Forever Worlds claims to be a game about a journey through surreal and immersive worlds where magic, humor, and beauty merge. It also claims to be chocolate. If you assume that “chocolate” is a code word for recreational substances banned in the USA then suddenly the first claims make sense. Forever Worlds is a whirlwind of disjointed and confusing cut-scenes with the occasional out of context puzzle thrown in. It’s a game that not only has an official solution guide packaged with it, it is fully assumed that you will be playing with it because that’s the only way to have the slightest clue what is going on. Forever Worlds is a “game” so maddening and terrible that should not be inflicted on your worst enemy.

You are Jack. You find this out from the solution guide. If you’re a fool like me then you don’t open the solution guide for a while and so you are Some Dude on a Beach and that guy in the cut scenes may or may not be you. The concept of the game is that the father of the woman you want to marry (also information that you can only get from the solution guide or by waiting until the end of the game) has disappeared while looking for the mystical Tree of Mu. From the moment you enter the first village and talk to the first characters the horror is palpable, but not the good kind of creepy intentional horror. As the villagers cavort and call you ugly and “boogie down” you realize that Forever Worlds is a game trying very, very hard to be funny. Trying so hard that they are willing to have things happen entirely out of context just for the hope of getting a giggle. Unfortunately, the chance of getting a giggle are very low – everything is forced and the game is simply too bewildering for anything to make sense.

Everything in Forever Worlds goes at breakneck speed. You enter a tree, take a step forward, and there’s a sudden short cut-scene of a blue guy touching someone who may or may not be your Some Dude Who Was on a Beach but Is Now in a Tree or may not be. The blue guy turns into the other guy and runs off. Then the cut-scene is over, with no context at all. The only way you’ll know what the heck to make out of that exchange is by reading the solution guide. After that you step up to a console. Looks like a regular adventure game puzzle. At last! Something normal! But when you click it a cut-scene suddenly fires with a flaming mask out of nowhere dominating the screen, yelling at you and then making a furious barrage of jokes about how he doesn’t have a body before abruptly disappearing and leaving you to finally get down to the puzzle. The entire game follows the same formula. You do something, a cut-scene that seems to have no context whatsoever fires just long enough to thoroughly irritate you, and you have to look it up in the solution guide to figure out what the heck just happened.

It’s not like the puzzles make much more sense. Forever Worlds gives you lots and lots of stuff to pick up. Sometimes it’s very easy to tell what you can take as most of the items look like stickers stuck on the drab 2d backgrounds. Sometimes it’s not as obvious, and when you add to that the frustratingly ill-placed interaction zones with objects in the game and you have a tooth-grindingly bad time. The puzzles also tend to either have literally no context whatsoever in the game, relying on that good old “force the players to read the solution guide” mechanic, or have huge obvious clues in the game that make them a breeze. There’s no happy medium between the two. On the volcano world you are forced to wander through a maze with no walls in the attempt to find the only place marker, a glowing red empty body flying a kite. Even the solution guide doesn’t attempt to tackle this one, basically telling you that you are on your own and giving you some vague directions to try. Once you finally make your way through the various places to do what you need they finally give a maze with walls. It’s as if the developers are deliberately taunting you for playing their game this long.

I choose to assume that a lot of “chocolate” was being consumed during the production of Forever Worlds because it’s otherwise impossible to believe that anyone thought this was a good game. From the annoying sidekick lizard’s sex jokes, to the whiplash you get from the fast and furious cut-scenes, to the lousy solution guide which is both required reading and written in a horribly obnoxious tone, there’s nothing in Forever Worlds that would appeal to anyone. Not even those with lots and lots of “chocolate.”