GordonJAGReview The Forgotten City Review

My favorite pastime is playing “old” games that everyone already knows are good. My second favorite pastime is playing “old” games that everyone already knows are good when those games are mods for Skyrim that got the chance to be built up as a standalone product. That second part is a lie. No disrespect to the Skyrim modding community, but you couldn't pay me to put half of those on a machine I own. The Skyrim roots make me nostalgic for a time when Bethesda knew how to (mostly) develop a video game. Well, that managed to both somewhat bury the lede and also give my broad feelings for the game away. One thing the Skyrim influence does not make me nostalgic for? Those extremely awkward Bethesda faces. You know the ones that come fresh out of the uncanny valley whenever you talk to someone. I understand that The Forgotten City has its roots as a Skyrim mod. I get that means the developer was probably most comfortable making the game feel like you were still playing that Skyrim mod. I don't fault them for that at all. It's exactly what I'd do in the same position. That doesn’t make it any less of a jarring lurch when you start the game and the first person you talk to is a woman who’s trying to stare daggers through you while doing her best impression of a fish that was recently beaten with a frying pan. Now, I don’t want to pile on a small developer for having some dodgy facial animations—one of the more annoying parts of 3D visual design in games. The push for better and better graphics is detrimental to nearly every area of game design, development, and enjoyment. There have been companies with infinitely more resources that still can’t make their characters look half as good as the ones in The Forgotten City. It was just more of a small bump in the visuals we had to step over during our vacation to the uncanny valley that occasionally broke the immersion. The fact that the whole experience managed to stay immersive despite the characters often looking like featureless walls with eyes and mouths taped to them is a testament to the game’s writing and general atmosphere. When you’re stuck in a time loop reliving the same stretch of time over and over, you definitely need things like the writing and atmosphere to stay strong, which The Forgotten City does well. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the game itself kind of sucks to play, but that’s not really what you’re there for. You wake up by a river, go explore some nearby ruins, and you’re immediately dumped into an ancient Roman city that is on the verge of an apocalypse. The intro is effective because it goes against just about everything you’re taught when playing a game. When I start up a game and it explicitly tells me not to steal or murder, I typically interpret that as some kind of challenge. Naturally, I did the same with The Forgotten City, called the game’s bluff, and then an angry voice in the sky made golden statues come to life and start gunning down the town’s population while I frantically ran away to reset the loop. After that, I was the world’s goodest boy, making sure I didn’t steal or kill to avoid the wrath of the angry sky voice by breaking the Golden Rule (except when I had to so I could reset the loop again). That’s where the game comes into its own. What it lacks in gameplay it makes up for in its philosophies, characters, and telling a story of how humans interact with laws and games they don’t know the rules to. There are people who don’t believe the Golden Rule actually exists and think that it’s a fear tactic to be abused by people in power. There are people who outright don’t care much about it and end up entirely indifferent to everything surrounding it. There are people who apply religious significance—or insignificance—to the Golden Rule. It was fun to discuss the Golden Rule with the characters and debate on its validity, especially when you know for a fact it exists on account of seeing it firsthand. I like that the plot serves the time loop mechanic well. From the start, you can tell things aren’t normal and are a little off. The lack of that "off" feeling is what frustrates me about some time loop games. Too many of them have a mundane setting that I don’t think gets the most out of the concept. An ancient Roman city that houses inhabitants that don’t even know if the arbitrary sin they commit will result in their deaths? Okay, I think that’s a little more in line with the tempo of the time loop concept. I wanted to keep playing because I wanted to take what I’d learned from each loop and see how I could change events in the next one. Yeah, I get that’s the point of this type of game, but I don’t play a lot of these. The game gradually building up knowledge and context while adding characters’ thoughts on the world to dig deeper into the mystery surrounding everything was something I found absorbing. The Forgotten City also does a nice job wrapping up just about every loose thread by the end, or it does that for the major ones, anyway. I didn’t end the game wondering much about something I felt was left unresolved. I also appreciate that The Forgotten City makes it easy to keep track of everything you’ve done from loop to loop, especially when it lets you keep key items you pick up on each run. It does take away some of the challenges of having to remember how to get certain items, but oh well, I feel like being able to show I can do something once is good enough. Needing to get the same key item loop after loop would have just gotten annoying after a while. I mentioned the game kind of sucks to play, and to elaborate on that, you’re doing a whole lot of walking around and clicking through dialogue options. It’s not a game for you if your preferred core gameplay loop is focused on a constant stream of action...or any action at all, really. Sadly, The Forgotten City does still have “gameplay” in it by having a few token action sequences in it. Again, the bones of the game being a Skyrim mod are showing, and the years have not been kind to those bones that have started to creak and groan under current gameplay sensibilities. Fine, they’re not that bad. They’re just sections from Skyrim where you play as an archer without any of the bells and whistles. I don’t know if anyone has played vanilla Skyrim this past decade, but the loose, floaty gameplay didn’t age particularly well from the day the game came out. The 10 years between the release of Skyrim and The Forgotten City haven’t done a lot to make the gameplay feel better. Fortunately, those action sequences don’t stick around too long, and when they are around, they don’t get worse than feeling like token additions to make it feel more like a “video game”. Outside of some Loop Hero and a very tiny amount of Deathloop, I’ve never given time loop games much of a chance. As a real “first experience” with them, I liked The Forgotten City quite a lot. Some small gameplay complaints don’t pile up enough to take away from an absorbing atmosphere, characters I wanted to learn more about, and a layered story that I enjoyed peeling away with each loop I did. I know everyone in the world already knows this game is good, but yeah, grab it if you like games with strong writing that last exactly as long as they should.