I'll preface this by saying that if you're the child of a single parent, or a single parent yourself, this game might have far more impact on you than it did me.

That being said, I can't really recommend this... experience. I have very little bad to say about it, but almost nothing good to say about it either. It's a decent if not basic story about a girl reflecting on her relationship with her mother, but it's not exactly in-depth or anything. The story is broken into basic interactive segments, like clicking on lights to play an animation showing where the relationship is at in the given time. There's not really any merit to this being an interactive experience rather than just like, a short YouTube video. For example, at one point the girl and her mother take a train ride, and the gameplay for the segment is inserting the coins into the machine, hitting the ticket buttons, dragging the tickets over to stamp them, then putting them in the slot. That's it. There's no real benefit to that being interactive beyond the simple entertainment of being able to fling the coins around the screen.

The story is not particularly interesting either, as it kind of just is a very simple life story. I can even sum up the story in a single sentence if I tried. The biggest compliment I can give this game is that it's told very well visually even if there's little to no point in it being interactive. If you're interested in seeing this story, go watch a YouTube playthrough that's over in like 45 minutes, then play it yourself if you think the experience is worth giving your money towards. Otherwise, there's no point.

Jugado a través de Gamepass, de una horita de duración.
Me ha gustado, sencilla historia sobre la relación de la protagonista con su madre, a través de sus recuerdos, representados con numerosos y sencillos puzles.
Historia sencilla, nada original, pero bien contada a través de su estilo gráfico, que mezcla de manera muy interesante gráficos 3D con animación clásica 2D. Visualmente esto da lugar a escenas muy bonitas hacia el final.
La banda sonora me parece otro punto fuerte del juego, incluye canciones cantadas muy bonitas.
Recomendado, siempre que lo encontréis a un precio muy asequible.

I've found it challenging for games without any dialogue like this to make an emotional impact on me, but A Memoir Blue did manage to elicit some twinge in my heartstrings. Though I feel like if I were a parent it would've been able to be much more impactful. The interactivity was a teensy bit frustrating in spots. I always hate having to pixel hunt for the object that's interactive, and I felt like I had to do this in a few spots. Other than that, not much to mention about this game, it's a wordless story with some beautiful art and nice music that only takes an hour to experience -- more of a short film than a full-fledged game.

A Memoir Blue
Developed by: Cloisters Interactive ( @cloisters_i )
Published by: Annapurna Interactive ( @A_i )

A Memoir Blue is an interactive “point and click” adventure game. The game centres around a woman Miriam, her childhood and relationship with her mother. The story isn’t complex but it’s done well. It’s an emotional story that examines that trauma that can be done to a child when their parent isn’t necessarily “there” for them in moments where they expect them to be there. It’s a game that examines the way we perceive events of our past as kids in the moment and reconcile those moments with information we learn as we grow up and become adults ourself. This game won’t be for everyone but it was a worthwhile experience for me. The gameplay consists of the player clicking around the screen and interacting with objects in order to progress to the next scene. Playtime for completionist will be roughly an hour. I’d recommend picking this game up on a sale to fans of the “point and click” genre.

Played on: Xbox Series X
Review score: 3/5

This is a short and cinematic game where you dive into a pro swimmer's childhood memories. The vibe is magical realism. The gameplay consists of being a magic cursor which can select objects and move them around. You interact with things by doing mechanical motions in order to advance through a series of scenes.

It's like someone made a movie, but between each scene they added friction. I actually enjoyed this friction more than I was expecting to. Some of the ways you interact with stuff is pretty amusing and satisfying. There were a lot of of small moments of random joy in something I was expecting to just be tedious. It's interesting how much this toy-like interactivity actually adds to the experience.

I was having 2 experiences: watching a series of creatively presented scenes obsessed with non-verbal story telling, and going through the motions of interacting with things. The latter prevented me from getting so bored that I stopped appreciating the former. To be clear, this was a danger because the story was pretty boring and uninteresting.

I can respect the intent of the story, but the real strength of the game is the diverse presentation of it's scenes. Some of the ways the trivial interactivity is implemented is neat. I repeatedly noticed an interesting bit of cinematography or scene construction and exclaimed "that's clever".

I love all the ocean & water imagery. Water is pretty technically difficult, especially for a small team indie game like this. Massive respect for all the shader and technical art work that was done here.

A beautiful, dreamy interactive memoir that's worth the hour it takes to complete but whose toybox-like interactivity is frequently uninteresting. The gameplay falls back to "click on everything to move on" a bit too often for me. I did love the original songs, and the soundtrack is good overall. I like the mix of visual styles and how the hand-drawn scenes denote memories from the protagonist's childhood. I don't think I would've wanted another hour, even if the story, which is sweet and moving, were further fleshed out.

I found this to be a neat way to tell a story.

The short gameplay segments acting as a vignette of memories were cool enough. The actual narrative wasn't anything I particularly connected with but fairly well done. It just all felt somewhat dull to me. Oh well.

An experience that's maybe worth trying if you're curious enough, especially with how short this is (roughly an hour)