The Forgotten City

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The Forgotten City: Video game was born to break the concept of “unmovable,” Do you know a concept that gets a lot of attention from game makers? Time! You might think that the concept of saving and loading games is a method of reversing time from a “meta” perspective. Still, recently, the linear flow of time itself has become a gold target for both game developers and development and fashion, thanks to the endless creative possibilities that you can explore by turning it into a loop.

Outer Wilds lets you explore a miniature planetary system just 22 minutes before the sun explodes. Returnal follows an astronaut stranded on a strange planet. Death loop sees an assassin find and destroy eight targets on an island to create a time paradox.

Twelve Minutes uncovers the truth about a married couple who a stranger visits.

All these games are in a different genres: open-world exploration; roguelikes; Immersive Sim mixing action, cinematic adventure.

When players lose, games take players back to a past point instead of the “Game Over.” With the idea that What the player concludes or discovers in one play will help find new clues in subsequent plays.

That’s why most players of a time loop game will often not have the same gameplay, thanks to the “sandbox” design based on the player’s searchability.

From there, we see a “rookie” to this emerging but potential genre with many interesting tricks – The Forgotten City, from Studio Modern Storyteller.

In 2015, modder Nick Pearce released a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim called The Forgotten City, with the idea of ​​solving crimes by time travel. It was quickly whispered and received by Skyrim fans and subsequently won the 49th Australian Writers Guild’s “Best Screenplay” award.

Nick Pearce is back and “doubled” when creating a new independent team called Modern Storyteller to bring The Forgotten City to the Unreal Engine 4 platform, no longer needing to be involved with Skyrim.

The biggest change when The Forgotten City decided to “leave home” was in the context. Instead of traveling to Dwarven ruins, the journey to find the missing person brings you to a Roman city suffering from the curse of “the many will suffer the punishment of the single.”

If someone breaks the law, like stealing or harming others, the golden statues scattered throughout the city will come to life and execute all the people. Your goal is, of course, to break this curse.

The Forgotten City’s structure is arguably the closest to Outer Wilds. Giving the player a starting point at each loop and the freedom to explore the city the way they want, but giving the player clearer instructions when analyzing the game separate all the clues in the traditional form of quests.

The only way to get all questions answered is to talk to the 20 or so residents of the city. Each of them is torn differently; their look at the “Golden Code” encompasses the myriad of prohibitions set forth by Judge Sentius to prevent the curse from continuing.

The city harbors an underground power struggle, and you can quickly realize you’re not the only one feeling insecure about it.

Fortunately, each time the curse strikes and the time loop enters, the main character’s memory does not lose, as well as the items you have collected are still in the inventory. Take advantage of these two keys, and you may find interesting twists and turns in solving The Forgotten City’s ingenious “human puzzles”: you need an item from the scavenger’s hand, and the curse will instantly slam; across the city when you “steal” it! But the item is still in your pocket in the next loop, everything has returned to normal, so maybe that decision is the right one?

That is where The Forgotten City comes into play within its framework. You know that someone is plotting to kill another member of the city, you certainly can’t put an arrow through his skull, but with a line or two, you can lure him to a place no one should be. This option will only appear when you have witnessed the end of an innocent person (or even yourself) walking in it.

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That’s how we use loops to solve cases, but the original goal is to break the loop itself, right? To do that, you need to solve 20 “side” quests (which aren’t at all) to solve three main questions: who broke the law and what the city inhabitants have in common. What is, and what is the key to reversing the curse.

Not everyone knows their fate and why they are suffering from this curse. Still, once you go further, understanding the nature of the city and how the inhabitants drift there, You will gradually realize that the screen is hiding the main mastermind with hints that the game cleverly integrates through every person you meet.

(If you decide to replay The Forgotten City for a second time, I suggest you keep an eye on how “he” talks to you and how he treats some of the other NPCs. You won’t expect the game to imply to him how clever!)

However, don’t forget that The Forgotten City is still a pure puzzle game, meaning its linear structure will always give you a specific sequence of tasks that you need to do, not absolute freedom like Outer Wilds.

Due to this nature, you will have to do the same things repeatedly that you have completed many times before. Therefore, the game cleverly places a character right in front of the exit when you start a new loop; through a few words of help, he will help you complete the side quests directly related to the main point.

That is not only a convenient mechanism that saves players time, but it also directly affects the scenario and the “canon” ending of the game.

Not much of a surprise; Modern Storyteller also tried to cram combat into The Forgotten City. It was boring, so boring that the writer had no more beautiful words to describe it.

If you remember the archery style in Skyrim, The Forgotten City’s combat is 90% parody of it, but even more minimalistic.

The game has two sequences where the player is forced to deal with bronze statues that only know one thing to do: “run like a dog chasing” you and then scratch all kinds of things. The main character also only knows how to do two things correctly: pedaling or arching; if they come close, throw their feet straight to keep the distance, as well as an arrow in the head will turn them into immovable golden statues.

The game’s AI is quite naive or gets stuck in the middle of the aisle and completely dies if you stand on high, which means that the challenge of confronting them is almost zero.

They’re not too scary, and both sequences are longer than necessary. The writer would enthusiastically applaud if the game replaced them with tough environmental puzzles or more clever dance segments.

In the end, although The Forgotten City fulfills the mission of an adventure game in terms of gameplay, the other half of the game – the content, carries quite a bit of conflict.

The overall story of The Forgotten City is about free will and humanistic themes related to humanity and the way people treat others. It uses anecdotes from Greek mythology to contrast how people use power and position to discriminate or cast hidden prejudices on others.

The idea is that but the implementation of The Forgotten City is quite fuzzy, one-sided, and sometimes inconsistent. One of the side quests that make the writer raise an eyebrow the most revolves around a graffiti character threatening to kill another character. You will have to find out for a long time before you find out that he is extremely irritable due to arthritis, so he decided to put it all on the other person’s head to relieve the pain.

The point? The victim is a gay guy. At this point, the writer doesn’t understand what message the game wants to send. That homophobia is not a cultural issue that the people who hate it are “difficult to live in,” but it does not stem from the living environment or cognitive biases?

The lack of clarity in the message that The Forgotten City wants to convey is also in the main plot. Fortunately, the player will not defeat the final boss by firing hundreds of arrows to pull down his health bar, but of course, you will use “martial arts” to break the curse.

It wouldn’t be worth mentioning if the last character of the game slams all the concepts and themes in the content that the game took about 8 hours to imply for you. It doesn’t want you to brainstorm to see the real truth; this last conversation only serves as option B (but mandatory) if the player does not see the story’s purpose.

Also, what’s worse is that even though the game’s message is truly sublime – because who can be against individual freedom? – The Forgotten City does not convince the writer with new ideas about human rights or human ethics. Still, it just parodies pretty basic philosophical concepts from the time of Socrates that we all know.

The main character belongs to modern times and has a lot of radical ideas. Still, once he argues with other characters, the game doesn’t give them a lot of logical reasoning from the ancient Roman ideology. As a result, they will always accept the main character, rightly speaking.

It’s a bit one-sided, and the writer personally doesn’t get many meaningful messages from The Forgotten City because its all-too-familiar radical ideas crush everything and leave nothing behind. What a truly memorable moment.