written by Jih-Wei Peng
My first reaction to seeing a trailer for Bright Memory: Infinite was “Wait, the dev is calling THIS an indie game?” But indie game it is, as the whole thing is being developed by the one-man dev team FYQD-Studio, based out of China and it looks remarkably impressive, with AAA-level graphics and incredibly slick-looking gameplay.
Beginning life as a Steam early access title for the PC, the dev has since released what he had on Steam as a short teaser for the upcoming full-scale next-gen game for the Xbox Series X, along with PS5, PS4, Xbox One and Steam releases.
So what is the game actually about? Well…there’s this organization, called the Supernatural Science Research Division which has more advanced technology than the military (of which country, we know not), and they got their hands on these thousand-year-old swords, yeah, that have this weird substance at their core called the “Soul of Jiu Xuan,”, which can reanimate the dead, but then these terrorists called SAI uses this “Quantum Transporter” to teleport in and try to steal the swords, but then the player, a near-superhuman omni-talented member of an ultra-elite branch of SRO accidentally screws up the Transporter sending everyone in the room to a thousand-year-old lost flying continent near the North Pole, which is now full of undead corpses and and well…
Look, the story is flatout nonsense. This wasn’t much helped by the translation in the original Steam release, which was pretty janky though you get the impression that the original Chinese wasn’t that great either. This was a one man dev team, after all, and it’s unusual for someone to be highly talented as a programmer AND an artist AND a writer. But then again, the story is basically an excuse for “breathtaking fun and exciting action, such as navigating a spaceship that can travel through time, battling ancient samurai displaced from 1000 years ago to the present, and exploring a wormhole that has appeared on Earth,” in the dev’s own words I might add. After watching the gameplay trailers you can also add “holding a shootout on the wings of a pair of jet liners flying in close formation” as well. It’s all about the action sequences is what I’m saying here.
These, the dev has a much better handle on. Combat is all about juggling weapons and special abilities to keep up combos, shooting an undead suit of armor in the face from range with an assault rifle before grappling them closer to you and launching them into the sky with a force blast before jumping up yourself to slash away with a sword in mid-air and then landing to switch to your shotgun and unload another clip into their gently falling bodies.
When it works, it works very well as you glide from one foe to the next, facing off against terrorist troopers, Chinese mythological monsters, undead medieval warriors and possibly more in the final release. These are broken up from time to time by action sequences as well, platforming across the ruins with the grappling hook or sliding down a hill to escape a landslide, and in case the adrenaline starts becoming too much for you there’s more sedate puzzle sequences as well.
There’s currently no definite release date for Bright Memory: Infinite yet other than that it’ll be out sometime next year, but if you want to get a taste of what you have to look forward to and own a gaming PC, the original Bright Memory is available on Steam for $9.99. Give it try and give us your thoughts.