Forma.8 hints and tips

What a lovely little robotic, exploring adventure. After much rooting around in the darker corners of the game, I just grabbed the Platinum trophy for Forma.8 (review). If you haven't tried it yet, the game is highly recommended as a perfect portable title. If you have it, and are missing an artefact, energy flower or are just confused by this rather cryptic game, then here's how to get find everything and get through the tougher challenges.

Basic Adventuring

Even from the early going, you will find out how the secrets in Forma.8 work, and can often see something you can't reach. Don't stress about getting these straight away. But do note down, or hold the left trigger and take a screenshot, where you saw them, to make it easier to pick them up later on.

As you go, nudge past any obvious secret entrances (see below), quite often you'll find either a flower or artefact. Some artefacts are hiding behind timed race events or the game's few real threats. For the races, you'll see a glowing orb, and a path or maze to navigate, sometimes with a few creatures to battle too. Learn the fastest route and each race should only take a few goes.

To collect this artefact, nudge the little lifeforms with your shield into the black hole to feed it! 

For the larger monsters, anything with a red eye, keep hitting it with your mines. For the venus fly trap, just keep it well fed. The big glowing orb can't be killed, so you need to run away in one of the longer races, keep going until it is trapped, don't think you've escaped as the map changes.

Explosions that track you can be useful to open up some areas

Energy flowers and keys give off a tone when you get close enough to them, keep poking around until you uncover where it is hidden.

Finding All 50 Artefacts

You will need all 50 to get the Platinum and the good ending. Most of the them are well hidden in the 

fiddly passages or dark corners of a level. The basics for finding the artefacts is to look for flat spots among the dark edges, shards of light, or other indicators. Also, look for glimpses of a room with no obvious entrance, while large dark areas can be obvious candidates for a hidden room. 

I'm trying to put a map together of the location of all 50 artefacts, will update when done! 

This flat spot soon gives well to a well-defended artefact

When you've gathered up plenty of artefacts, take them to this room and trigger the glowing totem. For every 10 you possess, you can open up one of the hidden hatches to grab useful extras to augment your probe.  

When you find 45 aretefacts, you will pick up a scanner that lights up any rooms on the map with a remaining artefact as blue. This makes it easier to know where to look, even if you can bet those last few will be pretty well hidden. 

The Tetris Shapes

The secret objects you find will actually trigger secret doors. Find the totems and trigger the object. Inside the unlocked room will be another object, find all of these and you gain access to the The Lost Temple.  Note down where the totems are, in case you don't have a secret object to open it with.

The Lost Temple

The Lost Temple is a series of endless similar rooms, with three different routes that end up with your finding artefacts, The first route is found when you enter the maze, printed as icons above an altar like strucure, the second is found by collecting Tetris shapes. Their meaning of the icons is found on a star in one of the outdoor areas.

The clue to navigating the Lost Temple is in the stars

The Dystopian Fortress

Near the end of the game, Forma.8 does its best to throw some 3D puzzling at you, as the mazes tower out of the screen, find the gaps that your ship will fit in and follow the path to the remaining pulse emitters, left or right of the main path.

Futuridium Ship

That familiar vessel is easy to find once you have the teleport skill. Head to the level with the pneumatic tubes, jump outside the normal route and you will find it at the bottom right of the large open area.