Unforgettable Love Review

The story begins with a cliché: you wake up with amnesia. A young woman takes responsibility and lets you stay at her place. A job application for a financial company, UPON, is the only thing in your possession. With no qualifications, a kind HR lady at UPON hires you as a security guard. Here you will cross paths with five women and regain memories.

Following a short introduction to each love interest, you choose who to visit. At this point you barely know them. But after picking one, it makes no sense to deviate from that path. That would be the equivalent of reading chapter one of a book and switching to chapter two of another book. The game should have let players read the first few chapters of all books.

The love interests remain apart for most of the game. This isolation is so extreme that you can play from the intro to the chapter 7 endings and only see one, excluding your housemate, Ingdao. Also, while each has their own arc, the story beats are too similar. After playing one, you can predict most of the others. This parallel is critical to the mystifying and creative amnesia plotline, but it sours the replay experience.

After you recover every memory fragment, which takes hours of timeline exploration via replays, the five will appear together and two additional chapters get unlocked. These last chapters have perfect endings and narrative closure, so they are definitely worth seeing, but prepare to grind.

It helps that the five love interests have great personalities, genuine appeal, and make some cheesy lines work. Milin has monetary ambitions and fights an arranged marriage. Nene seeks information at UPON and you can help. Ida struggles with office politics as you visit her at night. Ingdao enters a singing competition with some encouragement. The last, Proud, is a perfectionist who is unavailable at first because she requires money that you won’t have yet.

Money is earned via simple daily stock-trading and carries over into a new game. While cash is used for choices, it generally accumulates through replays.

There are quirks. You cannot freely enter every scene, but the timeline has enough checkpoints and skipping works as normal. There is some egregious product placement with toothbrushes, juice, and noodles. But if promoting Thai products allows them to keep making games then I also love BUD’s delicious strawberry ice cream and PENNY-O’s tasty Nugus chocolate bars.

For a game that demands to be replayed, Unforgettable Love could have alleviated the grind and tweaked some narrative replication. Thankfully, the true endings do offer a very sweet reward for about nine hours of play, but it’s not all ice cream and chocolates.