Review: With Great Ambition, The Forgotten City Transcends Its Mod Origins

As a tense, twisting mystery through a handsomely realized, historically accurate time and place, The Forgotten City is impressive.

The Forgotten City
Photo: Dear Villagers

At the start of developer Modern Storyteller’s time loop game The Forgotten City, you happen upon some underground ruins, littered with suspiciously lifelike gold statues of people, many of them locked in terrified and anguished poses. A time portal—entered because, as the man that you’re meant to find attests via a suicide note, there’s no way out—takes you back to the titular city’s comparative heyday. There are still gold statues all over the place, but now there are flesh-and-blood Romans moving throughout their prison-like city, living in fear of a so-called Golden Rule that mandates “the many shall be punished for the sins of the one.” No one is quite sure if the rule is real, but you, from the future, have seen the grim, gilded aftermath of what happens when it’s broken.

What follows is an investigation undertaken at the magistrate’s behest, a detective game built from the bones of an award-winning mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The vestiges of that action-RPG are visible in The Forgotten City, though the investigative bent means that the game centers the act of interviewing the central city’s ill-fated inhabitants in hopes of figuring out who will eventually be the one to doom them all. Suspects abound, as well as leads to pursue, which are cataloged like sidequests and can be tracked and followed through to their eventual conclusions—pertaining to what secrets are being kept, what grudges are being nursed, and whether either one poses a danger to the collective.

Once the Golden Rule is inevitably broken, you have to book it back to the time portal and restart the day, keeping any items collected along the way. Sometimes you must either sneak around gold zombies or fend them off with a bow, and it’s in these segments that The Forgotten City breaks from an otherwise tight, propulsive narrative framework for video game action. Mostly, however, you’re almost entirely an investigator rather than a fighter.

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The game is at its strongest when focused on the Golden Rule and the philosophical conundrums it introduces, many of them voiced through dialogue choices or the views of the city’s inhabitants. Murder may obviously be a crime, but what constitutes intent, and what qualifies as self-defense? If theft is a sin, what about theft under altruistic circumstances?

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Exploitive practices still technically follow the letter of the law, which is tangled up in the question of whose law you’re dealing with; Roman values differ from your own, and they may not even be the defining principles in the first place. In theory, you have nothing to worry about while walking the city streets because no one will attack anyone else for fear of breaking the Golden Rule. But tensions are running quite high nonetheless, stoked by current events like the ongoing election, a series of strange disappearances, and the whispers of a small cult among the residents. The early parts of the game are thick with suspense as you prod at the boundaries of acceptable behavior and watch them be prodded by others, worried that something as small as a lie or a profession of love might set the apocalyptic gears in motion.

As a tense, twisting mystery through a handsomely realized, historically accurate time and place, The Forgotten City is impressive, especially considering that it was made by such a small development team. Story threads don’t resolve the way you might expect while still managing to avoid outlandish red herrings, taking certain concepts like the gold statues in memorably horrific directions. The modern parallels—which don’t go unnoticed in the dialogue—make the story particularly resonant, with collective punishment and problems caused by denial feeling eerily analogous to the toll of a pandemic.

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But the game eventually feels, on a thematic level, like a bit of a cop-out, reticent to truly engage with the most disheartening and despicable conflicts that emerge from its setup beyond an overarching certainty that controlling people like this isn’t a very good idea. Everyone is a little too open to neat moralizing, leaning into what feel like talking points rather than natural conversation. In the process, the writing sacrifices strength of character for absolute clarity of message whenever people do things like eagerly lay out the history of the region’s imperialism. When you examine certain objects you’ll get a little educational pop-up for what purpose they apparently served (why, for example, the carrots are purple), and these parts of the dialogue feel more of a piece with that teaching instinct.

There’s some truly heavy stuff at work in this game: the inevitability of human failure, the problems of religion, the ability to actually reason with anyone through logic rather than emotion, the inherent inadequacy of a rigid rule of law or similarly fallible interpreters of law. The Forgotten City certainly doesn’t need to answer the philosophical questions that it poses before it’s allowed to examine them in a narrative context, but the ludicrously tidy conclusions to the main story and most sidequests ultimately feel like substitutes for any deep engagement. The game handily transcends its mod origins and tells an ambitious and thought-provoking story, but it eventually reaches a point where it doesn’t seem sure how to end.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by Tinsley PR.

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Score: 
 Developer: Modern Storyteller  Publisher: Dear Villagers  Platform: PC  Release Date: July 28, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Alcohol Reference, Blood, Suggestive Themes, Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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