I tried to remember those dreams and started to realize their gradual modifications and that’s how a certain cycle of remembering and forgetting emerged. After that, my need to transfer everything to my favorite medium – video games – culminated.

What visual parameters did you give yourself to work from to design the game’s unique look?

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to build the entire impression from the game on its visual side and approach each level as an independent image. The basis of everything lies probably in fascination with the night sky, the universe as something that is beyond possibilities of human rationality and also some kind of hope. I didn’t want to waste colour and thus to increase its value for eyes in a given environment.

The game has such a widely varied soundtrack, from ambient to classical, and even opera. Please tell me about curating the music. Were songs found to fit the levels, or did you have any songs that you built the visuals and gameplay around?

You have actually described the choice… First of all, I finished the levels and then I searched for music for these levels which was, by the way, a very lengthy process. However, during the search, I came across several pieces I didn’t need at that moment, but I couldn’t get them out of my head. Then whenever I was listening to the music I just closed my eyes and a theatre started playing in my thoughts. I hope you can notice at least a part of it in Rememoried.

One of the most interesting uses of music in the game is a level set in a dark forest, where you need to follow music to find a cabin. Can you describe your creation process for this level, in particular?

During the two-year work I was realizing the power of music more and more. It can elevate the visual side by at least further 30% if not more. I wanted to include it in the gameplay itself at least in this way, emphasize its importance and pay tribute to it through that. After all, how many people have found their life journeys thanks to music? It is one of the first refuges we usually turn to in our teens.

The Czech Republic has a rich history of surrealist art, from Toyen to Svankmajer. Do you feel that Rememoried is in any way part of that tradition?

I am happy that you mentioned the artistic history of my country. It is definitely modern art as well as the present-day artistic scene that formed me for years, mainly thanks to my university studies at an art school and that was the best six years of my life. To be honest, currently I mostly turn to film production. I am particularly fascinated by two foreign personages – Darren Aronofsky and Terrence Malick. I think that there hasn’t been a single day I wouldn’t have remembered Aronofsky’s The Fountain and this state has persisted for longer than a decade. When I think about the future I would like to create a video game one day that would be at least fractionally in such a poetic spirit of Malick’s movies as The Tree of Life. As a matter of fact I dream about how to transfer these qualities to the world of video games every day.

(rememoried.net)