Forgotton Anne

My first hour with Forgotton Anne felt like someone had pressed play on a Studio Ghibli film and quietly handed me the controller. That sensation never fully goes away, and for a certain kind of player, that is the entire sales pitch. The Forgotten Lands is a side-scrolling world where every lost object, from a stray sock to an old lamp, has gained sentience and is longing to return to its owner. You play as Anne, the Enforcer who keeps order for the authoritative Master Bonku, and almost immediately the game makes you do something that sits wrong in your chest. That early moment of distilling a frightened forgotling, draining its anima and effectively ending its life, lands harder than most games manage in a full runtime. The Arca, the glove-like device on Anne's left hand, doubles as both a tool for manipulating anima-powered machinery and a weapon against the very beings she governs, and that duality is where the writing is sharpest. The world itself is the undeniable star. Character designs are inventive and strange in the best way: a dress mannequin leading the rebellion, a cloaked light bulb in a top hat as its ally, a living briefcase that flinches when Anne asks it to open up for inspection. The hand-drawn animation carries real craft, and the cinematics bleed into gameplay without a seam or a loading screen between them. Backing all of it is an orchestral score performed by the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra, which swells and softens exactly when it needs to. On headphones in a dark room, the atmosphere this game builds is something genuinely rare. Where Forgotton Anne earns its 76 on Metacritic rather than something higher is in the gap between its visual and narrative ambition and its actual mechanical execution. The anima puzzles, which involve rerouting energy through pipes, switches, and junction points, are the only real puzzle type in the game, and they repeat their logic from start to finish without meaningful escalation. The platforming carries a deliberate, weighted quality to Anne's animations that looks beautiful but can feel imprecise, particularly in a handful of timed sequences in the later chapters where the gap between what you intended and what happened is frustrating rather than fair. None of this will stop you finishing the game. You cannot die. The punishment for a missed jump is a few wasted seconds. But players who come for mechanical depth will feel the shallowness. The choices woven into the dialogue are the more interesting design conversation. Forgotton Anne does not flag consequential decisions the way most games do. It tells you once, early on, that some things cannot be undone, and then leaves you to work that out yourself. Some of those decisions ripple into later scenes in ways that feel genuinely resonant. Others, if you are being honest, feed into an ending shaped more by a single final choice than by everything that came before it. The game runs about six hours on a first playthrough, which is exactly the right length for what it is trying to do. It knows when to end. Completionists have Pacifist and Empathic achievement runs to structure a second pass, and a chapter-select mode unlocks after credits, which makes going back to missed mementos and collectibles painless. This is a game for people who can accept that a slow, weighted walk through a beautiful world is the point, not a problem. If you need your platformers to feel crisp and your puzzles to genuinely challenge you, Forgotton Anne will test your patience before the second act. If you are the kind of person who still thinks about a game days after finishing it, quietly turning a moral question over in your mind, this small studio managed something that most developers with ten times the budget never pull off.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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