Forgotlings

I discovered Forgotton Anne a year ago and really loved it. Forgotlings is a work of art just like Forgotton Anne was. Great quality voice acting, music, and the animation/scenery is so beautiful to look at. The platforming feels just like it did in Forgotton Anne. I don't play a lot of platformers but I am able to navigate without problems. I have no complaints about the controls. There is now combat but the game has story mode and normal mode depending on your preferences. Difficulty can be changed at anytime, so the game can be as easy or difficult as you want it to be. I had a few bugs where my character would get stuck on objects, but autosave is frequent enough that it never felt like an inconvenience. Overall, if you enjoy Forgotton Anne, I think you would enjoy Forgotlings. I can tell that a lot passion was poured into this game.

I'm pretty torn on forgotlings tbh, on the one hand you have a game with great worldbuilding, wonderfully voiced characters and beautiful audiovisual presentation. But on the other hand the gameplay is so cumbersome that actually playing the game isn't all that fun. Whether or not the game is worthwhile depends on what type of game you want as a player. I personally prefer metroidvania's with great gameplay, exploration and level design but i can be swayed with excellent atmosphere, audiovisuals and worldbuilding. Forgotlings isn't even a real metroidvania tbh but it isn't a game i regret playing. I am however a bit dissapointed by the potential it could have had if it was a proper MV with better gameplay. For starters the controls are VERY clunky and cumbersome, not only during platforming but especially during combat. You have a 3 hit attack combo and a parry but both lock you into the animation while enemies stun you out of everything. This is especially noticable when you are getting swarmed by enemies which happens when you get spotted during one of the many mediocre stealth sections. You do have a dodge roll that's marginally usefull to even the playing field. There's also two 'bosses' in the game, neither of which are fun to fight. You won't find more variety in the regular enemies either as there's not even 10 types in this 15+ hour game, none of which were fun to square up against. The platforming is only slightly more fun as the controls really work against you sometimes. If you jump while running your character will do a far jump which can sometimes get you killed. You 'think' you were at a standstill but not yet as the character retains a lot of momentum due to the animation style. Wall jumping is also really janky. The level design isn't that great either but it's hard to with such basic mechanics anyways. There was a nice twist though that had you move into the fore and backgrounds, creating multiple layers of playable space. This created a lot of depth and made the world more immersive but it did make exploration a bit confusing, especially without an ingame map. Speaking of exploration it felt VERY unrewarding as there's pretty much only 3 types of things to find, two of which are basically currency that's interchangable. The other one are pieces for your chess minigame that's really hyped up by the npc's but lacks real depth or strategy to make it fun to play. The enemy AI is also quite dumb and most npc's will only allow you to play if you bet currency which is finite since enemies don't drop it. You also just have to play a LOT of this throughout the game and by the end i got pretty tired of it, luckily you can make OP decks to force wins early but that got old as well. On a final note you have to play a LOT of matches if you want to get all the achievements. Since we're talking about achievements i'll have to add that there's A LOT of them and most of them are either missable or require multiple playthroughs. Their descriptions are pretty vague as well and since the game is very obscure there's no good info either. If you're a completionist don't pick this game up as there's also many points of no return which straight up don't allow you to finish up some game wide achievements. There was also one achievement i know of that was straight up bugged and didn't unlock even though it should have. It didn't completely ruin the experience but it did sour it a bit as i tried to be as thorough as possible while playing and still only unlocked a little over half of the achievements. I spoke to every npc i came across and wasn't rewarded for this with any achievement which felt a bit disingenous. I suppose that the reward were the conversations themselves which were often entertaining but at the same time took a lot of effort. I don't think i would exagerate if i said that HALF of my playtime was spent on dialogues with npcs. I've never played a game where there was this much talking, luckily the writing was good and voice acting mostly solid. The main cast is very good, the main character fig himself especially but some of the supporting cast are pretty mediocre like the bandits which all have the same unpleasant forced voice. All of these dialogues and cutscenes crafted a grand narrative that mostly stuck the landing. The worldbuilding felt awesome, especially all the different tribes with completely unique cultures but the story did suffer from pacing issues. The first act takes a while to get going and the second act of uniting the tribes is most of the game. The final act however felt really rushed and i didn't really like where some storylines went. I suppose it lacked a satisfying pay-off for all that hard work you do most of the game but the subversion of expectations has its own merits i guess. Still thought the characters are the real highlight and the crew of your own ship which you can talk while traveling between tribes was very fleshed out. The cutscenes were also wonderfully animated studio Ghibli esque visuals. Speaking of visuals they were absolutely stunning with super cool and unique environments that created a really unique and memorable world. Like i said the tribes felt unique in culture but also their locations were very distinct and memorable. Seeing all the sights & speaking to the unique characters was the main driving force for me but the accompanying music felt equally magical. It did cut off at times when playing but worked most of the time so I'll gladly listen to the OST some more now that i've beaten it. Finally there's the technical side of things, while the game did run well i did encounter some bugs but it's mostly pretty polished after all the patches. It's not a perfect game due to very flawed gameplay but it's carried by great worldbuilding, story and presentation.

I beat the game to completion and I'll say if you enjoyed Forgotton Anne, you'll definitely enjoy this one. However, as I got near the ending of the game, I started encountering glitches (such as the camera not being on the right scene, frame drops etc) and some choices that left a bad taste in my mouth. The game would autosave at the beginning of some hard encounters with my low hp where I had to basically go hitless or be very cautious. This made the difficulty very artificial. It didn't even feel challenging, just annoying. The good news is this can easily be fixed with an update. I ended up having to reset so many times to get through them. This made me almost want to quit the game because I just simply wasn't enjoying it anymore, but I pushed through to see the ending. The puzzles are good, but some of the timings are not very generous. With that said, the artstyle, music and story are the best parts of this game that make it shine. I like the way you make choices in this game and the combat isn't bad, but it's nothing mindblowing. My gripes with the game are not major, and they can easily be patched for further players to enjoy. Either way, I'm happy to have supported this game through Kickstarter :)

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.

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

[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]

An incredibly beautiful game and loving the story!

Первая часть была не без плюсов, но всё равно тогда она мне не понравилась. Вторая часть ровно такое же унылое уныние унылого уныния, уныние! Я настолько обессилен, что даже минусы расписывать не могу. Тут слабо всё. Дизайн местами не то что плох, его кое-где вообще нет! Такое редко увидишь даже в самых дилетантских инди. После прохождения понимаешь, что самая справедливая оценка этому геймплею — "не нужен". Он не нужен игре, не нужен игроку, не нужен разрабам, никому к чёрту не нужен. На момент написания отзыва у игры нет руководства по достижениям, а одно из прохождений на "Ютубе", которое обозначено как "фулл волксру", по итогу дропнуто автором за три часа до конца сюжетки. Геймплей здесь такой же забывчик, как и персонажи, воистину гениально. Из хорошего только визуал и музыка. Да, как и в первой части. Ну, ещё концовки внезапно ничего такие получились, если вообще узнать про тот факт, что они здесь есть. Единственное, зачем "Forgotlings" существуют, это в финале повлиять на сюжет "Forgotton Anne". Всё. Но готовы ли вы тратить на это своё время? Ну блин, эти люди просто не умеют делать игры. P.S. Те, у кого по 30-40 часов наиграно в отзывах. Что вы там делали?

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.