Ah, Alice in Wonderland. The tale of a small girl with a big imagination transported to a magical world full of strange creatures. Today’s game is a narrative adventure similar in concept, but makes the bold choice of turning Alice into a militant soul-sucking embodiment of corruption and surveillance. 

A unique take to be sure, and an intriguing one at that. Luckily I have some friends here to help make sense of it all. So let’s dive into the rabbit hole and take a look at... Forgotton Anne.

The world of Forgotton Anne is one that’s been seen before, but is nevertheless a cool concept- a universe where all things go after being lost or forgotten and come to life. Socks, lamps, guns, you name it. Any item that gets left behind is transported to this world and turned into a forgotling.

At the center of the story is Anne. A young human woman trapped in the forgotling world along with her master, Bonku. Her role is to enforce the rules and regulations Bonku put in place in order to keep work on a bridge to the real world consistent and on-schedule.

On her wrist is the arca, a device used to control anima, the aura that keeps forgotlings alive. Anne uses the arca both as a tool to control various pieces of machinery and as a weapon to drain aggressive forgotlings of their life force. However, choices must be made with caution, since a drained forgotling can never be restored.

At the start of the game, Anne is woken up by an explosion started by some rebels working against Bonku and she sets out to find them. Over the course of her journey Anne will attempt to discover the rebels’ plans, chase down their leader, and learn the truth about her world.

To say much more would be to dive into spoilers, but all in all, the story is okay. It’s nothing that’ll blow you away, but the plot is original and should be enticing enough to keep players some motivated for the majority of the game, even if the ending comes down to one of the most annoying gaming cliches of having the player choose between ending A and ending B.

The real issues come with tone. It’s almost like someone tried to cram a noir storyline about war, betrayal, and the meaning of life into a kid’s cartoon full of talking toasters and living shoes. And it’s not just the visuals. The tones of certain scenes are so muddled up that it makes me question what the intended emotional reaction was for many of them.

For example, near the start of the game Anne has the choice to drain a forgotling of its anima and if she does so, it’s treated as a murder when she’s confronted about it. But at another point a bowling ball and a glass vase jump off a moving train in a scene that feels more comical than anything, especially since you’ll see the bowling ball and not the vase later on. 

In only a short time the game will bounce from light hearted banter to dread-filled philosophical ramblings to silly antics of a pillow trying to clean a castle and then back to talk of Bonku’s slave labor. None of these scenes transition to one another smoothly or naturally and they keep the story from reaching its true potential.

Anne herself is a strange case for a protagonist. It’s clear from the start that Bonku is corrupt and only using Anne for his own benefit, but because this wasn’t hidden very well, Anne just comes off as a huge asshole in the game’s first act. She barks orders at forgotlings in a generally rude and cold manner and only occasionally shows her more compassionate side when the player chooses certain dialogue options. 

And while the game does try to explain that this attitude is due to her and Bonku believing that the forgotlings are just things and less than alive, knowing his corrupt nature from the start makes the entire beginning of the game feel like being on the wrong side of a civil rights debate and makes the turns the narrative takes later on predictable and underwhelming.

And the side characters are just as much of a toss up. Some, such as Fig, make for an entertaining and delightful addition to the story, but most of the other characters just feel like simple caricatures that desperately needed more fleshing out. Particularly the recurring characters which the game treats as old friends even though they were only around for a 2 minutes scene before. It’s just so sloppy.

Graphically, the game is fantastic. The character models are inventive, the environments are varied and well thought out, and the forgotlings are incredibly creative. Environmental effects are well done and the colors and lighting are used effectively. However, that’s where my praise has to end.

See, the problem with Forgotton Anne’s visuals aren’t with its assets, but rather how they’re animated. And the only word that comes to mind is lazy. For example, some forgotlings animate in creative ways when speaking or interacting with the environment, but then others simply stretch up and down to speak like a Newgrounds animation from 2008.

Even the most important animations are treated carelessly, with Anne’s running animation only having 8 frames! It’s completely unacceptable. When your game is marketed to have beautiful hand-drawn visuals and the animation can’t keep up, it brings down the entire experience. 

Of course, I know fuck all about art. Maybe there’s something here that I’m missing; so who better to help me make sense of it all than my friends over at Black Sheep Vidya? See, Ratter Tatter’s a photographer and just one look at any of these beautiful photographs should be enough to prove that we’re in capable hands. 

Take it away guys!

Ratter - Hey dude!  Thanks for having us on to talk about Forgotton Anne!  I’m Chill Pill, and I’m Ratter Tatter, and we are Black Sheep Vidya!  Let’s get started.

Ratter - I’m not gunna lie, being an artist gives me a huge bias towards picking up games that have fantastic art, and Forgotton Anne was no exception. This game’s hand drawn art style is gorgeous and was pretty obviously inspired by Studio Ghibli films. The characters, world design, and story of Forgotton Anne have that same aesthetic. Just look how gorgeous this is!

Chill Pill - There’s no disputing that Forgotton Anne’s art style is absolutely gorgeous, but there was one small detail that bothered me while I watched Ratter play through it: why are some objects alive and other objects are just… things? Like, what are the rules here?  Seems kind of inconsistent to me; if anything ALL the stuff in this world should be alive, y’know? But, then again, I guess that would make for some pretty awkward moments at times.

Ratter - But I’m not gunna pretend Forgotton Anne’s art or story were perfect.  The janky animations definitely took away from the otherwise amazing character art and the way the story was delivered caused it to fall flat, not to mention the infuriating gameplay mechanics.  I wish Throughline Games had stuck to their inspiration material and just made a stunning Ghibli-esque film as a lot of the game’s flaws stemmed from them making it into a game.  But we’ll just have to settle for dreaming of what could have been....

Alllrighty then, thanks a bunch for the help! I’ll see you over in your review.

Putting the art aside, there is another redeeming aspect to the game’s presentation and that’s the music. A beautiful orchestral score performed by the Copenhagen Philharmonic is an absolutely wonderful and welcome addition to the game. While it does have the same issues as the story in regards to tone, I only blame the writers as the composers didn’t have much to work with.

For those who might say that I set my expectations too high, I have three things to mention. First, don’t make promises in your trailer that your game can’t keep, second the game was backed by Square Enix so it’s not like they didn’t have any funding, and lastly, games like Cuphead prove that hand-drawn visuals and fantastic animation can co-exist if a developer is willing to put in the effort.

Then there’s the voice acting. Anne and Fin are voiced well, giving emotional and captivating performances appropriate for leads. However, the side characters are a complete toss up in terms of quality. Terrible accents, awkward delivery, and a lack of talent to make up for the poorly written dialogue run rampant from start to finish.

Finally, we arrive at the gameplay. While Forgotton Anne is primarily a story-driven game, it does have elements of platforming and puzzle solving to round out the experience. It would be a fantastic idea… If any of it was fun, challenging, or intuitive.

Starting with the controls, Anne moves around the map with the keyboard, with the ability to run for short distances as well. When her arca contains anima, she’s also able to use her wings to perform a super jump. While this may seem fine, it’s executed in such a strange and unintuitive way that even the simple act of traversing the environment is disappointingly tedious.

For one, the wings are activated by hitting the control key and sprinting requires the player to hold down shift, meaning that in order to take a running super jump, the player is required to bend their hand in a really unnatural way. 

On top of this, if Anne is hanging from a ledge, the game uses the typical system of having the player point away and jump in order to move to a platform on the other side, but rather than have this typical control scheme repeat for climbing up or dropping down from a ledge, the player must instead simply press up to climb or press nothing but jump to fall. It’s really unintuitive and while it may seem minor, when combined with the final problem it becomes infuriating.

What final problem you may ask? Well, the game is slow. Not that it stutters or anything, it just takes so long to do anything! Opening doors, climbing ladders, going up and down stairs, almost all of it requires that the player stops moving for a moment in order for the animation to set itself up. 

While individual moments don’t seem to take that long, the end product is much worse than the sum of its parts. I swear without this unnecessarily slow gameplay the runtime for a playthrough would be hours shorter! It all combines to ensure that the platforming isn’t fun or satisfying to perform, even if using a controller does make it slightly more bearable.

So how about the puzzles? Well here the game is still lacking, but much less so. Throughout the adventure there will be multiple spots that require Anne to stop and take a look around the environment to solve a problem and progress the story. These can range from opening doors to moving platforms to pumping the breaks on a train.

What’s most impressive about each puzzle is how they all fit into the world. They typically don’t feel like they were added in for the sake of having a challenge, but rather feel like a naturally occurring event in the story, which is pretty cool.

On the other hand, many of these puzzles are mind-numbingly obvious. With her arca, Anne can absorb anima from batteries to use in the puzzles. This can power up machines or activate switches that allow her to progress, but there’s a catch. 

Certain areas also have anima pipes whose flow is controlled by valves that can only be adjusted with a charged arca. As a result, many puzzles come down to figuring out how to manage the available anima in order to turn everything on. None of it is really revolutionary, but there are some unique twists thrown in every now and again to keep them entertaining.

...Or at least they would be, if the the controls didn’t get in the way once again. In order to drain an item of anima, the player must activate the arca and freeze everything in place in order to use the mouse and choose which items to influence. Unfortunately, this is problematic.

For one, the pointer is finicky. Sometimes it’ll go to the item you want, but more often than not it’ll stick to some irrelevant object in the room and delay your puzzle solving. On top of that, draining and transferring anima between the arca and other objects takes a bit of time. Rather than making the action instantaneous and getting the player back into the puzzle, the game decides to take its time and it’s truly disappointing.

And while we’re talking about wasting time there’s one final note I should mention. Anne can only hold one charge of Arca at a time. This means that if you don’t have enough Arca to solve a puzzle and the only charge available is a 2 minute walk away, you have to go off to fetch it before being able to continue the puzzle.

This makes the entire process a war of attrition rather than a test of mental fortitude. And while these delays might not seem like much, in a 5 hour long game as poorly paced as this one where every action takes forever to execute, these annoyances add up.

So that’s Forgotton Anne. I know I harped on this game’s animation quality and gameplay quite a bit, but when it comes down to it, the game is really about the story. And while that’s not the best, it is at least acceptable, which is why Forgotton Anne for the PC get a 5.5 out of 10.

The game does have potential and I’d like to see Throughline Games take their time with their next title and hopefully we’ll see something truly special emerge. That being said I hope you enjoyed this review, big big thanks to Black Sheep Vidya for stopping by. Be sure to check them out by following the link in the description or clicking the end card. Subscribe for more gaming goodness and as always, have a mighty nifty day today!