Forgotton Anne

Overall worth to play if you can get it during a sale. I'm impressed with what the developers wanted to create. The world is beautifully designed and comes alive with many neat details, such as overheard conversations through windows or stray NPCs with interesting dialogue. The game gives you many chances to make various choices that will impact the gameplay as well as the ending. The main problems are how poor the puzzle design is. Often the puzzles are so simple it's just boring. I'd prefer to once in a while have a challenging puzzle to have simple puzzles all over the place. Movement is far from flawless but as this is not a very platformy game it doesn't matter too much. Some parts are a bit drawn out or even cringy. First hour or so is a bit dull. It gets better eventually. Overall, good for relaxing a bit and enjoying the environments.

This game is a puzzle platformer and plays similar to the old school Prince of Persia and Abe games. The controls are not bad at all especially if you were accustomed to those type of games. While the puzzles are satisfying they are not very challenging overall. Just note that this is not a fast pace smooth flowing platformer like say, Ori of the blind forest. The graphics and animations are beautiful, just like one would expect of a studio ghibli film, however I did find that the backgrounds were a bit static in comparison but definitely a non issue. There are points in the game where you are forced to make a decision and that decision can affect certain scenario interactions with characters. There are only 2 endings in the game with one being rather dissapointing. This is my only gripe with the game as I thought that decisions should have had a much greater impact on the overall story and expanded into multiple endings being that it is a primarily story focused game. Still this really felt like playing out a studio ghibli film in video game format. It is a bit on the short side and can be completed in one day or on one playthrough. My initial playthrough took somewhere around 6-7 hours I believe. I highly recommend going into this without any knowledge of the story besides what is given in the trailer to get the best experience out of it.

I liked Forgotton Anne's overall world setting the most. The highlights of the game are its animation and sound/music design with some decent voice acting. The story is a bit cliche, but it works. The puzzles aren't terribly challenging, and the controls aren't as precise as I would have liked. All in all, I had a pleasant time with the game, but it's not exactly something I'd suggest for anyone's must-play list.

Short review: The aesthetics of Ghibli, the platforming of Prince of Persia, the puzzles of.....Beyond Two Souls? (closest I could think of) with weighty RPG elements. Only a few hours of playtime but enjoyable and obviously had lots of care put into it. Long review: This is a game that tells a story. It is a simple story but it is told well. Its action is kind of "slow" and ponderous and I realize not everyone will like that, but I'm also a sucker for "forgottenness" as a plot point so I jumped right in. Creative direction is what stands out the most to me here. It's not just that the art is technically good (it is), but the cohesiveness of all the game's elements - art, music, lighting, writing, voice acting - all combines to tell this story beautifully. There are all sorts of little artistic flourishes that give extra life to the world - characters acting out their lives in the scenery, machinery running, lights coming on in houses, etc. Much of this is diagenic as well - for example Anne may overhear two characters talking in the background, and they will see her coming and react to her presence, and it all conveys story to you. Some of the writing is a bit on-the-nose ("I can't wait to go back to Ether!" "Yeah, me too!") but generally it's very good at being informative while maintaining subtext. Dialog choices are not just cursory but often decide life or death for various in-game characters. Though gameplay happens on a 2D environment, there's a plane-shifting mechanic that is executed incredibly well to give depth - up and down stairs, down an alley, around the back of a building, all intuitively and seamlessly. Mechanically there are a few problems. I played on a Dualshock 4 and the game couldn't decide if it was an Xbox controller or not. Some things didn't translate well to joystick (the pin sliding puzzles, dialing the rotary phone) and felt a bit clunky. At one point (the white fog) I wasn't sure what to do at all for a while. Worth the price.

Remember back when CDs unlocked the possibilities of playing large high-quality media assets like video files and voice acting that didn't look and sound like garbage because they had the space to store them at higher fidelity, but the developers spent so much of their budget on that side of the game that the actual mecahnics were very rudimentary and most of the challenges were a pushover? Forgotton Anne is this kind of game and is best described as "The first Prince of Persia game ever made mixed with a classic point and click adventure but paced like a Japanese game developer collaborated with an animation studio to feel like you're watching a series of episodes of an anime season." What makes this game stand out from the rest though is they make the sprites sell the performance instead of relying on large 2D illustrations with visual novel-esque dialog boxes covering everything on the screen, and the camera will zoom in on said sprites if they need to provide emphasis. The dialog text is also deliberately designed to invoke the subtitle styles most anime used during the 90s to really sell you that you're watching an anime. If you're like me and love this kind of stuff, it's a no brainer. Otherwise, don't bother. But apparently people like us who love it seem to have all of the money considering how much you're you're going to have to pay for a physical copy of this game for some reason.