If Lara Croft were a real person, and if the daredevil archaeologist loved playing video games, there’s a very good chance that The Forgotten City would be her absolute favourite game. Ancient history, mystery and the supernatural entwine in this open-world treat for lovers of adventure and narrative-driven games.
If the name The Forgotten City sounds familiar, it’s because the game began life as a massively acclaimed Skyrim mod, earning 3.7 million downloads, and even a national Writers’ Guild Award in Australia. Building on this success, mod maker Nick Pearce founded indie game studio Modern Storyteller and, with two other developers, remade The Forgotten City as a standalone experience completely divorced from The Elder Scrolls universe.
Doomed to repeat the past
In the completely overhauled The Forgotten City, your present-day character finds themselves trapped in a subterranean Roman city 2000 years in the past. The twenty or so inhabitants – a diverse group of patricians, plebeians, slaves, military men and foreign tradespeople – are held hostage by the Golden Rule, namely “The many shall suffer for the sins of the one.” Put more simply, should one person in the city commit a sin, everyone will die.
Just your luck, you’ve arrived on the day of that catastrophe. Fortunately, there’s a mysterious time loop to exploit, providing you with multiple opportunities (if needed) to identify and stop the Golden Rule breaker, figure out what’s really going on, and escape back to the 21st Century.
Deduction and debate over violence
The Forgotten City isn’t the only game releasing in 2021 to feature a time loop (see also Returnal, Twelve Minutes, and, duh, Deathloop), but its integration with the Golden Rule has a unique impact on gameplay.
While there is combat in the game – largely in relation to one unnerving, and optional, horror-survival segment – violence typically shatters the Golden Rule. Players are therefore deprived a standard video game method of problem solving. You simply can’t go around shooting people willy-nilly, as that will force your retreat to the time portal and restart the day. At times, you may want that reset, of course, such as in the case of irreparably alienating a useful informant, or stealing some much-needed denarii. However, you’ll also find yourself in situations where you must work out how to sidestep bloodshed, like when confronting a resolute assassin.
The Forgotten City is a rare game that rewards de-escalation of conflict, and peaceful solutions. There typically are a few ways to solve each puzzle, depending on your preferred playstyle, and it’s even possible to finish the game while entirely avoiding combat.
Multi-faceted cerebral satisfaction
The surprises in The Forgotten City don’t end there. Modern Storyteller is on a mission “to create games telling emotionally-engaging, thought-provoking stories.” They’ve succeeded with their debut effort.
The Forgotten City is heady stuff. Discussions with locals about the Golden Rule bring up all kinds of philosophical debates (appropriate to the setting) about the nature of sin and morality. Why do certain actions break the Golden Rule, and not others? Is there one universal, unquestionable definition of good and evil, or is it always shaped by society-specific norms? Can you truly trust others not to sin? Are smaller acts of cruelty against individuals acceptable if they preserve the greater good?
All of these questions come to the fore as you interact with the city’s diverse population, which includes non-Romans, people of other faiths – including outlier “cultist” Christians – homosexual characters, and even the intellectually disabled. The Forgotten City isn’t a game to be rushed, as each inhabitant has their own fleshed-out personality and backstory. They also realistically go about their day, and interact with other NPCs, as you move around.
In case you think at this point that The Forgotten City sounds relentlessly heavy and heavy-handed, it really isn’t. While your choices affect the fate of the city, there’s also quite a bit of dry humour. Players can draw on modern sensibilities and references, much to the confusion of the Romans.
As for other pleasures, The Forgotten City is an impressive looking game with a suitably epic orchestral score, and obvious attention to historic detail – guided by archaeologist consultants. While even armchair scholars of ancient history are unlikely to further their knowledge due to the game, it’s still enjoyable to see things like Roman ablution blocks and fermenting garum accurately depicted.
Finally, there’s the satisfying thematic parallels between the game world and our own. The past year or so, many of us globally have been confined to our own Forgotten City, living in lockdown limbo while relying on others to follow shifting rules in order to prevent disaster. Those basic similarities make The Forgotten City slap that much harder.
Throwback, for better or worse
The only real gripe about The Forgotten City is that the game has entered the 2020s with some of its decade-only Skyrim roots still attached. While there are contemporary features like a very comprehensive photo mode, the controls – particularly first-person traversal controls – are clunky, and the build accessed for this review had a particularly frustrating bug where a major confrontation never triggered.
Also, the Groundhog Day nature of any time loop media means you’re forced to repeat some conversations multiple times until you achieve the optimal outcome. That said, you can rapidly click through, and skip, dialogue so the tedium is minimised.
These complaints do feel like niggles though in comparison to the rich and rewarding game experience as a whole. For the record, The Forgotten City delivers eight to ten hours of gameplay, with four different endings. The fourth “canon” ending is the most emotionally satisfying and complete in terms of resolving the game’s greatest mysteries.
The Forgotten City is playable now on PC, Xbox and PS. A Switch version, and physical console editions of the game, are planned for later this year.
| The Forgotten City review | |
The Forgotten City is full of surprises. You’ll be disappointed if you’re after sleek and relentless Assassin’s Creed-style action in a historical setting, but in its place you’ll uncover a different trove of cerebral and emotional treasures. The Forgotten City is thought-provoking, powerfully immersive and sets the gold standard for NPC design. It also puts a fresh puzzle-orientated spin on the time loop mechanic. |
9 |
| The Forgotten City was reviewed on PC | |