Bright Memory: Infinite is Brief but Awesome

The first of the big Chinese indies is here, and it balances cultural design with genre trappings familiar to Westerners

The first-person shooter Bright Memory sent out some ripples when it launched in 2019. Developed primarily by a single person, this extremely short game — pitched as the introduction to an episodic title — hinted at something a lot bigger. The second part, dubbed Bright Memory: Infinite, has just dropped — did it live up to that promise?

Courtesy of the author

For those of you who missed it, Bright Memory places the player in the role of Shelia Tan, a heavily-armed futuristic paranormal investigator — a sort of Agent Scully meets Master Chief. Sent to investigate a new phenomenon, she instead encounters a rogue army (or perhaps a terrorist group, or whomever they’re supposed to be) and, after a brief firefight, all of them find themselves deposited in a strange new land swarming with monsters. The objective is simple — find a way out before something large and horrifying kills you. What can I say? No one played this game for the story.