In The Forgotten City, you are a detective/archaeologist exploring lost ruins and investigating the civilisation within, in order to learn what the ruins are and how things work. One of the first things that happens in the game is you find a time portal in the old ruins. Stepping into it has a suspiciously Doctor Who-esque cutscene before spitting you out in a shrine to Proserpina, and the world looks a whole lot more colourful. Welcome to a Roman city.
If you’ve ever heard of the Roman military act of Decimation, the idea of dividing the army into groups of 10 and executing one of them at random in order to quell rebellion within the army, this game follows a similar mechanic, but exactly 10 times worse. If any single person in the town commits sin, then every single person gets immediately turned to gold. Of course while this sounds extreme, it’s not truly the end. And thank the gods for that, because it’d be a very difficult and short game if that were the case. Instead if you run back to the shrine of Proserpina, the leader of the town opens up that time portal again to take you back to the start of the day. This gives you the ability to take yourself (and your knowledge) back with you to the start.
Heres where things are weird though. As a time loop game, there is a lot of emphasis on what you know, since if you know whats going on during the loop, you essentially become an oracle who can see the future. But the way that the game gets around this to make a second playthrough not just be a game that can be solved from new game to complete in a single loop, is that the stuff you know is different to the stuff your character knows. The Forgotten City started off as a mod for Skyrim, and a lot of that has been brought through, so there is a lot of emphasis on talking to the people around you, and there are a lot of possible dialogue options. The smart thing is that the available options is based on what you did in your previous loops.
Oh and if you remember in my review of Manifold Garden, how I learned of games through the video essayist Jacob Geller? He did a video on this one too, though there are spoilers for one of the game’s quest lines in it, so I’d play the game first.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/874260 £19.49
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/the-forgotten-city £19.49
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