Shoutout to PR Hound for reaching out, and Binary Phoenix for providin a key for the game.

I'm not good with writing short and concise texts, so I'll be rambling a bit. But I hope my experience can give others a better picture of how the game is :)
It's been a while since we finished our playthrough so I might've forgotten some stuff, but this should cover most of it.
(I didn't intend to write this much but here we are).

Note that my experience is specifically from the co-op campaign, which is likely veeeery different from single player.

TLDR: Hard puzzle-platformer that is very fun (and difficult) as a co-op experience. I would recommend playing single player before jumping into co-op. Use Assist Mode if the game feels too hard, it's really fun. Really nice pixel art. And the devs are really cool!

This was advertised to me as "think of Celeste, but with the ability to play with a bud". I don't necessarily feel this is a very accurate description of the gameplay (as there is no jumping tech or climbing), but I also don't really know what to compare this game to. I probably would not have gotten this game if not for PR Hound, as this isn't really my type of game genre, but as a silly co-op experience this was top tier (we both sucked at Celeste).


We went straight into the co-op mode without playing single player. In hindsight I would not recommend this. I have yet to fully play the single player campaign, but the difficulty of the early levels is quite easy compared to co-op.

The level difficulty fluctuates quite a bit. It didn't feel like there was any logical ramp-up in difficulty from one level to the next. We could spend an hour trying to clear one level because of how ridiculously hard it was, then clear the next one in one try. It felt very strange and kept happening.
Note: The devs have since made several updates to the game, making adjustments to multiple levels, so it may not be as bad now.

Our progress through each level went something like this:
1) Try to understand the level
2) Think of a plan
3) Fail to execute plan multiple times until it works (either due to skill issues or level difficulty)
*repeat steps 1-3 as needed due to misunderstanding the level or having a bad plan or because we missed something because we're both colorblind lmao


This could be a skill issue on our part, but both of us had a really hard time getting a hang of the controls. Something about them doesn't feel intuitive. The ones that kept messing us up were the orb targeting rotation, and creating platforms+releasing the orb.
- For the targeting, maybe being able to use the right stick would feel more natural, at least as an option. A way to pre-aim was also something we wish was a thing.
- For orb release after creating a platform, we felt using the same button to lock in place and release the orb would feel more natural instead of splitting the actions between 2 different buttons.


Due to levels being split in two and the nature of dying and retrying a level over and over, the player who doesn't start with the orb can end up doing nothing for a looooong time. This could sometimes mean an hour or more of downtime depending on how difficult the opening of a level is.
For us this often led to the orbless player forgetting how to play the game and having to slowly relearn the game once the opening became somewhat consistent and you actually got the orb. The orbless player has no way of interacting outside of backseating.


I feel the game could benefit from having a sandbox level where you can test new mechanics or just warm up. Many of our resets happened because we weren't sure how some interactions would work out in practice. Whenever we failed to execute something, we could never be sure whether it was due to a missplay on our end or our strat just being wrong. The assist mode options sort of allow something like this, but not quite, and using assist mode also marks the level with an easy mode tag after clearing.

Another thing that we were missing was the option to swap starting positions at the start of a level. On one of our final sessions we finally figured out that it's possible to swap characters through the remote control co-op menu. But I feel this could be an actual feature in the game itself.


Forgotten Fragments Co-Op is an infuriating series of mishaps and massive satisfaction once you finally succeed. There were some levels that we cleared in a way that definitely felt unintended, but "cheating the system" in this way a few times felt quite satisfying whenever it worked. Assist Mode is also really fun to mess around with, even if you don't necessarily need the help. We started using it towards the end of our playthrough and wished we had tried it earlier. Good game, I'll probably play through the solo campaign at some point as well.