The richness of strategic play and additive high-score runs make Forget-me-not a surprising classic!
Few games take me by surprise. Chances are, the first hour or two of playing a game, especially a game of performance or skill, gives a good indicator of what to expect from a game. Take Forget-me-not, a game that looks like a Pac-Man clone with the exception that you shoot lasers when moving - one might think that after an hour of gobbling pellets and dodging baddies, one would have a good sense of the entirety of the package. In this case, scratch that, as the perception of it being another Pac-Man clone threw me off the scent of Forget-me-not altogether. I was entirely ready to write this game off, a game that had received rather high Metacritic scores across the board. What were those guys thinking? Well, it turns out that once I forgot all about Pac-Man, Forget-me-not blossomed into a fantastic game of challenge, strategy, and adictively chasing the high score.
My mistake in qualifying Forget-me-not by it's looks are probably quite forgivable. Your "pac-man" avatar may shoot lasers, but otherwise the game SEEMS the same at first. You appear on a randomly generated map with pellets filling in the space between geometric alleyways. Enemies generate and move around, and though they don't usually chase you, they still stand between you and eating all the pellets. Once the pellets are gone, a gate appears. If you've grabbed the key, you can exit and move to the next level. Pretty standard fare right?
Wrong. Each of these aspects are entirely different than it's forebearer, and the gameplay, therefore, changes completely once that realization fully sets in. As a game of high scores, eating pellets certainly opens the exit gate, but they don't grant points. Rather, points are earned from collecting "flowers" which baddies drop after exploding in death. Eating flowers, in turn, stacks points in multiplier fashion if you eat them uninterrupted. Thus, the flow of the game moves from eating pellets to killing baddies. Enemies also drop potions which refill the life meter, grant more powerful laser shots, and even the occasional extra life. At first, shooting these baddies (which come in a wide variety of unique types, each with their own abilities and movement parameters) seems like a breeze, but the level design quickly reveals the need for high strategy. Each level contains a key, needed to open the exit gate. You might expect a key to be merely one-dimensional, but here, the key is critical, as it is the only in-game item to withstand laser fire as it trails behind you. Your laser shots themselves will also void any laser they contact. Thus with key in back and lasers in front, you move about always paying attention to the walls and your enemies. Empty space along the walls indicates places where the map wraps-around to the opposite side. Thus, long hallways with gaps on both ends are infinite, and can easily become shooting galleries of death if you don't go in prepared, or alternatively traps if you can set it up correctly.
Thus Forget-me-not proves once again that you can never judge a book by it's cover. The surprisingly deep gameplay makes for addictive runs where you continually push for your high score, and multiple game modes mean that there's multiple high scores to shoot for. Rarely have I been surprised by a game that seemed at first to be old-hat. Thankfully, that's a lesson that, ironically, I won't soon forget.