Forgotten Faces

I want to root for Forgotten Faces. The premise alone, a young woman confined to a mental hospital who cannot recognise the faces of anyone around her, is one of those high-concept starting points that a careful indie developer could turn into something genuinely haunting. Prosopagnosia is a real neurological condition, and building a point-and-click mystery around it has the potential to make exploration feel genuinely disorienting rather than just atmospherically dark. That potential is real. The delivery, unfortunately, is rockier than it should be. The game is structured across five episodes, each one asking you to click through the hospital environment, collect items, solve environmental puzzles, and interact with the world to push the story of Alice forward. The bones of a classic adventure quest are here: find objects, use them in the right place, unlock the next beat of narrative. The 3D colorful art style is brighter than you might expect from a hospital-set psychological story, and early screenshots give off a storybook quality that does have its own odd charm. Where the mood works, it genuinely works, and the sound design has been noted by some players as adding to the unsettling atmosphere rather than undercutting it. Here is where I have to be honest with you, though. The controls are a significant problem. The game launched without mouse support for navigation and interface, relying instead on keyboard-only input with some genuinely uncomfortable key assignments. Community feedback from launch made this loud and clear, and it remains a friction point that the developer does not appear to have fully addressed. On top of that, some players reported the game defaulting to Russian with no visible language toggle, which for an English-language audience is an immediate barrier rather than a minor inconvenience. These are not quirks to overlook; they are fundamental quality-of-life failures that sit between you and any emotional payoff the story might offer. The Steam reception reflects all of this. With only a handful of reviews and a strongly negative score, the community signal is hard to spin. That said, the review pool is genuinely tiny, and a game this obscure rarely gets the sustained attention needed for a fair verdict to settle. What I can say is that the concept deserves better execution than it received at launch, and there is no evidence of meaningful post-launch patching to close the gap. If you are a patient explorer who does not mind awkward controls and can confirm English language is functioning on your copy, there is a curio here worth poking at. If friction pulls you out of a narrative, this will test your goodwill early and often.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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