Memory Keeper Review (PC)

Tis’ the season to cloak yourself in a warm and cozy atmospherical pocket of radiant light and seasonal baubles, anti-strenuous activities and candlelit nights. It’s that time of year again—a festive period during which emotionally taxing city-building games à la Civilization take a back seat and wholesome favorites sprout out to counter the autumn woes. Memory Keeper, too, finds itself on the aforementioned wheel of cozy suite-shuffling sandboxes, with a cauldron of customizable interior elements and a trove of seasonal set pieces to keep fledgling collectors storing palm-sized snapshots and embellishing petite worlds for hours.

In a similar vein as, say, Camper Van: Make It Home, Memory Keeper chooses to bypass the act of grafting and indulging in seemingly endless pursuits for global domination and opts for the route less traveled. To counter the monotony of relentlessly trying to find stable ground in a chaotic civilization, the game brings an easier road to ascension, with as little as a colorful toolkit of moldable materials and a snapshot of a cozy workspace to keep you company over a short but sweet creative collaborative adventure.

To put it out there, you have seen this sort of thing a couple of times before. Scratch that, you’ve probably seen it hundreds of times before, most likely in the quaint boroughs of Organized Inside, or the cozy cubbies of Unpacking. Surely, if you can picture either of those two indie organizing sims, then you shouldn’t find it to be too difficult to imagine the walls on which Memory Keeper illustrates its ideologies. It’s the same deal, with a collection of vacant rooms, and a plethora of decorations and other apt set pieces that you can implement, customize, and tailor to suit your homely desires.

Suffice it to say that, if you have spent just a smidgen of time fleshing out the quaint borders of a bite-sized virtual suite before, then you probably won’t struggle to wrap your head around the ins and outs of Memory Keeper. From a gameplay point of view, it’s vaguely reminiscent of what you would have seen in alternate iterations. Surprise surprise, there is a conveyor belt of furniture to comb over, and there are several hand-holding features that effectively allow you to create your own ornamental dioramas without having to fret about time constraints, overarching objectives, or win criteria. In other words, you ought to feel right at home with it, even if you lack the skills, thankfully.

As Cozy As Can Be

There isn’t a goal for you to accomplish here, but a custom feat that only you and you alone can achieve with whatever assets you choose to add to the canvas. With no tilts of an hourglass to concern yourself with, Memory Keeper makes it so that you have all of the time in the world to perfect your dioramas. Does it cough up a special perk once you finalize the design and add all of those extra juicy details? Not really, no. Instead, it gives you the option to add the finished piece to a rolling portfolio of creative artworks, after which it offers you the chance to transport your creative wisdom to yet another cubby to, well, do it all over again, but in a different setting. It isn’t much, but it gets the job done. Well, sort of.

Memory Keeper falls into a purgatory of coziness—at the intersection of a jury that fosters vastly different interpretations of the word. As it doesn’t tout much of a challenge or a puzzling predicament for you to beat, it’s hard to imagine that competitive spirits will get a kick out of swapping an extensive docket of chores for a one-track ordeal that holds your hand throughout the duration of the journey. What’s more, as it doesn’t give you too many opportunities to sharpen your skills with a plethora of tools or settings, it might just fall short of a genuinely alluring decorating job for a small chunk of its target clientele.

Memories of You

To say that a lack of a challenge is a bad thing just wouldn’t be fair nor true, mind you. Oh, Memory Keeper does make for a surprisingly therapeutic experience, with its vast collection of memories and pivotal insights into a voiceless protagonist’s journey through the ages formulating a sturdy backbone for a pleasant ode to the likes of Unpacking and other sentimental adventures. It doesn’t always hit its mark, and it so very rarely finds a good reason to keep you coming back for a quick revisal of your work. That said, with a hearty batch of familiar locations available for you to customize and make your own, it does ensure that you have something to dabble in.

The bad news here is that, despite there being a good scale to work with, Memory Keeper does have a lot of issues. For starters, you cannot simply add items to a room, unless you spend a concerning amount of time trying to figure out how to rotate, rearrange, and slot them where you want them to go. That, along with some poor optimization and sloppy orientation, sadly, makes it so that accomplishing even the smallest tasks can be awfully difficult and tedious. Don’t get me wrong, you can still create fantastic workspaces, but with a confusing catalog of alphabetical set pieces and a ton of questionably meaningless icons, it can also be rather difficult to truly enjoy.

Verdict

Memory Keeper is about as warm and as wholesome as a box-sized diorama of homely comforts, with its simple yet elegant toolkit and UI offering just enough slack to keep you cozied up in its clutches for hours. Granted, it doesn’t do anything particularly special to overthrow its adversaries’ cubby-centric sandboxes, though it does make good use of its resources to create a long-lasting memoir that feels surprisingly good to paint and play with. That is, if you can gloss over the worrying amount of technical bugs and finicky details that it harbors. If those were to be removed, then sure, I’d say that Memory Keeper would make for a fitting love letter to Unpacking and the likes.