A bit in the way of background: “It Begins …” is the
first in a planned series of seven The Forgotten games. According to the
information at the start of the game, you are just supposed to get your feet wet
and get a feel for the controls, the basics of the story, etc. The designers say
they have already begun work on parts 2 and 3, “The Collection” and
“Anasazi,” and they say the games will become progressively more difficult
and more technologically up-to-date. Supposedly, you will find items in this first
installment that you won’t need until subsequent installments.

Story

“It
Begins …” with you trapped in a study. Whose study is it? Where are
you? Who are you? How come you can’t leave? You look around a bit and do some
reading, find a gun and a pocketwatch, poke around some more, and finally find
a mysterious card. You click on the card, and suddenly … you are traveling through
time and space. “Huh?” you say, “what gives?” Well, ever the
intrepid adventurer, you look around your new surroundings, literally a road to
nowhere, lined with buildings. You turn around in an attempt to see where you
came from, and there is a gate with spots for three cards. You put the mysterious
card from the study in one of the spots, and voila! it fits … but nothing happens.
You figure you need the other two cards to return to wherever it was you came
from, so you take your card back and go exploring. There’s not much you can do
in any of the buildings except an old, dusty, abandoned, slightly creepy apothecary
shop. What do you find there? Where to next? Where are those two other cards?
Who are the Forgotten? Who are the Collectors? Enough clues are scattered around
that by the end of the game, I was totally sucked in by the plot, but the game
ended extremely abruptly, and now I have to wait for the second installment.
It’s kind of like that Stephen King series, The Green Mile, where instead
of buying one moderate to large paperback, you must buy six slim volumes, all
at near full price, just to read one stinking story (which I never did, by the
way). And then on top of that, since I can’t go buy the second game right away,
there’s no way I’m going to remember everything from the first game by the time
the second one is available. The plot would have been great had it been fleshed
out more, and fully realized, but as it is, I find myself strangely compelled
to give it a D- just out of sheer pissiness.

Graphics

The
graphics are nice but slow-loading. This is a Quicktime game; I am beginning to
hate Quicktime games. You always have to click to see something or move and then
wait for a long time (we’re talking entire seconds here, not microseconds, and
they add up quickly, especially when there’s a lot of backtracking) to see whatever
you’re aiming at. The scenery in “It Begins …” is all very nicely
drawn. There are not many animations, but they are also well-done. There is one
in particular that was spectacular. You are at the end of a sewer tunnel wading
in the muck, and you look down at the water and get your finger-pointing cursor.
You can touch the water as many times as you want, wherever you want, and get
little ripples that overlap each other wherever you click–it is totally realistic
and totally pointless, but I wanted the designers to know I appreciate those little
touches. Anyway, I will give the graphics a B+, not an A, only due to the
slow transitions between the views.

Sounds/Music

The sound
effects are sometimes annoying but mostly well-placed and effective. There are
a couple of spots where there is a clock tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking, ad infinitum,
to no discernable end, and that got on my nerves in a big way. There is also a
squeaky sign flapping in the wind that was too realistic–I wanted to oil my computer–but
that was mercifully short. That was the annoying stuff; the rest of the effects
were just there to do their job. The music should have been left out altogether.
The introductory and ending music was lovely, but the in-game music consisted
of as few as two or as many as ten notes repeated over and over again, slowly,
so as to sound dirge-like. This category gets a C because the sounds/music
are dead average.

Interface/Gameplay

This is a standard
point-and-click interface with inventory, but additionally there is an area called
“collection” which is where your more permanent items go, for example,
the card that carries you out of the study. The onscreen inventory gets filled
up with about four or five items, and then you must move it to the offscreen inventory
to get room for new items, but I rather liked this feature because of the lack
of clutter. The “collection” works the same way, but I never got more
than two things in it, so I suppose the designers were planning for the future
installments with that one. There are a lot of red herrings. There are inventory
items that never get used, like the original pocketwatch and gun, and I never
did find all three cards to return through the gate, all due to the incompleteness
factor. On the plus side, this is one of the very few games where I never needed
a hint. You never die, there are no mazes, and there are no sliding tile puzzles,
all of which are good for brownie points in my book, so I rate this category
B.

Overall

I feel gypped by dint of not getting a full
game. This series idea would have been okay if each game stood on its own merits
and subsequent games simply built upon each other to fully flesh out the game
world; however, here it results in an incomplete game. I certainly hope the designers
chuck the serial concept for the next game in favor of a series; if
that were to occur, it would have a lot of promise. Whatever they decide, and
despite all my criticisms, The Forgotten was fun and interesting, and I
will be very likely to play future installments.

I am unsure whether this
type of an easy, short game is a good way to attract future adventure gamers;
on the one hand, they may find they really like adventure games, the slower pacing,
the cerebralness, the (usually) strong stories, but on the other hand, they may
wonder whether all adventure games leave you hanging in such a rude manner.

Final
grade for The Forgotten: It Begins … is a C-.

System
Requirements

PC:
Windows
98/95
Pentium 133 MHz
16 MB RAM
8x CD-ROM drive or faster

Mac:

PowerPC 133 MHz
24x CD-ROM drive
32 MB RAM minimum, 64 MB preferred

130
MB free disk space
Requires QuickTime 3.0 or higher (Quicktime installer included
on CD)