A Nostalgic Trip or a Creative Dead End?
There’s a bittersweet edge to growing older – each year brings more experiences, but they slip away, quickly becoming just memories. Forgotten Fields, a narrative game by indie studio Frostwood Interactive leans into this sense of nostalgia. It’s about looking back, longing for the past and struggling to move forward.
The main character is Sid, an author caught between a looming deadline and a stubborn case of writer’s block. As he revisits familiar places and reconnects with old friends, his inner world begins to shift and so does the fantasy story he’s trying to write. We not only get to play as Sid in the real world but as a mysterious girl in his evolving story.
A Sunday Story
The game revolves around one Sunday in Sid’s life when he revisits his family home for the final time before it is sold. He meets up with childhood friends and reminisces about the past, discussing where they think the next stage in their lives wil
l take them. Dialogue is shown on the screen as text, which appears with an extremely annoying sound effect (one of the first things we did was to choose to turn down the sound effect volume). You very rarely get to choose what Sid says, which tends to make the long stretches of conversation feel passive.
Limited Interactions, Missed Opportunities
There is some interaction in the game – Sid can examine a few items in the different houses he visits. These are mainly books, which you can rotate to read the spine and blurb on the back cover. Interesting, we thought, maybe the plotline from each book will influence the novel Sid is writing. We were wrong and are still in the dark about why the books are there.
Interacting with some items will take you to a short cutscene where Sid reminisces about a past event, which don’t offer any real insight into Sid’s motivations and are just there to hammer home the fact that Forgotten Fields is about a nostalgic longing for the past.
Budgetary Blurs
This is a game made on a budget by a small studio, so we were expecting it to be a simple game created using next to nothing other than the creator’s time and passion. Don’t get us wrong – we’re not all about the AAA games, with many of our favourites being smaller indies. However, there is only so much a gamer can forgive.
Forgotten Fields is rough around the edges. The art style is basic, which is fine in theory, but the animation is clunky and the physics are notably – and frustratingly – off more often than not. Characters float awkwardly above the ground, get stuck running on invisible paths, or run in the wrong direction when the camera abruptly shifts. And the camera controls are oddly inconsistent between scenes. Sometimes you can pan in all directions, other times only left and right, and occasionally not at all. This lack of consistency quickly becomes frustrating.
Lost at Sea
One highlight is the rendering of the ocean, which actually looks quite decent, even if the waves move oddly. We were surprised to discover that Sid can swim underwater, with no need to surface for air and seemingly no limits. Unfortunately, there are no discernible landmarks beneath the surface to help you orient yourself, so it’s incredibly easy to get lost. At one point, we were swimming for so long we started wondering if Sid should ditch the writing career and take up professional free diving instead.
Despite Forgotten Fields having an open-world feel, it is in fact very linear. The long chunks of narrative are split up by very simple tasks – calling them puzzles would be generous. Many of them take on a very domestic nature – finding sheets that have blown off a washing line, laying the table, doing the washing up. You know – the kinds of things that we have to escape to video games to experience.
The world looks expansive, with scenes set in locations such as a village, forest and beach but you are very limited in how much of these areas you can explore. We get it, rendering these is time consuming and expensive but often we came across an invisible wall, stopping our exploration in its tracks. With no clear boundaries on what is reachable, it makes it impossible to know in advance if it’s worth you running somewhere, which makes exploring more frustrating than fun. Spoiler: don’t bother. There’s nothing to discover.
Millennial Misery: A Disappointing Emotional Impact
A game that is a frustrating play must make up for it in some other way – right? Forgotten Fields even has two of the characters in the game having a conversation bemoaning the fact that lately big studio games lack any soul, which felt like a clear mission statement. So, we were expecting Forgotten Fields to have buckets of the stuff; to make us feel inspired, uplifted or simply relaxed. Unfortunately we came away feeling weirdly depressed. It’s like the gaming equivalent of listening to jaded millennials complain about how much fun they used to have, how social media has ruined everything, and how they feel stuck in a career they didn’t choose but can’t escape (which, to be fair, is exactly what one conversation in the game is about.) For anyone over the age of 25 and who is feeling hopeful about the future, play an hour of Forgotten Fields and it’ll soon knock that out of you.
Okay, maybe that’s a little unfair. There is a sprinkling of hope right at the very end, but by then, it’s too little, too late.
The Unfulfilled Novel
The most interesting part of Forgotten Fields is the fantasy story Sid is writing. Watching that world develop, and seeing how his real-life experiences shape the plot, is a great idea. We enjoyed straying into the fantasy world that Sid is creating and seeing this evolve. It feels like there was a missed opportunity here to make the fantasy world more different in appearance and gameplay to the real one. Both have the same art style, and are even similar in the same yellowish colour palette. It would have been much more powerful if the fantasy segments had a completely different look or feel, or better yet, different gameplay.
In these parts we do get the addition of Sid’s thought process appearing as text on screen as the plot of his novel evolves, which adds a point of interest. This addition of a parallel story is inspired, and we enjoyed our time here but we can’t help feel that so much more could have been made of this. Every so often, something in Sid’s day nudges the story in a new direction. We liked those moments and wished there were more. It’s only right at the end that Sid makes a decision that actually changes the course of his novel. Why not do that earlier? Why not make it a core mechanic? It feels like a missed opportunity.
A Rough Draft of a Good Idea
Forgotten Fields is a game with heart, but this alone is not enough to carry it. Just like Sid’s fantasy novel, it feels like a rough first draft – full of great ideas but lacking the execution to truly bring them to life.
Important Links
A Bittersweet Summer Sunday: Forgotten Fields Launches on Xbox with Nostalgia & Puzzles – https://www.thexboxhub.com/a-bittersweet-summer-sunday-forgotten-fields-launches-on-xbox-with-nostalgia-puzzles/
Buy Forgotten Fields on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/forgotten-fields/9pl1hf31475c
