I could not really find a spooky game demo to play for today, so I went with my backup. The backup is a game that I wanted to talk about before, but I had a few other demos that I wanted to talk about first. Now is the time to talk about a fun little puzzle platformer that can be both single-player and co-op. This week is Forgotten Fragments.

Forgotten Fragments is a puzzle platformer from Binary Phoenix. The game will be released for Steam first and then for the Nintendo Switch later in 2025.

Forgotten Fragments opens up with the player controlling a young woman named Enid as she wakes up and finds herself in a series of dungeons that are “lost to time.” An elderly woman speaks to you as she has been here for such a long time that she has truly forgotten her name. Lynn then tells you the way out and how to regain memories before it is too late. This requires searching and retrieving four fragments from the dungeon and bringing it back to Lynn.

The gameplay is your typical platformer. You are running and jumping a lot, but the key mechanic here is that there is a blue orb that, when picked up, the player has a limited time to get to its final destination before the time runs out and you have to start over. A simple concept with limitless possibilities.

Forgotten Fragments gives the player a few levels to try, which all work really well.

A controller is much needed as throwing the blue fragment is tied to a timing minigame. You will throw orbs onto switches that unlock doors and extra areas to deposit more fragments to complete the level. On occasion, the player will have to throw crates to then jump on them to cross larger areas. The number of deaths and cumulative time is noted at the end to entice more speed running of levels.

The environments themselves really remind me of Splunking, with tight corridors and lots of traps to bait the player into restarting from the beginning. As the demo continues, the dungeons keep getting larger, and more orbs are required to complete the levels.

Once the player understands the core gameplay, that’s when Forgotten Fragments becomes an exciting race against time.

Back to the good old pixel graphics. Forgotten Fragments has quite a nice charm with cute, chubby-faced characters and absolutely gorgeous environments that are accentuated by fanning flames on torches and little fireflies that hover over small patches of moss and water constantly flowing in the background.

Forgotten Fragments sounds and looks great.

There is a nice little dungeon-themed melody that accompanies the player as they race around, throwing around orbs that sound like they have weight to them and jumping that sounds like you are rocketing off the ground.

Forgotten Fragments was really fun when I got the hang of how the game played. There were moments when I was questioning the game as I just kept throwing crates off cliffs, wondering if I had to kaizo it, which I don’t think that I could have done. I ended up figuring it out and was pleasantly surprised at how fun the game was after that.