Memory Lost is Looking to be a Decent, Yet Short Top-Down Shooter for the Steam Deck - Preview

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Memory Lost is a new action shooter from the Magic Hazard team. It uses a couple of unique gameplay mechanics and a story to drive the experience along. I got to play a preview of the game, which interestingly enough, had less content than the public demo that is currently available.

Memory Lost - Gameplay Impressions

Unfortunately, the preview I could play only contained the game's first level, while the public demo currently on offer allows you to play the first two levels. So, if you want to check Memory Lost out for yourself, I recommend testing the demo.

Memory Lost might look like any other top-down hack'n'slash game at first, but it has a couple of unique mechanics that help it stand out from the crowd.

Namely, rather than healing via first aid kits or pickups, you can possess the bodies of certain fallen enemies. Each time you do so, you'll replenish a small amount of health and gain that enemy's weapon and abilities. So you can defeat a strong enemy with a hammer, possess their body, and get that powerful slam attack you were just avoiding. Once that body has sustained damage, you can quickly switch to a nimble enemy with more martial arts-style attacks and use them instead.

While some of your abilities and stats depend on the body you're inhabiting, the game also has 5 skill trees that you can progress down, affecting your base stats like movement speed and defense. These skills, unfortunately, are the first hint you get that Memory Lost might be a little on the shorter side, as by the time you finish level 1, which is about 20-25 minutes long, you likely already have about 5 or 6 of the 25 upgrades unlocked.

The entire game is only slated to have 7 levels, and in the demo, you can beat the first 2 levels in about an hour, which does raise concerns that if you were skilled and avoided death, you could potentially beat the game in around 3 or 4 hours. The game does have multiple endings, but it remains to be seen whether they are different enough to warrant multiple playthroughs.

There are 3 difficulty settings available, but I struggled to feel the difference between them. I'm sure there are some changes, but Story is too difficult, and Nightmare is too easy for what they're supposed to represent right now.

The voice-acting also feels stilted and wooden. While the voice-acting talent seems pretty decent, the script they've been given isn't written very naturally, as the words don't flow as they should.

On a more positive note, the combat does feel pretty decent. You have a large variety of weapons at your disposal, from pistols to assault rifles, shotguns to hammers. These require you to switch up your playstyles constantly, as you don't know what weapon you'll be using next when you switch to a new body.

Memory Lost - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Memory Lost seems to work reasonably well on the Steam Deck. The controls work fine, the game supports 1280x800 resolution, so we get no black bars, and the performance is playable.

There aren't many graphical settings, just a Graphics Quality setting, that I'd recommend you set to "Low." Medium did present some drops below 30 FPS during intense scenes, while Low will mostly stick to 30 FPS throughout.

The power draw varied between 13W and 19W, depending on the action on-screen. So expect about 3 Hours or so of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and about 2 Hours from an LCD Model.

Final Thoughts

While I didn't experience much of Memory Lost, it has some interesting mechanics that work well. I fear for the game's length, as the first level in the preview can be completed in as little as 20 minutes, and the entire game is set to only contain 7 levels. So, I would estimate that this may only be a 4-5-hour game, but we shall see.

Performance on the Steam Deck is a little below what you would expect, with 30 FPS being the only stable framerate to target on low settings, but it is at least perfectly playable.

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