Gamer reviews for Forgotten Memories: Alternate Realities

Escape the Horror in Forgotten Memories: Alternate Realities

The dark holds a lot of mysteries with Its mere presence simply drawing fear to those who bathe in it. As darkness swallows its prey whole, light serves as the only thing that could free its victim from the dark’s deadly clutch. And when one only has around 5 minutes worth of time of light, survival becomes more challenging when one has the need to escape blurred by the very limited amount of resource for survival.

In the iOS horror game, Forgotten Memories: Alternate Realities developed by Psychoz Entertainment, the race to survival is married with bizarre challenges and horrifying elements.

Forgotten Memories continues to be receiving quite the praise as a horror survival game that could even rival the games of the same genre in the past. The game is available for download in App Store at $5.99.

Other than the mystifying setting, the game's premise is somewhat simple. Rose Hawkins, a private investigator working on a case of a missing little girl, wakes up in an abandoned asylum void of any memory of the events before her awakening. With this, Rose must find a way to escape the dark and creepy asylum, riddled with haunted mannequins, and also discover the whereabouts of the little girl. As soon as the player takes control of Rose, the player immediately begins the said mission with the help of a flashlight which has its light run out after around five minutes of continuous use.

The story and ambiance, somewhat reminiscent of some Silent Hill games, is also quite captivating--unless for the times when the characters aren’t provided much background and quite a character to really care about them. Voice-overs and graphics, however, are astounding considering the game was designed for mobile gaming.

Being a game developed for mobile devices, the game's controls are one of the things that may limit its fan base for the controls are not intuitive to gameplay and are difficult to deliver given the limited screen space mobile devices have. The lack of intuitive controls is evidenced by the absence of being able to make quick 180° turns--used especially for battling an enemy creeping from behind or perhaps an enemy which is only a foot tall.

Other than the difficulty battle controls have, the game's set controls for simple navigation and exploration are quite easy. To move around, players must drag their left thumb around the left-hand side of the screen while the right-hand side of the screen is used for view controls. On the other hand, examination and dialogue are done by a simple tap on the screen.

As the asylum is filled with horrifying creatures, fighting for one's life becomes a real challenge when Rose's life bar is not readily available to view even upon getting on battle mode. Checking equipment and weapons is somewhat difficult too since a command or button for quick toggle is not available.

Through the dark hallways of the asylum, Rose must find her way out with the help of a flashlight and a pipe or a gun for a weapon. Batteries of the flashlight run out fast so it is important to always make a mental note of the various locations of battery chargers. Meanwhile, progress in the game is saved on floppy disks, which players must collect around the area.

As of this writing, the game is also plagued by several crashes here and there. A visit to their site would support this claim as a warning that the game must be played with no other apps working in the background is displayed.

Forgotten Memories, with its highly impressive story and graphics is a wonderful game in itself. If not for the very limited controls and random crashes, the game could be easily branded as one of the year's best. But for everything else, Forgotten Memories is still a game that is worth trying. It is still a game worth taking note of as tons of mediocre apps are released day by day—this gaming community desperately needs more games like this; a game that is refreshingly good and well-executed and a game that not everyone would easily...well, "forget".