My dad suffered a brain injury last year and passed away in April as a result of it and the complications that came with it. I’ve since been increasingly drawn to game experiences that tackle brain, memory and dementia because of how its impacted my life over the last couple of years. It has been a very rough ride and I’m curious as to how games approach the topic.
Don’t Forget is a free game which is a short 20 minute experience that acts like a look inside the mind of someone with brain injury. Spread across three chapters, you play as someone exploring their house, a hospital ward and an outside road as someone who can’t remember very much. A bit like a papercraft isometric adventure game, you move around these environments and interact with various objects in an attempt to jog your memory and spark something. These nuggets of info are stored in your notepad as a menu of thoughts, post its, polaroid’s and drawings and much of Don’t Forget revolves around finding several of them to advance the story. It isn’t hard to do and that’s a good thing.
Periodically you are also tasked with completing brain training tasks like sums or Simon Says pattern recognitions. These are nice short distractions and doing well increases your focus to remember a clue. They add some gameplay to the experience and help the clunky and rigid movement mechanics feel less cumbersome by breaking up the time you spend moving into smaller chunks. The main impactful parts of Don’t Forget come from the use of graphics and post it notes spreading like a plague to help you remember things. You can also reach a game over state by staying too long in a level and not moving the plot forward as you will become lost in a fog of your own mind.
Whilst a free experience is always welcome, Don’t Forget feels like an appetiser for meatier and more polished, paid games. For those I’d recommend Inner Ashes and Before I Forget – two impactful games about brain injury and Alzheimer’s. Use Don’t Forget as a way into these games but ultimately, both of those do more justice to the topic by having more expansive storytelling and polish overall.
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