Forever Worlds

Forever Worlds, also released as Forever Worlds: Enter the Unknown, is a 2004 adventure satire video game from Canadian developer Hexagon Entertainment. Its gameplay uses a 360-degree navigation system across fixed locations, similar to the engines in Post Mortem and Syberia, and is reminiscent of the DreamCatcher title Beyond Time.

Players click to move between scenes and can rotate the view fully. The cursor changes to indicate puzzles, paths, informational popups, and items that can be taken. Hexagon estimated the game takes 25 to 30 hours to complete, and solving puzzles requires "the player to think and experiment a little."

Plot

The story follows scientist Jack Lanser, who begins a quest only to have his body stolen by an entity that then runs off with his girlfriend. The player, now inhabiting a different body, must set things right.

Development

The game was created by Courtland Shakespeare and Peter Faluisi. Faluisi, Hexagon’s Production Manager, explained the design philosophy: experienced players know all the clichés and are jaded, so the team wanted to surprise and entertain them, drawing on the creativity and originality of old sci-fi stories and cult movies to make players smile and have fun again.

Audio and music were handled by Steve Sauve, who also worked on Hexagon’s earlier game Jewels of the Oracle (1995). The development team used graphics packages including LightWave, Maya, 3DS Max, and Virtools Dev. Faluisi noted this allowed high-polygon images for the 360-degree navigation nodes and animations, and made it easier to assemble object-oriented code with Dev’s Building Blocks technology.

Reception

Reception was poor. The game holds a Metacritic score of 31% based on ten critic reviews. Tap Repeatedly praised the visuals and cutscene animation but criticized the dialogue and puzzles, saying they lacked the physical intelligence of Hexagon’s earlier work. AdventureClassicGaming concluded that while the game had excellent cinematic cutscenes and animations, it was spoiled by a cumbersome user interface, poor storytelling, and confusing puzzle mechanics.