Ambition in games is always usually centred around the bold. In the case of 11-11: Memories Retold -- the first game from Aardman Animation (with DigixArt), there’s certainly a grand sense of the bold. Here’s a game that plays out around the first world war, where not a single weapon is fired by either of the game’s two protagonists: Harry -- a budding young photographer from Canada who is obsessed with a girl, and thusly signs up in an effort to impress her as a “man in uniform”. And Kurt -- a German technician working at a zeppelin factory who signs up after learning his son’s unit has been attacked. His only goal is to learn the fate of his boy.

The game plays out as a third-person adventure game where you’ll control the two main characters in chapterised form. At a given moment -- worlds apart -- their stories draw ever-closer together and you must work to effectively unite them by playing out their respective stories, each of which highlights a unique aspect of not just war, but on a person’s journey to war.



It’s an incredibly remarkable concept from a gaming perspective, and it’s one the studio’s felt would be even more impactful with a unique painterly style of visual presentation -- a sort of “moving painting”. Problematically, for mine, this is more a distraction and presents as a basic camera app filter than as a moving visual representation of the period, or of the drama Harry and Kurt face. It could well have been better handled if it wasn’t such a broad stroke, so to speak, as nuance and detail is lost in its dancing, colourful strokes. Honestly, it could have had the impact they were hoping for with some refinement, or if each chapter or new location perhaps represented a different art style, as opposed to the straight-up impressionist angle that plays throughout.

Thankfully it’s not an all out distraction, as the game’s audio presentation -- specifically in VO thanks to Elijah Wood’s portrayal of Harry, and Sebastian Koch as Kurt -- is fantastic. Both characters are wonderfully written and their plights are equally driving given the personal nature of them. There’s no ‘heroics’ here to speak of. Just raw human emotion as portrayed around events largely out of a single person’s control. The folly of war and how it impacts on deeper levels over a ubiquitous concept of ‘good versus evil’ permeates the experience, and we’re better for having this game out in the wild, offsetting the larger conflict marketplace as dominated by games touting big guns, and bigger explosions as selling points.



Don’t get me wrong, as both entertainment and art, there’s room for both in our medium and it’s excellent to see such disparate entities co-existing because they can and because they should.

What breaks the mold here is that 11-11: Memories Retold suffers from limited gameplay, and therefore visceral impact. Puzzles are often awkward due to the clunky animations of both characters. And it’s a heavily-directed piece that really only offers choice by way of conversation, or through the letters you help dictate to Kurt to send back home to his family. Different endings will play out based on a number of decisions and interactions, but agency is lost in the game’s penchant for overreaching on its artistry. And that might be a failed statement to some, after all art, and meaning in art, is in the eye of the beholder, but in 11-11: Memories Retold it becomes a bit too much, largely because it doesn’t do enough where gameplay is concerned.



There is poignancy here, and if you’re the sort of person interested in the first world war or in period drama, the writing in 11-11: Memories Retold is difficult not to recommend. But we play games for more than just writing, and while on that sentiment alone it could be suggested this should have been a standalone, non-interactive story detailing the dovetail of two disparate characters and their respective plights, the game and both studios ought to be applauded for taking on an ambitious concept. It’s just that through their bold decision to overdo it on the presentation front (or at least not refine it, or differentiate it chapter to chapter -- a missed opportunity in my book), the larger issue in regards to gameplay and how limited it is, jumps off the canvas.

11-11: Memories Retold, however, is still a game worth more than a look-in, and at roughly five-to-six hours, you’ll gain a deep and respectful look at one of the world’s most jarring global conflicts, from the perspectives of the individual.