My Memory of Us

Publisher: IMGN.PRO · Studio: Juggler Games · Creator: Pawel Miechowski, Mikolaj Pawlowski

Anecdote

Designed by Polish studio Juggler Games under the direction of Łukasz Janczuk and published by IMGN.PRO in October 2018, My Memory of Us tells the story of a friendship between two children in a fairytale Warsaw gradually invaded by an allegorical mechanical occupier. The title, narrated by the voice of Patrick Stewart in the English version and by Jean-Pierre Cassel in French, belongs to the tradition of the fable established by The Thief and the Cobbler and La Vita è bella. Writer Jakub Jabłoński wanted to pay tribute to the memory of his own grandmother, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, by transposing the story into a fairy-tale grammar that makes the horror accessible to a family audience without distorting it. The boy is depicted in black and grey, the girl in scarlet red — a colour that will later be identified by the robot soldiers as a star to be sewn on — and together they traverse a Warsaw filled with escape puzzles, chase sequences, stealth sections and platforming segments. Art director Tomasz Wacław Gop, a veteran of The Witcher 2, delivers a visual grammar inspired by the illustrations of Roman Cieślewicz and Polish cinema posters of the 1950s. A full playthrough lasts between four and six hours. The soundtrack by composer Mikołaj Stroiński, already known for his contributions to The Witcher 3, blends cello, piano and klezmer clarinet to underline the emotional dimension. The game spawned a second edition entitled My Memory of Us: Definitive Edition and has been used in several European educational programmes devoted to the Shoah. It remains a rare work that succeeds in combining family entertainment with memorial testimony.