Memoirs is a narrative game in VR in which the player takes the role of a detective that has to solve a murder case.
With this project we wanted to approach something that wasn't very popular in VR games at the moment. We wanted to approach storytelling with the VR technology. But we did not just want to make a VR visual novel. We wanted the user to feel like she was playing.

The premise of the game was to situate the player in the centre of a crime mystery in a noir setting. The player has to look for clues in different scenes to solve the murder. But the game does not give the answer to the player. Are they in the right path or are they getting it all wrong? It is the player who has to put the pieces together and find the answers.

This created several challenges during the development of the game. The narrative of the game had to be not too complex so that it did not end up being tedious for the player, but also challenging and juicy enough that it made the mystery satisfying to solve. Both for time and scope reasons we did not rely on cinematic or scripted elements; instead we focused on environmental narrative. A big part of this development was spent on playtesting in order to tweak the narrative elements to achieve that spot where the player would have a satisfying experience solving the mystery.

This project was developed in collaboration with Niels Andreas Østman, Nikolaj Licht, Antony Nestor and Francesco Rugerfred Sedda.