A Memoir Blue
Review

A Memoir Blue (2022) is a narrative game about an athlete's relationship with her mother. It's a story told through a dream, which you move along by interacting with everyday objects. It stands out for the metaphorical use of visual styles and the poignant territory of how success and failure are so closely linked and how parents inevitably struggle to support childhood passions.

Play is minimal but purposeful. Amongst other things, you push coins into a ticket machine, tap to board a train and place planks of wood to bridge a river. Other times you guide the rain to fall on a newspaper that then reveals a memory.

As you progress, you settle into not being responsible for that progress. As you do a story unfolds about the highs of sporting glory and the lows of isolation and the loneliness that was needed to create that success.

The result is a game that some may find, like Florence, too much like a movie. But actually, this is why it's interesting. Your light interactions implicate you in the narrative. You are involved in the tragic obsession with performance and reach for any hope that might help your character escape this. By the end, there is more here than there appeared as the experience leaves you with plenty to reflect upon in your own life.

Our examiner, Jo Robertson, first checked A Memoir Blue 10 months ago. It was re-examined by Rich Adams and updated 10 days ago.