Remembrance is a straightforward game, and delivers its premise well: your mother is dead, and you only have room to take one keepsake with you. It walks you through the various options, the significance that they hold for you, though what exactly your mother had intended when passing them along- you can only speculate on. Fragments of your life bubble up in recall as you handle them, trying to make what feels like an impossible decision.
Ultimately, any of them will serve their intended function just fine, but the lingering questions that you will never quite know the answer to- what did your mother mean to impart with each gift? What were her expectations wound up in them- on how they would be used, on the kind of person you would become if you lived up to them or not? How would things differ, if you had made a different choice?
Does any of it matter? Does it really matter if you’re tormenting yourself with the what-ifs and could-bes, if ultimately, she’s still dead? Even from beyond the grave, she picks and picks and picks at your confidence, your ability to trust in yourself: that no matter how badly things go, you will persist: that if you fuck up, at least the mistakes were yours to make, alone.
That powerful sense of ownership is precariously in the balance, as the protagonist grapples with a profound disconnect between their mother and themselves: struggling to even know in what image their mother would have had them made, if they have the capacity to even strive towards it- or if they were always doomed to disappoint her, even in her funerary rites.
The protagonist is alone- left only with the phantom of her mother’s words haunting them, the snarled threads of their relationship to in turn fuss and nitpick over, trying desperately to find answers when there are none: whatever did exist, died with their mother. Whatever relationship they had, or might have had: it’s all over, now. What’s been said and been done has come to pass.
They have to live with the aftermath now: it’s all up to them, profoundly alone- and yet free, of the weight of the complexities of their maternal relationship. There is still life to live, once the immediacy of grief isn’t quite as crushing. They can still figure out the kind of person they want to be, and already are.
The game ends on what is ultimately a hopeful note, and it felt like a really beautiful tie to end the story. Whatever comes, the protagonist is ready, even if they’re still unsure if they really are. Science fiction is, to me, often at its best, when it abstracts the everyday far enough away from our experiences so that we’re able to confront it without reflexively shying away. A little distance makes it easier to face. The story is constructed with all the usual expectations- space travel, space ships, but ultimately, is a story about a very human, fraught relationship, and the future the protagonist is moving towards. Very bittersweet. Well worth a play.