Remember Me - Mirror's Edge meets Ghost in the Shell, or a cut-price Watch Dogs?

Another trade show, another parade of sequels with slightly shinier weapons in - and another game which runs away with all the praise simply because we've never heard of it before. At Gamescom, it was Capcom's moment in the sun, with the debut of memory-hacking sci-fi adventure Remember Me.

Like Ubisoft's E3 hit Watch Dogs, it's an open world in which you'll engage in high-tech disruption. But this a grimmer and more futuristic vision: a Blade Runner-ified neo-Paris, in which a company called Memoreyes has fitted everybody with neural implants that can be used to control, edit or delete memories.

Unlike Watch Dogs, it isn't impossibly good-looking, and there's much shoe-shuffling and subject-changing from the PR rep when we ask if it's coming out on the next Xbox. This is definitely an Xbox 360 game, to the point of looking a tiny bit rough around the edges - although the rain-drenched neon-splattered metropolis is stylish enough to impress despite.

It's set in 2084 in a deliberate nod to George Orwell's 1984, and is centred around heroine Nilin, a former "Errorist" - well done, Capcom - who formerly worked as a rebel memory hunter. Having been captured and reformatted, she's now got to use her memory-hacking abilities to find out what happened and who she is. The demo we're shown reveals this to be done by a combination of Assassin's Creed-style wall-climbing and a radar-style vision mode used to detect enemies in the game world.

Hanging from a ledge, Nilin is able to wirelessly hack the memories of a passing guard to find the location of a local politician. A short scamper up a nearby office block and she's close enough to the mark to hack into his mind and start rearranging his grey matter.

This is done by a very stylish spawning of a specific event, in this case a row with his girlfriend, which first plays out as it really happened before winding back and giving you a handful of items to adjust. Nudge a bottle off a table and you trigger a different outcome in which she's threatened with a gun; wind back again to take the safety off and you pop back into the real world to see a man convinced he's killed his beloved. All it takes is an impending visit from security to tip him into suicide, removing an obstacle to Nilin's progress.

It's very smartly presented, if a little restrictive. There's only one solution to each problem, says creative director Jean-Maxime Moris, so it's less Hitman-style flexibility and more point-and-click trial-and-error. More elaborate puzzles will keep this fresh, we're told: "When you play the game for real you'll find that the puzzles are far more complex," he says, "and will require you to analyse the scene thoroughly before making a move."

Not quite as exciting as it looks, then, but it's a welcome change from the parade of square-chinned shooters. And while the dialogue is unlikely to trouble the history books (representative sample: "I'm a hunter! Why am I being hunted?"), the story can't help but hurry you along. Expect it to arrive in May, and us to have played it rather sooner.