Unseen Scars – Remembering Forgotten Hope

By Paramie Jayakody

The topic of mental health is tackled differently by different people, and you rarely get people exploring each topic the same way, as mental health and how we perceive it is different to each one of us. 

However, there are some who explore these moments in a way that brings everyone into their experience, their lessons. Be it prose, poetry, or art, mental health is a topic that is seen across all platforms. 

However, recently, when Black Hammer Studios developed a game along that theme, it immediately piqued our interest just because of how different it is. Named Forgotten Hope, the game came out a few months ago. 

Read on for spoilers!

Forgotten Hope is the result of three friends, Sohan Gunaratne, Naveen Damintha, and Sithira Siriwardana wanting to share their experiences with the world. After all three lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, morale was low. So when they got the idea to do a game, they hopped right on it. 

Despite the fact that none of them had any game knowledge whatsoever, they managed to develop a fully fledged game in a matter of few months, an accomplishment in itself! Intrigued by the name, the visuals, and the teased storyline, we eagerly awaited the release. 

Available through steam, we were lucky to get the game a couple weeks earlier for a test run, and here’s what we observed:

For starters, this isn’t a heavy game, with the download being just above 1GB. The installation process also went by pretty fast. 

The first thing I noticed was…darkness. Quite literally, as the character wakes up in a cave, in the dark. And just like that, I was hooked. 

As I played on, I noticed a significant lag in the game, which gave the whole thing a choppy feeling. Sohan assured me it was a glitch with laptop devices (of all the luck) and several cross references with friends also supported that theory. It seemed to work fine with desktops. However, by playing around 10 mins at a time, I was able to keep the lag at a minimum. 

One of the better aspects for me in particular was the graphics. Of course it was nothing special, rather basic, in fact, but the visual landscape was rendered in such a way that it was stunning. My gameplay was interrupted frequently because I would stop to take screenshots of the grassy mountains, the leafy forests, the glass-like water, or the smoke twisting up towards the sky. Game aspects were rendered in similar painstaking detail, much to my pleasure, with maps, items to collect, and little memory cards appearing on screen to guide me. Overall, the graphics and visual aids were charming and I couldn’t get enough of them!

Speaking of guiding me, hand holding during the game was at a minimum, with the most (only?) form of guidance being a mysterious spirit wolf who guides your character to explore her past and piece together what happened. The independence was one I welcomed. That being said, it led to several moments of disorientation as I was frequently logging out mid task to keep the lag down, and if I had forgotten what I was doing by the time I logged back in, I would have to run around for a few minutes to locate the wolf and figure out what I was doing. 

However, this would not be a problem for most other players, as this game is designed to be played in one sitting. The whole thing took me about 90 minutes of play. 

However, it didn’t feel like 90 minutes of play for one reason and one reason only: the storyline. 

Now, personally, I am a sucker for a good storyline. I’m one of those people who believe people in art don’t pay nearly enough attention to the story. Forgotten Hope turned that all around for me. Despite the annoying lag, and the running around, the storyline was what made me unable to stay away. 

Starting in a cave, like I said, we as the main character have no idea what we’re doing there. As we navigate our way out and into the world, the character remembers more and more of their life through familiar rituals. Sometimes certain landmarks trigger memories, which we get in the form of memory cards. This journey leads us from cave to shrine to island, waterfall, spirit tree, village, home, a maze, and finally to the lighthouse. All the time, whilst exploring, we realize that the character has been dealt a very short stick in life. She’s been through a lot of hardship. She’s restless, turbulent. I started to get a very uneasy feeling somewhere around the spirit tree.

In the maze, she reconciles with the spirits of her deceased mother, her emotionally unavailable father, and her long gone best friend, and you think this might have a happy ending. But at the end of the maze, at the lighthouse, we read a final memory card: the suicide note our character left behind. And as we realize that she’s finally come to peace and doesn’t want to die, it’s too late. The game was nothing more than that flash of your entire life that goes through your head as you’re about to die. 

As expected, that ending was heavy, and carried a significant message. Speaking with Sohan, who had gone through a similar experience, he shared that it was the inspiration for the game format. “Truth be told, Naveen came up with the story arc,” he shared. “But 3 years back I had a near death experience. And I used that experience to enhance the story.” He further explained, “For me I saw my parents and all the good people in my life during my last few seconds.” While Sohan’s story had a happy ending by virtue of his friends and medical staff, the thought that by the time you realize what you’re leaving behind it’ll be too late stayed with him, and that’s the powerful message Forgotten Hope conveys. 

While the team is still learning, their first game itself has managed to hit the market in a very unique manner. With an unheard of storyline, unique storytelling, and a wonderful backstory, Forgotten Hope also goes the extra mile to be inclusive. For example, narration is done through audio, but the text will also appear as floating letters in front of the character. Similarly, memory cards also combine the two, an aspect I appreciated. 

Black Hammer studios plans to do more games, Sohan shared with us when asked. While they’re still being drafted and he can’t share any details, he did tell us that they’re playing with around three different ideas. 

You can watch out for these on their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/BlackHammerLK