#FORGOTTEN FIELDS REVIEW SIMULATOR#

In UGG, the characters move smoothly and interact with gravity and the world around them as they should. But the production of something that looks so effortlessly… well, effortless, is not without… effort. They are low-poly, easy to grasp, and conceptually clear – to the player they appear perhaps an easy feat. Simplistic games like Untitled Goose Game, which gave us all so much fun last year, work on this basis. For it to carry well commercially, there is a requirement that something look and feel offhand, but in actuality is rather acutely refined. Lo-fi is a difficult concept – deceptively so. Forgotten Fields prides itself on lo-fi, low-stress storytelling centred on a man who stresses about his story. He seems to be a gentle chap, surrounded by friends who don’t see as much of him as he would like, and situated in the heart of a beautiful community. He is a writer who has lost his thread, and we meet him staring up at the ceiling procrastinating hard. The familiarity of these emotions went some way toward endearing me to Sid, the protagonist. There’s something about returning to a time when you could write that slowly massages your consciousness back out of the panicked rigidity of a deadline-addled brain. My own preferred tactic for tackling a bout of writer’s block is to stick on some familiar tunes and play something I’ve played a million times. On the better side of things, controller binding seems to be reasonable, and if you do end up in a situation where you cannot figure out the next narrative step there is an option to show all available interactive hotspots. Sadly no closed captions were available, and there were some moments were sounds like the ringing of a doorbell for example, had no subtitle prompt. This combined with it not always being obvious which objects can be interacted with, could cause frustration or hinder the experience. When it comes to accessibility, there is no voice acting, as this was a stretch goal that was missed on Kickstarter but Forgotten Fields is still able to tell the story it wants to tell without this being a hinderance, clear subtitles on a black background are used for most interactions, which allows the text to be separated from the background for ease of reading. Chances are if you find a bug, they’re already on their way to fixing it. It seems unusually demanding for a game of this simplicity and could maybe do with further optimisation, but the work ethic of the developer can’t be faulted. Initially this review was hampered by a few crashes and bumps, and multiple updates from the Forgotten Fields team, the game began to run a lot better. It promises to be “a story focused on nostalgia and time that is sure to linger in your mind long after you’ve finished the game”, but comes up a little short – I’m not sure it’ll linger for long. It isn’t a particularly attractive game, and some parts feel a little wooden, but the dialogue is simple enough and the story is a sweet little tale told from an interesting cultural perspective. Maybe it’s the gentle music, the simple style, or the fact that playing it felt like reading a bedtime story, but there was something that kept pushing me forward. In his own life, returning to his childhood home allowed him to overcome writer’s block and finish his first game, Rainswept.įor what it lacks in polish and excitement, it makes up for somewhat in an indeterminable charm. Starting life as a Kickstarter project, and based around the developer Armaan Sandhu’s real-life experience, Forgotten Fields transports the player to the Indian state of Goa, where Sandhu grew up.

#FORGOTTEN FIELDS REVIEW SIMULATOR#

Forgotten Fields isn’t a walking simulator so much as it is a, relaxing break from the chaos, the digital equivalent of just taking a moment to sit under a tree with a story and some quiet. It’s an upbeat sort of a game gentle, predictable, slow, but ultimately cheerful. Forgotten Fields is a homely slice-of-life game about a writer who can’t write, a simple premise that from the offset can create a connection with the player, as who hasn’t hit that block when it comes to creativity at some point? Returning to his childhood home for the last time, protagonist Sid struggles against a looming deadline and dips in and out of his own fantasy world.

Forgotten fields review