Forgotton Anne

Most games about lost things are really about loss. Forgotton Anne goes further. It is about the moral cost of keeping order, and about what we owe the things we throw away.

The game comes from Throughline Games, a small Copenhagen studio. Its premise is close to a Pixar pitch with a darker edge. Every object people forget about, like a single sock, a scarf or an old lamp, ends up in the Forgotten Lands. There it wakes up as a Forgotling, a living thing with feelings, grudges and a place in a strict social order. Anne, an Enforcer who serves the mysterious Master Bonku, is the player’s character. The two of them are the only humans in this world, and they are trying to get back to the human one. Standing in their way is a growing rebellion among the Forgotlings, and Anne’s job is to crush it.

That setup creates the game’s main tension. The opening act puts the player to work for the people in power, enforcing order on creatures who have good reasons to resent it. The game knows this is uncomfortable and keeps pushing the player to look at it.

In the market, Forgotton Anne fits next to Oxenfree, Gris and Night in the Woods: short, story-driven games that care more about mood and meaning than about mechanics. It runs about as long as a prestige miniseries. It is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch and Android, which gives it a long life well past its 2018 debut.

Ask whether it is a great game and the answer is mixed. Ask whether it is a strong piece of interactive storytelling and the answer is yes. Throughline put almost everything into the parts you watch and listen to, and the controls are where that shows.

• Hand-Animated Cinematic Presentation: The characters are drawn frame by frame in an anime style that invites Studio Ghibli comparisons, and the game earns them. Cutscenes and gameplay share the same art, so the line between the two rarely shows.
• Live Orchestral Score: The Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra performed the soundtrack. The music is carefully cued, it drives the emotional high points, and it never feels like filler.
• Choice-Driven Moral Narrative: Dialogue branches and key decisions, above all whether to “distill” a Forgotling into raw energy, change how characters see Anne and where the story goes.
• Anima Manipulation: Anne’s wrist device, the Arca, can pull anima out of objects, machines and living Forgotlings and push it back in. It drives both the puzzles and the morality system.
• Light Puzzle-Platforming: The world is traversed through environmental puzzles and cinematic platforming, helped by anima-powered wings that let Anne make longer jumps.

The Core Loop: Walk, Talk, Drain, Repeat

Forgotton Anne’s gameplay loop follows a clear rhythm. Walk through a beautiful scene, talk to its inhabitants, solve an environmental puzzle by moving anima around, and then hit a story beat that usually ends in a choice. Repeat.

The anima system is the smartest idea in the game, because it ties the puzzles and the theme together. Anima is the world’s energy, its money and its life force. When Anne drains a power canister to open a door, that is just a puzzle. When she drains a Forgotling, she is killing someone. Using the same verb for both is a sharp piece of design. The tool you use to solve a switch puzzle is also the tool you use to execute someone, and the game never lets you forget that.

That is why the distillation choices work. They are not abstract “good or evil” prompts with a morality meter attached. They come up in tense, specific situations: a rebel who may or may not be guilty, or a Forgotling begging while Bonku’s authority hangs over the scene. The game is confident enough to leave some consequences vague and some delayed. The story’s shape is mostly fixed, but how Anne is seen and how certain relationships end really do shift. It is not The Witcher, and it does not try to be. The choices matter because they change how the player feels about Anne, not because they open up a branching plot.

The Platforming Problem

This is where the game weakens. The platforming is functional at best and annoying at worst, and it takes up a large share of the runtime.

Throughline chose animation fidelity over responsiveness. Anne’s movements are drawn with real weight. She winds up before a jump, stumbles on landing, and turns with momentum. That looks great in a cinematic, but the animation-locked controls build in a real delay between input and response. Hit jump and Anne commits to an animation, not to the command. Old Prince of Persia and Flashback players will recognize the feeling. Players used to the instant response of Celeste or Ori will find it sluggish.

Jumps and glides are contextual. The game decides where Anne can go far more than her abilities do. That makes the platforming forgiving, with few meaningful ways to fail. It also makes it empty. There is no mastery to build. The player is mostly finding the one path the designers drew and then walking Anne down it, somewhat clumsily.

The puzzles have the same problem. Most come down to moving anima from canister A to machine B, sometimes with a timing or ordering wrinkle. A few late-game setups ask for more thought, but none should hold up a seasoned player for long. Easy puzzles are fine in a story-first game. The trouble is that the puzzles are easy and slow, and the stiff traversal makes even simple solutions take longer to carry out.

Pacing and Flow

Pacing in the first act is uneven. The game spends a long time on worldbuilding and tutorial puzzles before the central conflict pays off. After the middle section, the story gains a real sense of urgency. The writing gets tighter, the reveals land harder, and the choices carry more weight.

The localization and writing hold up well. Dialogue is crisp, the Forgotlings have distinct voices (a vain scarf talks very differently from a world-weary piece of machinery), and the game trusts players to read subtext. Some exposition drags, but the story’s emotional arc about belonging, abandonment and what it costs to obey is handled with a maturity many bigger narrative games lack.

Onboarding Friction

There is very little. The controls are simple, the anima system explains itself, and the game guides newcomers gently. That accessibility helps its natural audience, people who want a story and may not play platformers much. Genre veterans may find the early hand-holding a bit condescending, but it fades quickly.

Forgotton Anne’s art direction is the strongest reason to buy it.

Throughline’s hand-animated characters move with a warmth and personality that only comes from frame-by-frame work. Anne’s cloak flutters naturally, the Forgotlings are full of small, odd details, and the facial expressions in close-ups carry real emotion. The painted backgrounds add depth with layered parallax, and the environments range from cramped industrial districts to wide, sunlit vistas. The Ghibli comparison is earned through the color palette and through the care in the small details, not just the drawing style.

The UI is minimal and stays out of the way. Dialogue choices appear cleanly, and prompts for interacting with anima are readable without getting in front of the art. It is a sensible, restrained design that knows the art is the main event.

Technically, the game asks little of modern PCs. It is a 2D game of this scope, and it is light on hardware. The main performance costs come from the size of the hand-drawn assets, which points toward longer loads and higher memory use on weaker machines. Some scene transitions are built as long, uninterrupted stretches, which can break the cinematic flow on slower setups. These are irritations, not dealbreakers, but in a game built on immersion they stand out.

The audio deserves its own note. The Copenhagen Philharmonic recording gives the soundtrack a richness that synthesized orchestration cannot match. Music rises and falls in step with the story, and several of the best moments rely as much on the score as on the visuals.

Steam (PC): This is the reference version. The art looks best on a large, high-resolution screen, where the line work and background detail really show. A controller is strongly recommended, because the platforming suits an analog stick better than a keyboard. Keyboard and mouse work fine, though, and the forgiving contextual jumps keep the inputs from becoming a fight. This is the best-looking way to play.

Nintendo Switch: This is arguably the best fit for the game’s audience. A story-heavy, low-intensity adventure suits handheld play, where short sessions are easy to pick up and put down. The art holds up well on the smaller screen, and the Joy-Con layout works for the simple controls. Loads will run longer than on a strong PC, which matters most during scene transitions. Docked, it looks good, but some background detail is a little softer than on PC.

Android: This port has the most compromises. Platforming with virtual touch controls is never ideal, and a game whose platforming is already stiff does not gain anything from on-screen buttons. There is one upside: the slow, forgiving traversal leaves room for imprecise touch input, so the interface rarely turns a jump into a failure. Dialogue choices and anima interactions translate well to taps. The bigger worry is device variability. The large hand-drawn assets put pressure on low-end and mid-range Android hardware, so performance and load times will vary widely across phones and tablets. On a current flagship or a good tablet it is a pleasant way to experience the story. On an aging budget phone, look elsewhere. A Bluetooth controller improves things a lot.

Forgotton Anne is an unbalanced game, and it is still worth the right player’s time. Throughline Games put almost all of its effort into the presentation and the story, and it shows. The hand-drawn art is beautiful, the orchestral score is excellent, and the story’s handling of power and the morality of abandonment is more mature than most narrative games manage. The anima system is a genuinely clever design choice, because it turns a puzzle tool into the center of a moral question.

The gameplay never reaches the same level. The platforming is stiff, the puzzles are thin, and the pacing in the first act tests patience. These are real flaws, not nitpicks, and they occupy a real share of the runtime.

Ultimately, the flaws are easier to forgive because they sit around a story told with real conviction. The clumsy jumps fade from memory faster than Anne’s choices, and the Forgotlings she spared or distilled. For players who buy a game for the story it tells and how it looks and sounds, Forgotton Anne is a solid pick. For players who buy it for how it plays, lower your expectations and go anyway.