Forgotten Fields

It used to be that video game characters lived big, unrealistic and totally unrelatable lives. You would be a plumber who moonlights as a princess rescuer, a Greek God looking to end it all or a space marine trying to survive a war between different types of aliens. These days, thanks to the influx of smaller games made by indie developers, we're starting to see a lot more game characters with relatable lives. That's certainly the case in Forgotten Fields, a new game that revolves around a man with a severe case of writer's block. He sits in a dark room all day hoping that inspiration will come, all as his friends and family fail to see what he's going through. I can relate to his struggle, because I have been that man. Hell, I may be that man right now. Wait ... am I the new Master Chief?

Before we can dive into Forgotten Fields, we first need to talk about Sid. He's a writer in his late twenties who found some notoriety when he wrote a fantasy book called The Tower of Yesterday. Since then, he's been dragging his heels about writing a follow-up book, and with an important deadline only a few hours away, he's starting to feel the pressure. This feeling of writer's block is only compounded by the people around him, who all seem to be moving on and forging their own paths -- his mother is selling her house, his ex-girlfriend is getting married and one of his closest friends has been thinking about moving to the big city. Sid, on the other hand, is stuck. Both as a writer and as an adult.

Forgotten Fields is about the day Sid spends leading up to that big deadline. There isn't any action or excitement, just him hanging out with friends, having long conversations and visiting his childhood home for one last time. Along the way, he learns more about himself and finds inspiration for the book he's trying to write. And, as simple as it sounds, that's the whole game. Well, that's not entirely true. There's a B-plot that has us playing through the fantasy story he's attempting to piece together, but we'll talk more about that in a moment.

Forgotten Fields is the sophomore game from Frostwood Interactive, an India-based studio who burst on the scene with the wickedly clever adventure game Rainswept. Inspired by Twin Peaks and teaming with memorable characters and dialog, this was one of my favorite games of 2019. In my review, I went as far as calling it the "best point and click adventure game I've played since Thimbleweed Park," which is high praise if you know my feelings on Thimbleweed Park. To say that I was eager to see what they would come up with next is a huge understatement, especially when I saw that the story would revolve around a writer who seems to be stuck in the past. Now that's something I can relate to. Unfortunately, Forgotten Fields will likely go down as the year's most disappointing game.

In fact, I don't even think the word "disappointing" covers it, because I would call this game bad. Full stop. Not since Danny Boyle released A Life Less Ordinary a year after Trainspotting have I seen a follow-up project this ill-advised. From the meandering story to the monotonous dialog to the constant game-breaking bugs, Forgotten Fields doesn't work on so many levels.

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Let's start with the biggest problem -- Sid. As I mentioned earlier, he's a writer suffering from a lack of ideas and inspirations. He's stuck in the past and is pessimistic about the future. These are all things that, at one point or another, you could say about me. He's relatable. He's also a bit of a sad sack. He doesn't have anything interesting or insightful to say, which ends up being a problem when the entire game involves you hanging out with the guy. It's not that I don't understand his plight and even sympathize, but he's intolerable to be around. It got to the point where I started to worry that maybe this is how other people see me when I'm in a rut. I hope that I'm never this dull an uninteresting.

It doesn't help that the conversations he gets into are mind-numbingly boring. No matter if it's with Sid's friends, family or ex-girlfriend, every conversation is plodding and repetitive. The dialog always seems to end up being about nostalgia and how things used to be easier, better, more interesting. Everybody has a different thought on the subject, but it always ends the same way. It reads like it's supposed to be deep and moving, but it's shallow and emotionally empty. Everybody talks in platitudes and says the most obvious thing. And this goes on for the better part of four hours. They make the point within the first ten or fifteen minutes, and then spend hours hammering that point home until it feels like nothing more than lip service. We're never given a reason to care about Sid and his friends, which makes it almost impossible to connect with what is supposed to be an emotional final act.

And then there's that terrible fantasy novel he's trying to write. Like I said, we end up playing through the story he's coming up with, which seems like it's only there to pad out the run time. I don't think it's an insult to call this B-plot generic and lame, since Sid spends the entire game telling everyone that the story he came up with is generic and lame. I'm sorry, but that's no excuse. Just because the game is aware that the B-plot is terrible doesn't make playing through those sections less terrible. And it's not as if Sid's lame fantasy novel gets better as the day goes on. If anything, it actually gets worse. And constantly getting transported to that world only takes us away from the story that actually matters. The only good thing about the side plot is that the paper-thin female protagonist is far less mopey and annoying than Sid, so it's a brief reprieve from his sad sack antics.

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Not that it matters, since the game is often unplayable. I don't have enough time to go through all of the problems, so let's focus on a few of the most frustrating issues. The very first thing I noticed is that I couldn't move the camera around while using a mouse and keyboard. Thankfully, I was able to get this to work by plugging in a controller, but you can't use it to cycle through certain menus and the cursor speed is about a million times too fast for the analog stick. The game also throws up invisible walls to prevent you from going to the places you need to go. Also, when you're riding in cars, you can literally detach your head and have it float outside the vehicle. And then there's the time when Forgotten Fields turns into a stealth game for about 30 seconds. Take a wrong turn and you're so far outside of the level that I had to start over from a pervious checkpoint. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time. This is a broken and buggy game with plodding conversations that is never fun to play.

Forgotten Fields is one of 2021's biggest disappointments. While the music is really good and I like being able to relate to a hero with writer's block, everything else about this meandering adventure is bad. From the rampant bugs to the poorly written conversations to a fantasy B-plot that is every bit as pointless as it is generic, there's almost nothing about this game worth recommending. Instead of playing this massive letdown, I suggest you go back and discover Frostwood Interactive's brilliant debut release -- Rainswept. You won't regret it.