Forgotton Anne

Good things: - the game is gorgeous. It has the best-looking 2.5D system I've seen, with smooth and natural depth transitions between 2D planes. The animation is very good, and there are plenty of small touches that show great care, such as the fact that the main character was animated by someone who obviously has worn skirts, and she interacts with her clothes in a natural way that makes them feel real. The hand-drawn parts blend in well with the "3D" parts of the world. - voice acting is mostly excellent. There's a wide variety of English dialects, and they're all pleasant to listen to. Very few lines were anything less than great - it's obviously a labour of love Mixed: - there's a lot to see and plenty of very dramatic choices, but in many places, the game actually railroads the player heavily and forbids approaches that were OK to take elsewhere Less than good: - the plot is painfully obvious. The big "twist" is foreshadowed within the first 5 minutes - the protagonist is aggressively dumb. Despite the hamfisted foreshadowing, she has no idea what's going on all the way till it hits her in the face, and even then doesn't seem to grasp it. She misses the most obvious clues, and generally behaves like a drunk child in the fog - that infuriating thing where you can choose what to say, but the choices presented have nothing to do with what your character actually says. Not the tone, not the content. A couple times the actual line spoken is the opposite of what the summary suggested - the puzzles are perfunctory, boring and unnecessary. There are only two types, and both are boring, with occasional one-off mechanics that were never introduced, are annoying to figure out, then never feature again - the platforming controls are meh at best Overall, despite the flaws, this is very promising first title, and I'll be looking out for whatever the studio releases next. With a bit of polish and experience gained on Forgotton Anne, they have the potential for greatness.

The title basically says it all. What we have here is a lovingly crafted game. The sheer amount of unnecessary side characters with mind-bogling diversity all specially animated and charaterized. Mechanically, the game itself is fairly light platforming mixed with light puzzling sprinkled with a small amount of choice and consequence. The story, while nice, is quite linear and fairly predictable if you have any awareness of this kind of narrative. Occasionally gets a bit preachy but mostly maintains a pleasant fairytale wibe. In fact no single aspect of the actual game stands out. But still the game manages to charm.

Forgotton Anne it's a very cute game, you will fall in love with everyone on Forgotten Lands! Visual art is stunning and the story really charming! Try it :D PS: Game is also in italian...

You can tell the devs had a story to tell and tried really hard to not make the gameplay overly intrusive or challenging for those who simply want to experience it. Unfortunately, they didn't entirely succeed. The experience is marred by uninspired puzzles and fiddly controls that get in the way of the narrative once too often. But the real bummer is that halfway through the story, the narrative itself starts to crumble under the weight of its predictable cliches and sloppy delivery. Some character beats are plain stupid (i.e. Anne's outburst at the beach) or painfully lame (like struggling to build Anne's emotional connection to a character we never heard of before) and made me lose interest in the characters' fates long before the dramatic final choice hit. Other dramatic beats just lack the punch that the authors intended and fall flat. At the end of the day, Forgotton Anne is a somewhat enjoyable affair carried by its charming premise and cute art style but brought down by unfitting gameplay and a lack of storytelling finesse.

This is a charming game with gorgeous anime like visuals and a simple plataform with some puzzles gameplay. The controls are not the best and even tough simple, the gameplay is enough to keep you going through the story wich is the main focus of the game. And the story starts great, giving you a different and original world and intriguing you from the very beggining. However it gets really bad near the end. In this case, i could handle the usual overused story cliches (emotional induced exmachina, abstract explanation for important things) but the ending soured it for me big time. It is unsatisfactory and bad explained.