Platforming, puzzles and an anime aesthetic converge in Forgotton Anne

If you wake every morning, stare into the bathroom mirror and wish, most earnestly, for a story-driven platformer in which you get to fight a scarf, I have excellent news. Square Enix Collective has just announced its latest game, Forgotton Anne (not a typo), and it's a story-driven platformer in which you get to fight a scarf.

And the scarf is just the start of it, frankly. Throughline Games' debut is set in the mysterious Forgotton Realm (also not a typo), where misplaced stuff from our world tends to turn up. These unfortunate objects become the Forgotlings, strange creatures powered by a life force called Anima. Playing as Anne, one of two humans trapped in this unusual place, you get to manipulate Anima using a funny little hand-mounted doohickey, in order to solve simple puzzles and ultimately get back to the real world.

All of which explains why, a few minutes into a demo I was shown the other day, Anne kicked in a scarf and stole its Anima. She needed the Anima to power a generator to get the electricity back on, which seems typical of the sort of puzzles you'll be encountering. (If you're firmly against violence to neckwear, the developer leading the presentation suggested that if Anne had handled a previous dialogue sequence a little differently, things might have reached a gentler conclusion.)

Forgotton Anne is quite striking. It's a 2D platformer with a neat anime aesthetic, and hand-drawn characters whose movement, when leaping from ledge to crate to ledge, recalls the original Prince of Persia. As the name Throughline suggests, the developer, which is based in Copenhagen, is firmly focused on narrative, but there should be a decent number of puzzles, many of them involving that Anima stuff, which you can scan the environment for and send arcing across the screen with a flick of a thumbstick.

Forgotton Anne is available to play at EGX, and it's coming to PC, PS4 and Xbox One next year.