When I was a kid in the early 90s a friend told me about the Neo Geo. This was well before the popularization of the Internet, and before I was regularly buying gaming magazines, so I didn’t know anything about the machine. According to my friend it was a ridiculously expensive nearly magical piece of technology that made games look just like cartoons you see on TV and put both the Super Nintendo and the Genesis to shame. I wasn’t sure if I even believed the thing existed, since the idea of a home console where the games cost as much as a whole Super Nintendo each seemed absurd, but I was completely confident that even if it did exist the games couldn’t possibly look like actual cartoons. How would you even play a game that looked like a cartoon? The camera angles and complex illustration would render the thing totally impossible to control. Yes, I was that kind of nerd as a pre-teen. As it turns out we were both kind of right. The Neo Geo did exist and it looked amazing, but its games did not look like cartoons, they looked like arcade games. They sport some very impressive animation and other touches but they fundamentally look like 90s video games, just better, not like cartoons.

Forgotton Anne looks like an animated film. It has been described as having an anime aesthetic, but it’s a little more complicated than that. There’s certainly an Anime influence on the character designs, but it has a richness of lighting and painterly backgrounds that recall a number of schools of animation and cobbles them together into something all its own. It’s gorgeous and though it’s not the first game to ever achieve this look it is easily one of the best. The budget doesn’t seem to have been very high and the animation can be a bit rudimentary (backgrounds don’t really move much and characters are mostly restricted to simple loops that aren’t at the level of even Street Fighter III let alone something like Cuphead) but I adore the richness of the illustration. The art in this game is easily its strongest asset, and the reason that I kept playing. 30 years ago my friend told me of a magical machine that lets you play games that look just like cartoons and now, as I slide into middle age, multiple games like that actually exists and I can’t help but be blown away by them.

Of course Forgotten Anne does compromise its camera angles for playability, and gets away with having such a detailed visual style and such rich animation by being a hybrid of an adventure game and a puzzle platformer. You play Anne, the “enforcer” in a magical place called the Realm where things that are lost or forgotten by humans come to dwell. Anne herself is human in appearance, as is her ‘master,’ Bonku, but the majority of the characters are manmade objects, generally taking the form of childhood toys, obsolete technology, or the sorts of things that people tend to lose like various forms of footwear. When these things are forgotten they enter this realm where they have built a city that looks a lot like a European city from the mid 20^th century and they live and work there. Bonku is supervising the construction of something called the Ether Bridge, which is intended to get these “forgotlings” back to the human realm to be reunited with their humans. There’s a rebel faction that is using sabotage to try to stop him, and the game starts with an act of non-fatal terrorism and Bonku tasking Anne with finding the rebel leader and putting an end to their activities once and for all. Anne sets off into the city to track down the rebels and disrupt their plan, and, as one expects, learns more about the origins of the world and the nature of the society that Bonku rules over.

Forgotton Anne’s setting is another of the game’s strengths. The city of forgotten things is a perfect concept for a game that looks like an animated film, and it’s full of anthropomorphic versions of various manmade items like refrigerators and old television sets. It’s never fully explained how all this works on a mechanical level, but the world seems driven by a force called “anima” that is stored in batteries and used to power the machines that the residents of this world use, and is also present in the forgotten things themselves. It’s a bit odd that the world of Forgotton Anne contains animate machine residents, some of which maintain their old mechanical function, like a film projector that can show movies if powered by anima, and also inanimate machines, including quite complex designs like a train, presumably built by the machines to do things but lacking personality and agency. At one point Anne says that Bonku ‘found’ a bicycle for her somewhere and it raised a number of questions about how that’s possible, since up until then it has been implied that Bonku has at least supervised the building of all the non-forgotling machines in the world. I would have preferred a world where every complex machine had a personality instead of there just being a bunch of mechanical elevators and cranes, but the world the game presents is intriguing nonetheless.

Anne herself is not a machine but wields a fearsome device called “The arca” that can control anima. She can store an anima charge from a battery, infuse that charge into other batteries or machines, and, crucially, “distill” forgotlings by sucking the anima lifeforce from them and leaving them as inanimate husks, though the game only allows you to do this in certain specific situations. She also has wings that allow her to jump many times her height or quite a long distance horizontally when the arca is charged. All the forgotlings know about the enforcer and seem to fear her and the arca, which creates an interesting dynamic as you travel through the world and speak to characters who mostly respect but don’t actually like you.

If the aesthetics and world of Forgotton Anne are its strengths, its weaknesses lie in some of the performances and the gameplay. I don’t know if Forgotton Anne was originally written in English but even though the writing itself can be strong, the majority of the performances are not great. Anne herself is fine, as are a few of the other major characters like Bonku, but many of the forgotlings you meet sound like they were voiced by amateur actors and give the sense of someone trying to do ‘a voice’ or an accent but not being able to make it sound natural. It doesn’t help that the credits show that many of the characters were voiced by the same actors, and they clearly made attempts to differentiate them. It’s all very community theater level and detracts from the game’s attempt to tell a compelling story. The game also gives you a number of dialog options, some of which have branching outcomes that can range from someone responding to you with anger or friendship to an entirely different branched ending (there are apparently six.) I think the core story also falls apart as it comes to its close, with a lot of clunky moments and times where Anne’s emotions seem to whipsaw from calm to angry to morose. The game also pulls its punches in fully exploring Anne’s role in forgotling society and the actions she has taken prior to the start of the game and the things she does during its run time. Forgotton Anne’s heroine is not just a cop, but a cop with authority to kill anyone she wants, or send others to “the plant” where they do forced labor, but the game isn’t willing to explore everything that implies, especially if you choose to play her “nicely.” This is a game that draws some pretty direct comparisons to historical atrocities but can’t bring itself to face them head on, and so provides its characters with some easy outs. Forgotton Anne has a great premise and some charming characters, but the story itself is average for a story-driven adventure game, and the emotional moments are mostly carried by the gorgeous orchestral soundtrack.

The average story is a bit of a disappointment but still enjoyable enough, especially during the first half of the game when it’s focused on set up and explaining the world. A deeper flaw is in the gameplay. This should have been a pure adventure game. The puzzles in the game aren’t fantastic, but the platforming is much worse. It’s sluggish and stiff and while there’s some autocorrection that means it’s not very frustrating it is often a chore to do, especially when you need to retrace your steps multiple times to complete a puzzle. There are all kinds of unintuitive quirks to the system, like the fact that you cannot use your arca (which is necessary to pull anima from some objects and move it into others) while you’re on stairs, and the way levers work, which feels off. None of these are dealbreakers, but they make the game feel old and clunky and do not mesh well with the fact that you’re supposed to be doing quite a bit of platforming in it. In an almost unprecedented move for a game like this you lose access to one of your main platforming moves about two thirds through the game, and greatly reduces the emphasis on platforming for the remainder of the game, showing that the developers themselves seem to have realized that platforming was not where the title shines.

The puzzles, which mostly involve hitting switches or moving anima around or, most often, both, are fine for what they are. but cutting the platforming and replacing it with deeper and more unique puzzles would have done much more to complement the good parts of the game. The game could have greatly benefited from stronger puzzles, but instead they are often pedestrian and repetitive. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t a strong reason to play. There are also sometimes unfortunate interactions between the puzzle gameplay and the platformer elements. This game runs into the common problem where sluggish movement makes trying multiple solutions on some puzzles a chore, as you have to slowly move your character into position and move things around for each potential solve. It also runs into a more serious problem where it tries to combine platforming elements with puzzles in areas that require quick timing, which is not good in a game where movement is unresponsive and clunky.

One puzzle in particular had me stuck to the point where I almost gave up, since I couldn’t figure out what the solution was given the tools at hand. It made me feel dumb, as I kept cycling through the same solutions, including one that seemed like it should work, over and over, but there was something I just wasn’t getting. I actually said aloud, to myself, “I used to be smart” at one point, which is not the feeling a good game should impart on the player. As it turns out, the solution I thought should work was the intended solution to the puzzle. It just relied on some random elements that went wrong for me the first four times I tried it. That’s very bad design and something that absolutely should have been fixed before the game shipped.

Forgotton Anne took me 7 hours to get through, and that’s probably 2-3 hours longer than it should be. As the game gets closer to the end it starts focusing more on the story it’s telling than the world and background, and that story can’t sustain the game’s sluggish pacing and repetitive design. The bad voice acting starts to wear on you, you find yourself backtracking through old locations, which reduces the impact of the genuinely great art. The puzzles and platforming both seem like they regress towards the end and it all comes to a close in a flat and disappointing way.

There are things to like about Forgotton Anne. The intricately illustrated world is absolutely gorgeous, even if it’s only lightly animated. The score is good, as is the voice acting of the main characters. Some of the characters, including Anne herself, are compelling and pleasant to spend time with. The set up and world building are strong, and though I’d say the story is ultimately pretty average it does have its high points. As an adventure game its strong aesthetics elevate its weaker puzzles and dodgy voice acting and put it firmly in the above average category. However, the combination of the clunky feeling movement and mediocre platforming mean that there are portions of the game that feel chore-like, and there are some irritating issues with some of the puzzles that create frustration points. It’s a beautiful game and if the idea of the world appeals to you and you can tolerate its problematic aspects I would say it’s potentially worth a playthrough. It’s a flawed experience but not a bad one. It’s just that with a few tweaks and improvements the rest of the game could have matched the strengths of its aesthetics and worldbuilding.