FOREVER AGO

A road trip down memory lane

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Developer Third Shift

Publisher

Annapurna Interactive

Format PC

Origin Germany

Release 2023

Photographs can be a powerful gateway to the past – to places we might not have been, or faces we might not have thought about, for years. This is a power that Third Shift co-founders Kai Brueckers and Fabian Denter understand all too well. After all, the duo might never have made Forever Ago if Brueckers hadn’t asked to borrow Denter’s camera for a trip he was taking with his family, flying from their hometown on the western edge of Germany to America’s west coast.

“We basically toured from Arizona to San Francisco, and then along the Pacific Coast Highway down to Los Angeles,” Brueckers says. Alfred, the game’s protagonist, takes a similar road trip. His beaten-up camper van drives along a desert road lined with telegraph poles, through the kind of dense pine forest found in the Yosemite Valley, and along the coast, where the sunset recolours sky and ocean in a way we can’t help but associate with an Instagram filter.