Forget-Me-Not Review

There are a lot of games on iOS that are inspired by retro gaming - but very few feel as true to the era, while remaining modern-friendly like Forget-Me-Not. This game falls somewhere in between Pac-Man and a Roguelike game. Your goals are to collect the key in each level, collect all the flowers strewn throughout the levels, and get to the lock that appears once all the flowers have been collected. There are enemies who are trying to stop you from doing this, and will attempt to steal the key from you as well. Your character constantly shoots bullets in the direction that you move, but you have to beware - your bullets can harm you as well, so you have to be careful when traveling through loop-around tunnels as bullets can come around and hit you. This is true of everything in the game, though - even enemy bullets can hurt other enemies, and you can use the key trailing behind you as a shield from bullets, both the enemies' and your own.

What Forget-Me-Not does really well is nail the retro theme. Everything from the graphic and sound themes to the simple swipe-based controls make the game feel like an actual old-school arcade game, despite playing on some of this millennium's most ingenious technology. It's definitely a bit more forgiving and modern than some games, but it has that old-school arcade feel that it nails really well. The game also has some depth to it - getting high scores requires mastering abilities like grinding the walls to charge your character up so that you can kill enemies by just touching them, and can hyper-charge your character for a speed burst, however this can cause you to explode if you keep it up for too long. The keys are to not just master the game's mechanics, but to also find opportunities to raise your score by collecting fruits consecutively, and by exploiting enemies like the consistently respawning pudding enemies. On the features side, the game is a universal app, comes with Game Center support for high scores, and supports 2 players on one device.

Forget-Me-Not may run on the smaller iOS devices, but due to its design, levels can be VERY small on the iPhone/iPod touch screen with the smaller levels that only take up the center of the screen, although the bigger levels look okay. If you can play this on the iPad, definitely do so. As well, I'm not a fan of your own bullets being able to hurt you. I understand how it fits in the physics of the game, but it also makes the game quite frustrating around the tunnels, and it's something I feel could be removed from the game and would make it more fun.

Forget-Me-Not is a great little retro arcade game - and I mean arcade in the truest sense. This feels like something that could have been made in the 1980's and just recently unearthed. This is 'retraux' in incredibly fine form, and well worth checking out for fans of arcade games and fans of retro-styled games.