Forgotlings

Forgotton Anne (the previous game) got me hooked on the world. this game's gameplay is very different with more focus on combat

Very beautiful both visually and musically. Great voice acting, interesting story, and a good old school platforming with some twists.

I rarely write Steam reviews and, given I didn’t do one for their last game, I feel obligated to here because this is clearly a labour of love that undeservedly flew under the radar. I just want to say that I recognise the hard work the devs put into this. Here’s me doing my part to show appreciation for both the game and the devs. Spoilers ahead. So real quick to go into my background with this game, I played its previous entry, Forgotton Anne, in 2023. I loved it, and replaying it this year reaffirmed that ahead of Forgotlings, one of my most anticipated games of the year. Forgotton Anne was a strong Ghibli-inspired cinematic puzzle platformer with impressive production values for a studio of its size. The animation, lighting, voice acting and environmental detail all stood out, and it told a solid story with an okay ending. So when I heard about a potential sequel, I was excited. Forgotlings had me mixed before release though. Hearing it was a prequel focused on Fig was a little disappointing because I hoped it would expand on Forgotton Anne’s ending, which felt abrupt and unsatisfying regardless of which ending you got. I liked Fig as a character, I just wasn’t convinced a prequel would do much for me. After finishing it, I think I was half right and half wrong. Again, huge credit to the artists and animators. Everything looks fantastic and, like the previous game, the whole thing is voice acted. I don’t think the performances are quite as strong this time overall, but they’re still decent, and Fig’s actor especially did a great job. The music is fine, though I preferred Forgotton Anne’s soundtrack and art direction. While Forgotlings’ environments are detailed and varied, the setting itself feels less unique. Forgotton Anne felt like a bizarre Ghibli-esque world built around forgotten objects, whereas Forgotlings often feels like generic fantasy lands that just happen to contain them. Before I go into the gameplay, I need to address the elephant in the room: this is one of the buggiest games I’ve played in years. Credit to the devs for actively patching things, but damn man, it was rough lol. I got softlocked early on and literally couldn’t progress until reporting it. The devs responded within a week and fixed it a week after that, but there were still plenty of bugs after that, like Fig disappearing, the camera freaking out, etc. Thankfully “Load Last Save” option in the menu usually fixed things and checkpoints are generous, but the frequency of issues was definitely distracting. Gameplay shifts more toward action-adventure. I wouldn’t call it a Metroidvania since progression is fairly linear and optional backtracking mostly just rewards currency or board game stones. That’s not a negative though; the game’s structure still works well. Areas are open enough to explore without becoming confusing, and the physical drawn maps are surprisingly effective to navigate with, even without an in-game map you can call on standby. Major props to the designers there. The story revolves around uniting scattered tribes to stop a prophesied beast wreaking havoc across the world. Each area follows a a gameplay loop of... interacting with the denizens of that land's tribe and play INA, clear dungeon-like sections where you fight bandits and do some light puzzle platforming and so on. I think the game paces all of these really well. I’d recommend doing the Falls area first because you get an air dash. That was one of the last upgrades I got though since I did Shelter Island first lol. Where Forgotlings struggles most for me is its move to the action-adventure genre. Forgotton Anne’s slightly awkward movement never bothered me because it was slower paced and puzzle focused. Here though, Fig feels stiff and awkward to control, so jumps never quite feel right. Combat is also underwhelming thanks to limited enemy variety, awkward controls and strange button mappings. I eventually switched to Story mode because I simply wasn’t enjoying the combat and wanted it over with. Outside of the exploring and combat, you can interact with NPC's and the game lets you pick between four responses that all still feel like something Fig would say. There’s also INA, a board game inspired by Chess and Go, which I genuinely enjoyed and appreciated as a pacing break. One thing I can really credit Forgotlings for is pacing overall. Areas rarely overstay their welcome and I regularly played for hours at a time without realising. Once combat stopped being a chore on Story mode, the gameplay flow became much smoother. Unfortunately, the story itself is where things started to drag. Forgotton Anne’s endings left me wanting more, and the marketing for Forgotlings implied this game might address that despite being a prequel. It sort of does, but also doesn't. Most of the story is instead about uniting tribes, solving local conflicts and finding purpose when we've lost it all, and I just didn’t find that side of things very compelling after the first island because it was the same song and dance each and every time. Eventually, I just started fast forwarding dialogue because it all began blending together. The forgotten-object world felt more grounded and engaging through Anne’s perspective as a human in the first game than it does here, where it's just kind of the norm. What did interest me was all the stuff that ties into Forgotton Anne. You meet Bonku in the final city, and between chapters Fig experiences visions involving Anne as a child referencing events from the first game, memories Fig obviously doesn't have since he hasn't gone through all of that jargon yet. But because this is a prequel, Fig ultimately has no agency in changing that fate since the main story has nothing to do with that and is more of an addition that serves to throw a bone. The ending is where things became especially mixed for me. If you lose the final battle, it simply leads into Forgotton Anne. If you win, it somehow changes future events entirely. Anne is shown living happily in the human world instead of entering the forgotten realm at all. While I liked seeing Anne get a happier ending, it didn’t really feel like changing fate so much as creating an alternate universe. I never understood how the events logically connected, and it also sidesteps questions I still had from Forgotton Anne: why Anne became a forgotling, who her mother was, why she abandoned her, etc. So instead of feeling like Anne herself was saved from tragedy, it felt more like this was simply a different Anne altogether. It reminded me a lot of Stone Ocean, or more recently, Chainsaw Man. I left finishing Forgotlings feeling very mixed. As a companion piece to Forgotton Anne, I don’t think it fully sticks the landing. As a standalone game, the bugs, the uninteresting main story and janky gameplay hold it back. At the same time though, I still had a genuinely good time with it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have put 14 hours into it within a week and a half, I usually burn out of sessions within an hour or two unless it's a JRPG, this game has great pacing. I came away overall positive and feeling my time wasn’t wasted. It's upsetting that thigs game flew under the radar, especially since I think the shift to an oversatured genre in the indie-sphere did it no favours, especially when it doesn't stand out from its contemporaries on the gameplay front. Despite how negative this comes across, I still do recommend this especially if you played their last game. I want to see this as a step into what they do next if they do something next. When that happens, I'll be there day one. That being said I think Forgotlings is still worth your time which is why I can still recommend it despite its issues.

Even though Forgotlings has beautiful graphics, a great story, and well-written dialogue, I’m tired of games that lock you into a single current save. If you want to see an alternative outcome, you have to replay the entire game from the beginning. I don’t enjoy this kind of gameplay where I’m basically just a passive observer forced to accept random events or conditions with no chance to retry or explore different choices in the moment like in normal story-driven games. Because of that, I give this game a 1/10.

[h1] 被遗忘世界里的温柔回响 [/h1] 本作是由Throughline Games开发的手绘风格横版动作冒险游戏，说起Throughline Games，大伙可能也不熟悉这是哪个制作组，但提起《被遗忘的安妮》，部分对手绘美术风格特别喜爱的玩家就有可能了解了。而本作正是《被遗忘的安妮》同世界观下的正统续作。 本作保持了《被遗忘的安妮》同等高水准的充满童趣的角色与惊艳的纯手绘美术场景设计，吉卜力的画面风格清晰可见，并且本作在游戏实机操作与过场动画之间切换得极为丝滑，这也正是纯手绘制作的游戏的独特魅力。 在游戏内容方面，本作虽然是横版动作冒险游戏，但实际上是更偏向于剧情向的游戏，在游戏中玩家将要探索这个由被遗弃的日常物品 “活过来” 组成的世界，游戏本身的叙事体量非常庞大，流程的中对话与配音水平都是一流水平。本作虽然是更加侧重画面与剧情的游戏，但在游戏性方面本作也没有偷工减料，本作的平台跳跃、战斗、潜行玩法方面都有非常充足的内容，还有独特的棋类玩法可供钻研，丰富的收集品可供玩家寻找，本作很好地做到了剧情和游戏性两手抓。 但要说本作不足的地方，也还是有的。首当其冲的就是本作的操作手感问题，本作在角色转向以及跳跃的时候，操作粘滞感特别强，虽然本作并不以战斗作为核心内容，但在平台跳跃的过程中，糟糕的手感还是非常影响游戏体验。而另一个比较大的问题是游戏的字幕问题，本作的字幕与英语语音对轴没有对好，经常出现蜜汁断句以及后半段话一瞬间就消失的情况，对于英语不好的玩家来说，很容易出现对话只能看完整半句话，后半句话因为字幕问题直接被跳过看不懂剧情。 [quote] 关注[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44791929/]游戏好声音[/url]，认真品味好游戏，倾听游戏好声音。 [/quote]

Backed this game on Kickstarter and had high hopes for it. And I was not disappointed. It's an interesting shift from Forgotton Anne - instead of binary dialogue choices we get four, and there's a lot more combat (which makes sense). But it's still the same charming world of objects, the same strange place where you talk to a quill pen or a chess piece like it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You've met Anne, you've seen Fig through her eyes. Now get to know Fig and learn his story.

Entrañable mundo que han creado los desarrolladores con exquisita animación, mucho amor y originalidad.

Such a beautiful and charming game. It feels like a fantastic animated movie. Its so refreshing to see high quality, uniquely hand crafted games like this still exist. GG!