Forgotten Fragments | PC Review

October 5, 2025 Eric Sandler

As an avid puzzle game fan, Forgotten Fragments, the new puzzle platformer game from developer Binary Phoenix, caught my eye and my interest. It drew me in with a simple yet elegant formula of “throw ball in hole” but with platforming, secrets, and a co-op mode that, sadly, this review won’t touch on. However, what they didn’t tell me was this simple puzzle game would come with a hefty side order of pain and rage.

Puzzle Basketball

The core gameplay of Forgotten Fragments is pretty easy to grasp: Enid, our main character, can pick up a glowing orb and must deposit it in a sconce to beat the level. As the game progresses, additional mechanics are introduced, including throwing the orb, surfing on shoved boxes, and turning the orb into a platform. Likewise, the levels become progressively more devilish, with wicked spike placements and requiring precision platforming. One misstep and you start the level over again. Fall into spikes? Start over. Orb falls into water or spikes? Start over. Hold onto the orb for too long (traveling!)? Start over. There’s going to be a lot of that.

This is the crux of Forgotten Fragments: it’s Super Meat Boy in a puzzle game wrapper, and it’s not shy about killing you. Each level, when completed, shows the time you took to beat it as well as how many lives you had to expend. It definitely isn’t afraid to tempt you with that straight dopamine hit of “FINALLY, THANK GOD!” when you master a level and conquer it after a hundred deaths.

And that dopamine is well-earned. The platforming in the game is…not bad, but there’s a slight wind-up to Enid’s run that is very off-putting when compared to other challenging platforming games like Celeste. Basically, rather than run at full-tilt as soon as you press the D-pad, there’s a half second walk and then you’re moving at a run, which can throw off any muscle memory you may have accumulated.

Be At Ease

Fortunately, while it may seem a bit of a cop-out for some, the game also includes some accessibility options that make things easier. The traveling timer (how long you can hold onto the orb) can be extended unto literal infinity and you can disable spikes and improve the guidance the game gives on your throws. Given how rough the game can play, it’s really nice of the developers to include the option, even if it gives you a pink badge of shame on your end of level summary.

Forgotten Fragments is honestly in kind of a weird spot: it’s ostensibly a puzzle game, but really what you should be looking for here is the kind of tough-as-nails platformer that you’d look for with, say, Super Meat Boy, Celeste, or La Mulana. While some levels require some brain power to figure out the sequence of moves to get the ball in the hole, others make it very plain what you need to do and how to do it. The real question is, can you do it?

Should You Buy It?

Forgotten Fragments is currently available on Steam for $13 USD, discounted to $10 for the game’s launch. It boasts a total of 120 handcrafted levels, though the ones in the co-op campaign were sadly out of my reach, so I only beat around 60, plus the secret levels I’m still hunting down. If you’re into pain, and I mean the good stuff, Forgotten Fragments will provide. It’s not for the faint of heart, yet it gives you the tools to customize the experience if rage isn’t your preferred mental state. It’s a quality game for the price, and if the devs tighten up the platforming, it could be even better.

To hear me talk more about Forgotten Fragments, be sure to listen to our October 1st, 2025 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:10:35 timestamp.

This review is based on PC copy of Forgotten Fragments provided by PR Hound for coverage purposes. As of this writing, it is exclusive to that platform.