Before I Forget is the reminder I didn’t know I needed. While there is the terror of an illness at its core, the game is primarily a love letter to living life to the best of one’s abilities, of finding a place for career and relationships and of even mastering the art of forgiveness – toward others but most especially ourselves. It also delivers a message for these stressful times: be kind to yourself. Before I Forget resonates beyond any attempt to capture an illness (in this case Alzheimer’s ). While the game never lets us forget the heartbreak that is living through dementia , this is ultimately a game about remembering the joys of life. We play as Sunita (voiced by Anjali Kunapaneni), a woman with early onset dementia. The story unfolds as a mystery, encouraging both Sunita and the player to pause and reflect on one’s life. There are brief moments in which the game disorients us, reflecting Sunita’s inability to know the way around her own home. The indie game, envisioned by the two-person development team of Chella Ramanan and Claire Morwood, is designed to be bittersweet. As we discovered the highs of Sunita’s science career and her romance with musician Dylan (Mason Scott Robinson), Before I Forget seemed to be telling me that just because 2020 appears to have put many aspects of our lives on hold, I should remember to continue to do the things that I enjoy. “Sunita is a person who has lived a life and is not just a person with a disease,” says Ramanan. “We don’t want to look at her and pity her and be left with that. Like, ‘Isn’t it terrible what happened to her?’” Instead, the game wants us to walk away with a bit of an uplift, even as we discover some of the tragedies that befell Sunita. Horror video game’s ghosts, demons from Indonesian folklore make it a hit With a first-person perspective, we traverse a home shared by Dylan and Sunita. Dylan’s thoughts narrate the action as we come upon career mementos or notes that remind us what day it is, what pills to take and what groceries to stop buying. We pick up old postcards or records and sometimes view vignettes from the past triggered by the items. We find messages that appear to be written by Dylan, and hear his elegant piano refrains as we move, the music appearing like a character that’s trying to nudge a memory to the forefront of our minds. There’s also a tenseness. A challenge was finding the balance between the bright, slightly abstract look of the game and the emotional terror Sunita sometimes suffers. And yet we’re never not aware that Sunita is trapped in her home. Her wardrobe is outfitted with old newspapers that tell of Dylan’s career. Their placement may have once been the work of a proud spouse but now underscore the fragility of the thoughts of our past. There is a panicked moment where Sunita imagines a hole in her hallway and can’t remember where the home’s bathroom is, but the real horror is the realisation of how much slips from our minds, even when we are healthy. Though it was never intended as such – Ramanan and Morwood created the initial version of Before I Forget for a 2016 game jam event in the British city of Bristol – the game feels decidedly relevant today. Now, for instance, as we struggle to corral the coronavirus , it’s not uncommon to encounter someone who brushes off the pandemic by telling those who are fearful to simply stay home. “I never thought of it in terms of people resonating with it in a different way because they have actually experienced that isolation,” says Ramanan, noting we typically associate dementia “with elderly people or sick people or people who are disabled and might not be able to get out as much as they want to or are suffering from mental health issues. That was always the experience of the ‘other’ before, but maybe people can relate to it a bit more now – that loneliness ”. It’s key to the game’s appeal. Often when we discuss games that deal with serious topics, it’s done with the belief that there must be some educational goal, to put us in the mind of another person to create empathy and teach us to understand someone else’s point of view. But that’s not necessarily the intent of Before I Forget . Philippine revolutionary heroes star in fighting game Bayani “I’m totally confused by the people who always levelled that assumption at us, that games are somehow too frivolous to tell serious stories, and if they’re doing something serious they must then become a functional tool,” Ramanan says. “That’s a weird disconnect that I don’t understand. I don’t think any other medium has that problem. If you have a film with a person with dementia, you don’t assume it’s to go into schools and care homes to teach about dementia. That sounds ridiculous.” In fact, neither Ramanan nor Morwood have been close with anyone suffering from dementia. They simply wanted to tell a story that feels like a character study, one that uses a tragedy to celebrate life.