• Price: $11.99 USD
• Developer/Publisher: Goca Games
• Release Date: February 15, 2024 (NA); February 22 (EU/JP)

A review code was kindly provided by Goca Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

“Your Town, Your Memory!”

I always like to check out games with interesting ideas behind them, and Membal caught my attention for a few reasons. I was first drawn by the cute and colorful animal characters, and then the concept. It’s a memory game/village-building experience that was touchingly dedicated to the developer’s late aunt, who inspired this idea after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Arriving in Membal, you’re told that your objective is to rebuild the town and attract new residents. You earn funds to unlock new neighbors, decor, outfits, and hairstyles by playing memory games on your (in-game) phone. I like how we can control the mini games with either the joystick or the touchscreen.

There are 5 levels to each memory app that you unlock; you unlock the next levels by successfully completing the prior level a certain number of times. Each game starts with a much lower difficulty level and becomes progressively harder with more things to remember as you play the harder levels. The higher levels provide you with more money, but if you have trouble with them you can always choose to play the lower levels for less money.

I really appreciated the effort put into including a variety of memory games into this. I’m generally not so good at remembering strings of numbers as long as the ones in level 5, for example, so I was able to play other games that focused less on numbers to earn the funds I needed. I did wish that the game was a bit more lenient with mistakes; the tarot card matching game gives three opportunities for you to make mistakes, but the rest of the games don’t let you make even one.

However, it was nice that there weren’t any timers, as that could have made it easier for players to make mistakes under pressure. Most of the memory games weren’t extremely difficult for me, but they also didn’t make it too easy.

One game has you remember fruits in different colors and shapes for one level, and the next level changes things up by using bugs instead. And if you make mistakes, the game doesn’t give you the same items to memorize the next time. This prevents you from getting complacent with the memorization.

Some of the games were better than others, although player experiences will vary depending on their style preferences. There are more than 25 game options to unlock. Most of them involve remembering items right away, but there are some interesting ones that force you to remember an object 24 hours later!

The excavation game confused me at first because they ask you to remember an item but they’re all hidden under piles of sand. I figured out that you need to remember the color of the item and see which sand pile has sparkles coming out of it in that color. There were also two color wheel games that seemed almost exactly the same to me. Other than those three games, I was satisfied with the overall variety and quality of the memory apps.

The gameplay loop involves you paying for new neighbors to move in, and completing a memory game request for each resident upon arrival. (Each villager has only one request.) You’ll receive diamonds for helping them with their request, which can be used to construct new facilities in Membal. When you speak to a character after finishing their memory game, they’ll often reward you with a new decoration, hair style, outfit, or phone background.

With each new facility, residents from new “guilds”/animal categories become available for you to unlock by spending your hard-earned coins. You can bring more than 140 animals to Membal. I was a little disappointed that while we can build apartment buildings for the residents, and we have our own house, we can’t enter any of the buildings. I probably would have liked to have seen how the animals would have decorated the interior of their own homes, but in fairness this was created by a solo developer.

Although we can’t decorate inside of our own house either, we can still decorate the outdoor areas. I especially loved the aquarium-themed items (as well as the marine animal characters we can bring to Membal). There’s a decent variety of unlockable decor options available in the shopping app.

The clothes and hairstyles are a bit more limited, but I like how colorful everything is. From what I could tell, each hairstyle can only be worn in the color it comes in, and there aren’t any options to dye it? More varied facial features also would have been nice. But you can at least choose your character’s skin tone.

Overall, it’s a cute, wholesome village builder with a decent selection of memory games. Personally I really like the aesthetic, and the music is soothing. As I’m not a doctor, I can’t speak to the medical/scientific aspects of the memory games, but they did get me to use some of my usual strategies like grouping things together and singing to remember each item.

Some elements could have been more expansive, but I like that Membal has achievements, and there are apparently some special characters who will appear during certain holidays. That – and the memory games themselves – could help make this game something to come back to every once in a while even after you’ve completed most of the “main game.”