Before I Forget

I finished Before I Forget in a single sitting and then sat with it for an hour after. That almost never happens with a walking-sim, and I want to be honest about why: this is not a game that shows you dementia from a clinical distance. It puts you inside it. You are Sunita Appleby, a retired cosmologist with early-onset Alzheimer's, wandering the rooms of your own home as if they belong to someone else. Postcards, scribbled notes, photographs, a care agency call you don't understand, the memory of a musician husband named Dylan who you believe is simply away on tour. The whole thing holds together with a restraint that a lot of bigger-budget narrative games could learn from. The design work here is quiet but deliberate. Sunita's world begins almost entirely drained of colour, and as you pick up objects and trigger memories, colour bleeds slowly back into rooms, never fully. That one mechanic communicates more about the experience of fading cognition than any text box could. There are puzzle-like moments too: a sequence where every door in the house returns you to the same corridor, making you feel the exact disorientation of trying to reach a bathroom and failing, is genuinely unsettling. The voice acting from Anjali Kunapaneni grounds Sunita as a specific, accomplished person rather than a symbol of her illness, which was clearly the developers' central concern, and it shows in every line reading. Dave Tucker's piano score does the atmospheric work you'd hope for: searching, looping, never quite resolving. Two women, writer Chella Ramanan and programmer-artist Claire Morwood, built this at game jams and in spare hours, consulting with medical professionals to get the portrayal right. The care in the craft is legible. What could have been exploitative comes out compassionate. That said, honest caveats belong here: the ending is deliberately ambiguous and some players find it uncomfortable rather than cathartic, so if you have close personal experience with dementia or with loss, approach knowing it will reach into that. The runtime is also genuinely about an hour, not a padded hour. There is no replayability to speak of, and the Mac version has compatibility issues with newer macOS builds. Go in with eyes open on both fronts. For anyone who has spent time watching a loved one lose the thread of their own story, this is going to hit hard. For players who are new to that experience, it offers a window that feels honest rather than performed. It is the kind of small, handcrafted thing the medium needs more of: one hour that knows exactly what it wants to say, says it, and stops.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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