The game was free for owners of Bright Memory.

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This review contains no major story spoilers.

Bright Memory: Infinite is the quasi-reboot of the now-cancelled Bright Memory and shares a lot with that game but also deviates strongly in other aspects. Comparisons are somewhat inevitable. Find my review for it here.

The game works perfectly well on both mouse + keyboard and controller.

Bright Memory: Infinite is a visceral, fast-paced first-person shooter with some added mechanics, including melee combat, a deflect/parry mechanic, upgradeable skills, and a grappling hook that is sadly only used in fixed places for linear traversal. Combat encounters in this game are extremely smooth, brutal and weighty, and it's satisfying to deflect an enemy's bullets back to them, parry the melee strike of another one and then slice through both with the blade, severing limbs in the process.

The gun-play is serviceable, if not nearly as fun as creatively combining the different skills. While the sniper rifle can satisfyingly dispose of enemies with one well-aimed shot, the other guns, specifically the shotgun, feel like they lack punch, making some enemies feel a bit bullet-spongey. On the other hand, the aiming, recoil, reloading, as well as their animations are all well made. This is a decent shooter elevated higher by its added skills and melee. However, many skills from Bright Memory, like the Light Forcefield, the Time Freeze bubble and others are gone, as is the Style meter that encouraged a varied play-style. Additionally, reliquaries now serve a purpose but all look the same and cannot be inspected any more.

There are some sections that play differently, like driving a car or being forced to be stealthy, so there is some variety here.

Sadly, the game is extremely easy (with the exception of a certain boss encounter), which isn't helped by the highest difficulty setting, "Hell", being locked away.
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717803273


You play as Shelia Tan, a young, female operative for a futuristic government organization, who is sent to investigate and, if possible, stop a strange phenomenon, a miniature black hole, that threatens to end the world. Additionally, she is to pursue a man named General Lin, whom we (including Shelia) know very little about, aside from him being the leader of a sinister organization. Both Shelia, the average tough female protagonist, and the elusive General Lin lack any character depth or story arc.

While the story, despite having a decent premise, is somewhat generic and underdeveloped, and mainly serves as a vehicle to get you to the action set-pieces, it is told in a competent way, with fully-voiced dialogues and well-animated cutscenes. While parts of Bright Memory can still be spotted in there, that game put a much stronger focus on the relationship between Shelia and the antagonist Carter, whom Lin clearly replaces in this game. In Bright Memory, the pursuit of Carter felt much more personal, especially since the story starts with him infiltrating the base of Shelia's organization. Another antagonist gets introduced fairly early on, who seems somewhat enigmatic at first but also turns out to be shallow.

It's also a bit of a shame that the cliffhanger of the first game never got resolved. Overall, despite this game being more gorgeous and technologically impressive, as well as playing more smoothly, the first attempt's story intrigued me more. It also made more sense for Shelia to be on her own in that one, as she got sucked through a portal by accident. Here, with the world at stake, the SRO only sending out solo operatives to try and save it seems implausible, and nobody else seems to care enough to contribute. I expected more and was a bit underwhelmed when it was over.
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2718274785


This game is nothing if not gorgeous! From tessellation and reflections to advanced weather effects, particles, high-resolution textures and life-like animations and models, Bright Memory: Infinite is a visual achievement that can easily compete with any "AAA" game of our time. Rain, light, blood, fog, autumn leaves, fire and smoke all look breathtakingly good, and only tiny details fall flat upon closer inspection, as lights in the distance that look like small settlements or towns turn out to just be dots of light when viewed through a scope.
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717431129

The game's sound design is pretty great as well, as is the voice acting, which features an all-new cast, with the only outlier being General Lin, whose voice (audible in the trailer) sounds a little underwhelming and almost comical. Bright Memory's Carter sounded quite a bit more intimidating. The soundtrack is nothing too special, but works well enough with the game.


Even with RTX set to "High", the game mostly runs smoothly on my hardware, with only few temporary frame-drops that don't last long. It's not ideal, but there are enough settings to play around with, as well as an DirectX 11 mode (without RTX) to make the game run buttersmooth. Given the visuals and the fact that my GPU isn't the newest model, I expected the performance to be worse, though it could also be better.

Tested with the following setup:

🔀 Supports [Alt]+[Tab]: Excellently

Business Model

"Cosmetics only":
Buy the game, play the game, buy cosmetic changes.
There are paid skins for both Shelia and each weapon but no "micro"-transactions.

While Bright Memory: Infinite certainly is an ambitious project for the one person who made it and a technical achievement in many ways, I'm having a hard time recommending it at full price. The pretty visuals and great action aren't quite enough to justify the price, for a game that can be cleared in roughly three hours, only has the bare skeleton of a story and offers little replay value aside from getting all achievements and unlocking the non-DLC skins. Unlocking everything there is, playing the entire game on three difficulties and extensively in both DirectX versions to test them took me a mere ten hours.

While those ten hours were fun for the most part, it feels more like a glorified tech demo than a full game. One last thing I want to point out is that, while it was nice of the developer to hand the game out for free for owners of Bright Memory, that game is still being sold, even though it's technically a demo. In my opinion the right move would have been to include Bright Memory with purchases of this game. That way owners of the first one would still have saved some money, but new customers would get a bit more for their money.

Ultimately, I'd give this a neutral rating if Steam would let me.

Follow the Devils in the Detail for infinite bright memories.