The Forgotten: It Begins

The Forgotten is a game of solitary exploration so there are no conversations, though you will briefly meet up with Richard at the rather abrupt ending to the game. Despite its brevity I found it to be most intriguing and it certainly captured my imagination, but then I do enjoy a good mystery and I liked the way the snippets of information I discovered slowly revealed elements of the plot.

So with all this praise, why only a 3 out of 5? Well, like in figure skating, the The Forgotten: It Begins was penalized for lack of difficulty. Tieraney and I played this game together, and we finished it in about three hours. That's unheard of these days. DreamCatcher explained in the press release that the game is marketed towards novice gamers, but even novice gamers will get through this in a shorter amount of time than it would take to download a walkthrough.

Even though I have been grousing about The Forgotten in this review, I don't want to give up on the game entirely. It's certainly an interesting and ambitious project, and I hope that the subsequent installments--provided they appear at reasonably short intervals--will overcome the limitations of the initial episode by offering cutting-edge graphics, increased depth of play, and more firmly drawn storyline. For now, however, the first episode is not so much a fully fledged game as a teaser, and a rather underwhelming one at that.

Irgendwie sind all diese Quicktime-Adventures richtig schnarchöde und auch "The Forgotten" macht da nur insofern eine Ausnahme, als es vielleicht einen Tick interessanter als seine vielen Vettern ist. Wer also im Big-Brother-Haus wohnt und nichts Besseres zu tun hat, mag sich von mir aus damit befassen.

As only part of a story, and the introduction at that, there are a few problems with this game overall. First, you never really get a feel for what is going on. Since this is the beginning of a story, you're given some information but there is no big payoff at the end. And to make things worse, the game isn't very long. Rather than make a number of short games, I'd prefer one long one with a full plot that has a beginning, middle, and end. Here you have a short introductory chapter and that's all. After all the titles are complete, I'd be willing to bet that the entire game will be collected into one large volume. At least then you'd have a whole story. As a single game, it didn't really catch my interest. Overall, who knows? Bottom Line: Limited graphics powered by Quicktime technology. Slow-moving plot which is only the introduction to a story. Very short overall. Too early to tell if this series will be worthwhile in the long run.

A haunted hotel? A creepy mission to fight a sinister evil force? The first chapter in a much longer story? No, no . . . I’m not reviewing Activision’s Inherent Evil again. This is a new game called The Forgotten: It Begins from Ransom Studios and DreamCatcher Interactive.

Overall, the game feels about three years old - probably because it is. It seems like the creators had a really elaborate idea that just falls to pieces under a laboriously told, convoluted story, and poor game mechanics. The Forgotten just tries too hard to be too many things that it's not. Please, pass it by on the software shelves and leave it where it belongs - forgotten.

The story is vague and muddled. It suggests big, interesting events, involving famous historical people, but nothing ever really happens. There is almost no game here at all; picking up a key and inserting it into a lock does not qualify as “gameplay”. Unless future installments develop a good, coherent story, the game The Forgotten: It Begins… is best forgotten.