Forgetful Dictator (PC)

When I was a kid, I conceived of a game where I’d use a map of the world as the basis of a simple world conquest game, starting in some small country and gradually spreading out from there. I never did come up with a proper mechanic to build the game off of though, my younger self wishing for something quick and simple but not so easy that there would be no resistance. Little did I know, the perfect mechanic for such a concept might just be a geography quiz, as Forgetful Dictator almost feels like my childhood game concept finally realized.

In Forgetful Dictator, you are playing a game both about taking over the world and remembering the names of countries, the two tasks linked together in a fairly simple manner. The player is able to pick to either try for global conquest or only aim for a single continent or region, and from there, you’re thrown in with your starting country, the player asked to identify which random place was picked as their launching point. Besides the shape of the country and its placement, your only real clue are the blanks you fill in telling you how many letters the name contains, but once you capture a country by typing out its name, all adjacent countries become available for your unique method of takeover.

The game isn’t just about labeling countries correctly though, as Forgetful Dictator is an edutainment game that wants you to learn the countries and retain what they are for a repeat play. If you don’t know a country, you can spend intel to reveal a few letters from it, potentially jogging your memory if you’re in an area with a lot of crowded small countries with nearly interchangeable names. If you guess incorrectly, you will lose troops, your army serving as your life meter and the game ending if you run out. However, if you mess up your guess by just a letter, Forgetful Dictator will let you try again until you’ve found the right letter, so there is a bit of leniency there. Intel and troops can be earned by conquering specific countries containing treasure chests, these packing two options you can choose from. Usually these will be the aforementioned choices, but there are also incredibly useful power-ups you can find late in the game such as having every country’s first letter be filled in automatically or you can increase the frequency of the equally helpful trivia questions.

At random points between conquering countries, you will be pulled away to answer a trivia question about the places you control. These can be things like guessing the capital or flag of a country, there being entire modes based around filling in capitals or picking the right flag for a country from a few options for their own twists on the world conquest formula. Other trivia questions might ask for special details about a country’s culture or history, these ones being especially common when you encounter your rival for global domination: Dino Dictator. This monocle wearing tyrannosaurus rex will randomly claim a country and gradually expand from it in much the same way the player does, and if the player doesn’t head over and steal the territory from the dinosaur, they can risk their game coming to an abrupt end. If you fail his trivia questions your troops will eventually force him out anyway, but losing that life can be risky if you haven’t built up a good reserve. Dino Dictator can be toggled off, but he is actually a brilliant way of forcing a player out of their comfort zone. If you are leaving a few countries off to the side since they’re harder to guess, Dino Dictator might plop down and force you to head over to them, pushing through the sidelined territories instead of just coasting by on the easier countries for early gains.

If you really are struggling with remembering the right information for a country though, you do gradually build up a BlitzCraig, these being rapid fire multiple choice menus where you can clear through a few countries without having to enter the information yourself. The countries you can’t remember might be a good target for a BlitzCraig so you don’t lose any soldiers if you guess incorrectly, and the mild complexities to Forgetful Dictator only continue to evolve from there. Global Conquest mode features missions where if you conquer similar countries such as all Spanish speaking ones or ones that were part of the Soviet Union you will be rewarded with powerful items such as a random free country conquered or a superweapon that can be dropped to take over a country and its neighbors without a fight. Other than the other major modes where you guess capitols and country flags instead, there are also options to have every country presented in one long BlitzCraig where a failure ends the run, a hardcore mode where you must enter names without any blanks to guide you (or more flags in the multiple choice flag mode), and the rather odd option to have the world upside down so that it’s harder to identify a country based on our normal understanding of a map of Earth.

All these mechanics mix well into something simple enough to pick and up play but with enough meat to it that Forgetful Dictator isn’t just a shallow quiz game. Intel helps you when you need it, random events add extra opportunities, and the different modes give you more to do once you feel you’ve learned the countries well. However, when it comes to edutainment, the effectiveness of it as a learning tool is an important question, and Forgetful Dictator is strange in that regard. There is no real way to study except by playing through the game a few times to learn country names and trivia answers, but this isn’t necessarily a bad way of learning. A Forgetful Dictator game doesn’t last overly long and usually moves at the player’s pace, so popping back in to play again is easy, the continent-specific options making for good segmentation so you can learn through play. Each country is part of the satisfying global conquest game, making learning and remembering countries and their placements incredibly important. I know I won’t be forgetting where Senegal and Suriname are now after they routinely tripped me up until I finally made a mental note of their placement, and other little facts have become rooted in my mind like that the Falkland Islands’s capital is Stanley and Kosovo’s flag has a miniature image of the country on it. In the same way a player may learn the layout of a level that requires proper reactions in another game, Forgetful Dictator teaches by incentivizing memorization, with intel and other options meaning it isn’t absolutely required to win either. However, capital mode especially could use a better in game way of learning the names, and flag mode sometimes boils down to recognizing the wrong options instead of the right ones in its multiple choice design for conquest.

The cherry on top to the Forgetful Dictator experience though has to be the humor of the game. As no doubt implied earlier when I mentioned a character like Dino Dictator exists, Forgetful Dictator is a game that portrays its global conquest in a lighthearted and fun manner. The titular dictator is constantly chiming in with little jokes, perhaps a little bit too often, but Dino Dictator’s rare appearances makes the ridiculous quips he yells incredibly fun to see. The dictator’s eyepatch-wearing second-in-command provides a more acerbic wit to the game as she seems much more cartoonishly diabolical compared to the dictator who just seems to be conquering for the fun of it. Some of the best humor comes in the presentation of little things, like how a trivia question will be framed as a country in revolt because they think you forgot what their name is, or how the game justifies multiple takeovers of the world as the dictator completely forgetting he had ever gone on a world conquering spree. Even the nuclear weapons are rebranded as missiles filled with love and support, this quirky take on creating a global empire able to make you laugh between the geography quiz questions.

THE VERDICT: Forgetful Dictator is what an edutainment game should strive to be. It incentivizes learning the countries, trivia questions, and more by making them part of an enjoyable and silly global conquest game, the player learning because it helps them enjoy a simple but varied gameplay style.  While it is more of a geography quiz than way to study the world map, it makes information valuable in acquiring resources so that memorization is achieved by experiencing it in the context of play rather than through dry study. With a dash of strategy added to the affair, Forgetful Dictator makes geography fun and accessible for almost any age of player.

And so, I give Forgetful Dictator for PC…

A GREAT rating. While personal knowledge may make a person’s efficacy in playing the game swing high or low in regards to difficulty, Forgetful Dictator has structured itself well to reward learning the countries and even offers the harder modes of identifying capitals and flags that will test all but the biggest geography buffs. The mechanics that allow for learning the places you don’t know help to gradually build up a player’s knowledge so it can be drawn in for repeat playthroughs as they chase high scores, unlockables, and achievements, or just the simple enjoyment of taking over the world in a casual but challenging game. Having tools to work around hard areas such as the BlitzCraig, things that force you to challenge yourself like Dino Dictator, and the random trivia questions that provide an incentive for learning more than just the basics about countries, Forgetful Dictator ends up an excellent test of how well a player knows the world while providing a fun way to fill in the gaps of their knowledge. Features that allow you to see things like the capitals or flags to study them would no doubt improve the harder modes, but Forgetful Dictator still provides a fun challenge for people looking to put their geography skills to the test.

Learning and play are intertwined excellently here, the player’s growing knowledge providing the progress in an enjoyable yet simple world conquest game. Edutainment often overly prioritizes the information being learned over the game being played to their detriment, but Forgetful Dictator has its many different mechanics all feed into the global domination angle of the play, with remembering facts and answers simply being the method of taking over countries. The humorous presentation and reward for knowledge is what makes Forgetful Dictator both a fun way to learn about the world and a fun way to conquer it.