Summary

And that brings us to the close of our Memento exploration. We’ve covered a lot of ground here, but it’s for a good cause. Saving and restoring state snapshots is not only useful but crucial in almost any meaningful application or game. Without it, your users (and players) may feel like they don’t have any agency when it comes to making mistakes or being creative (for fear that they can’t spam the back button if they don’t like where they end up).

Remember, the Memento pattern works best when you need to save and restore internal state information without breaking an object’s encapsulation. The Originator class is responsible for creating and restoring Memento snapshots, your Memento is a storage-only class that mirrors whatever Originator data you want to save, and the Caretaker class stores and provides the current Memento on demand. You’re not limited to a single stored snapshot because the Caretaker class can be upgraded...