Forget You Not

I developed a game concept about dementia, inspired by my grandmother's life story called "Forget You Not". This was my master's thesis at HAW Hamburg.

The result is a platform game in which players discover memories from the perspective of Nani, who suffers from dementia. As she travels through her past in reverse chronology, the level structure becomes more and more complex. At the beginning, Nani is an old woman who can hardly move. Her surroundings are very monochrome and seem almost unreal. During her journey through the house, she finds memories that are bright and colorful. I used a mix of keyframe and frame-by-frame animation to depict the contrast between memory and reality. As the game progresses, the real elements disappear more and more. All family members are depicted as sheep, while those who are "enemies" in Nani's eyes appear as wolves. Her father wears wolf clothing after his return.

In the demo, you play 16-year-old Nani, who picks up her father from the train station after he was deported for a long time. He probably won't recognize her anymore.

The game is based on a real memory of my grandmother, who suffered from dementia. She grew up in the German Banat region of Romania and lived in very poor circumstances. Her father was deported after World War II because of his German origins, even though he had fought on the Allied side. When he returned, he entered the family home backwards and explained that he had fallen in love with a woman and wanted to move to the big city with her. My grandmother was supposed to go with him, but she refused. This bothered my grandmother a lot, even into her dementia, which I took as inspiration for this idea.