Annapurna's Forever Ago Completely Won Me Over with Grief

An unexpectedly sensitive tear-jerker

It'd be easy to look at something like Annapurna and Third Shift's Forever Ago, one of our most anticipated games of the fall, with cynical eyes. Another sad indie game about loss? Get in line, brother. There's a dozen more of you behind Spiritfarer. It's a walking simulator-slash-adventure game that follows an elderly man named Alfred after his wife Audrey dies. She left him a list of things to do, a posthumous scavenger hunt of sorts, and it's meant to remind him of the good times while he learns to move on. It's easy tear-jerker material on the surface.

But Polygon was able to play a demo of the early game and go a bit deeper. You quickly see Alfred isn't interested in reminiscing, nor is Forever Ago as easily defined as it first appears.

The demo starts with Alfred waking up at a motel. He looks out the window and checks his journal, where his wife left him a list of things to do. They shared happy times at this motel, and one of her favorite flowers grows nearby. Alfred, she hopes, would find the flowers, remember their time there, and order their favorite snack, sit in their favorite diner booth, and listen to their special jukebox song.

The flowers are gone, their broken petals scattered around the parking lot all that remains of them. Alfred picks some up and recalls snippets of the past.

The diner is less comforting. The aesthetic is all wrong. The booths have changed. The jukebox records don't work — they're just for decoration, one of the annoyingly young employees tells Alfred. Worse still, the booth, their special booth, is part of a blast-from-the-past special membership. You wanna eat there? Join the club.

Alfred didn't want to eat there. He doesn't really want to do any of this stuff. He loved his wife, but her absence left him trapped in an emotional netherworld. I appreciate Third Shift's more nuanced approach to nostalgia here. It might be a tried marketing trick, and easy to scoff at as a result, but studies have shown nostalgia's effectiveness in helping treat anxiety and depression. Alfred desperately needs that comfort as much as he needs to move on. But he can only grab at shreds of the past before uncaring modernity rips them from his hands. He's left alone and unmoored to anything substantial or comforting, an invisible wanderer drowning in his isolation. Moving on often isn’t as straightforward as we’d prefer it to be.

That context makes the rest of the demo, and the promise of Alfred's full journey, much richer and more promising. He travels away from the motel and gets caught up in other people's lives as he mentally revisits milestones from his relationship with Audrey. Here, too, Third Shift seems to be aiming for something more ambitious than your usual "tug-the-heartstrings" story. Yes, Alfred learns to rejoin the human race and enjoying what's left of his life. Yes, he finds strength in his past as he turns it into a lens through which he can view the present. He's coming from such a broken place depicted with surprising sensitivity and understanding, though, and that makes me very eager to see the route Alfred's journey eventually takes.

Forever Ago is one of the many October games inbound. It launches on Oct. 8 for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.