You will lose in Before I Forget, a video game about dementia

Claire Morwood and Chella Ramanan are a micro-studio called 3-Fold Games, and as they're about to release Before I Forget, we took the chance at Gamelab Live 2020 to talk about this unique story with the latter, who's the Narrative & Game Designer on the project.

According to Ramanan in the Gamereactor interview above, Before I Forget is "a first person narrative exploration game. You play as Sunita, a woman who is living with dementia, and you walk around her house interacting with objects. The house is in greyscale when you first experience it, but when you interact with an object, it brings colour back into that part of the world and it triggers a memory for her. So, by interacting with these objects, you piece together her story."

During the interview, and with recent games such as Hellblade or AI: The Somnium Files also depicting mental health illnesses, we talk about how video games as a medium are ready and mature enough to deal with these delicate topics, and also about how they as creators have to deal with player frustration as this is deliberately a confusing experience because of the theme.

"Gamers are used to winning," recalls Ramanan. "They're used to gaining control of the situation and feeling successful and obviously that's not the experience of dementia: you struggle against it and ultimately, sadly, you lose in those kind of gaming terms".

As a Humble Original, Before I Forget has been available to subscribers in June and will release to every player on PC on July 16. It lasts for about an hour and will also be available in Spanish among other languages (French, German and Chinese), as Ramanan announces during the interview.

Ramanan is interested in the stories that are not being told and celebrating diversity, and her next project, being "a child of Windrush" herself, is Windrush Tales, which will explore the rarely covered stories of the Windrush generation. But before you forget, press play on the interview above for all the exclusive insight.