If your bar for quality has dropped so low to the point where this is some of the best writing in gaming, please seek help or play more narrative video games.

For a game made for "Adults who like figuring things out for themselves" the mission path is extremely straight forward, and there isn't much thought required to get through the game. Aside from a single moment, nothing in here really feels clever. It's a game with a timeloop mechanic, but they do fuck all to give you interesting puzzles/narrative beats to get around by using said timeloop. Most solutions play out with you choosing dialogue until you say the wrong thing, then on the next loop you go back and say something different. Feels more like reloading an old save instead of actually solving a puzzle. And it's not like you have that much input either, as the options are usually pretty rigid. In fact, there were several moments where the game would not let me say the one thing I wanted to say, which is especially annoying when some asshat, debate-lord NPC is lecturing you on something and you literally can't argue back. It's so surface level and rigid that I can't fathom why anyone would think the dialogue and choices are interesting or meaningful. I mean I literally got the "True" ending on my first run through and I didn't even feel like I did anything to deserve it. I just followed the obvious path forward, how inept do you have to be to get a "bad" ending?

Speaking of the ending, the big reveals in the last act are unbearably corny and play out like something you'd probably see in a random Gmod level or a porn game. It's a bunch of self-congratulatory bullshit and it doesn't feel earned because, again, I don't even know how it's possible for someone to get a "Bad" ending. And despite coming out, what, almost a decade after the original mod? This game still plays like a skyrim mod, and I'd argue the original mod's visuals fit much better, and Skyrim's facial animations are about on par with this 2021 release (I'm also fairly certain Skyrim has better combat then this thing too, somehow). I seriously can't believe this game was made in Unreal 4. It looks like it was made in Unity, by people who don't quite understand lighting and post processing.

The premise is definitely interesting, and there are a few early moments that show promise, but by the end I think this becomes a laughable excuse for storytelling. If someone loves this thing, please enlighten me as to why. Because to me, the detective elements are paper thin, the ending is eye-roll worthy, and it's just super corny and self-congratulatory as a whole. And the 4th wall breaking jokes are some facebook mom level humor and having a "Karen" joke literally 2 minutes into the game does not set a great tone.

I enjoyed this title! However, I don't think I was enamored by it as much as the internet is making it out to be. I really enjoyed the characters, the central mystery, the setting (Who doesn't love Roman / Greek stuff?) and the dialogue choices. The game also makes some really fantastic way to make the jumps between time loops more frictionless and keeps the pace moving. The game is primarily hurt by the janky technical elements, gameplay section that don't add a ton and some very corny voice acting (Story goes a bit bonkers at the end also). I still recommend it but perhaps temper your expectations a little before hopping in.

Forgotten City focuses on a time looping city on its last day. By the end of the day, someone will sin causing everyone present to be turned into golden statues for eternity. The premise of the game is immediately intriguing, and I think the aspects of the game that question the moral and philosophical ideologies of the populace as well as what the proclaimed "Golden Rule" would mean in such a society are where the game shines the brightest. The final "confrontation" itself is also a neat bow to tie around the story itself (at least one of the ways of resolving it) and quite satisfying.

For the negative, I think the game probably doesn't utilize the time loop aspect of the game as well I would have preferred. A lot of time is given in a loop if you don't happen to mess something up disastrously (like killing someone or stealing) which gives the player ample time to resolve a lot of the mysteries in a single loop. For instance, I think I had basically solved all of the questions of the game after four loops(basically amounting to about a loop every hourish). Much of the cast members themselves also don't feel like they are quite given enough time to shine with some characters actively feeling rather irrelevant/barely relevant in my playthrough. Both of these issues kind of stem from the fact that the game itself is on the shorter side barely reaching past 5 hours of playtime. The game doesn't overstay its welcome in any capacity personally, but it did leave me with a sense of "that's it?"

Technically, the game is okay. Some tearing resolved with vsync, and generally stable framerate as far as I could tell(on PC). Character models often look a bit unsettling, and while the environments do the job well enough, this is definitely not a game you'd play for the aesthetic. I believe I had heard that the story for this game had started life as a Skyrim mod, and though the engine and game itself has obviously changed away from that, the Elder Scrolls DNA will still be exceedingly present as you go through the game. I don't necessarily think it a bad thing, but it is funny and slightly distracting at times.

All in all, I played the game because I wanted something to metaphorically wash the disappointing taste of another recent time loop game, 12 minutes, out of my mouth. Forgotten City, while not perfect by any means, is a good time, and, at the very least, accomplished what I wanted from it.

A perfect little game with very, very little filler. I think of it as the first really well-designed town you come up to in an RPG, where all the quests flow into each other and the presence of each piece enlivens the others around it. This is a game that simply tackles that one small town. It won't take you more than ten hours to 100%, and in a time where games seem to be exploding in length but have little content worth exploring, that's a beautiful thing. Great writing, interesting characters, and fun use of the time loop mechanic make this worth a binge session or two.

A strong gameplay loop that is very creatively woven into the engaging story makes for a compelling introduction to a game that also features all sorts of fun interactive dialogue, deep characters and a whole ton of interesting lore to delve into.

However, it does have its fair share of unintended cheese, with dialogue like "The shrine! It's collapsing!" (as the character stands there awkwardly just as it crumbles on top of them - reminded me of stuff you'd see in early PS1 games) & the entire final image of a few dozen people all cheering you on as you silently watch on... But for the most part, the writing is beautiful and gives you a lot to think over during your time playing.

My only wish is that there was more to do after seeing through the canon ending... I was initially intrigued by the "who dunnit" mystery but it has no effect a second time round, and I genuinely would have enjoyed seeing a bonus mode that ignores the larger story and gives you a new guilty member to reveal as so many of the characters already had great motivations in place to allow for this.

Overall rating: 7.8/10

The Forgotten City is a peculiar, mystery-based walking simulator within a time loop frame. The game on the whole invokes a open world RPG with its quests; you’ll talk to various residents as you unearth the city’s secrets. It’s fitting, since The Forgotten City began life as a mod for Skyrim. The game makes some extremely bold choices with its setting and world, and your suspension of disbelief will certainly be tested at the game’s climax and epilogue.
Still, the characters are charming, the dialogue is well-written, and the game world is a fascinating and fully realized place.

I would personally rate this game as 4.5/5, but I’m willing to accept the game’s substantial flaws because I’m so impressed by what it pulls off successfully.

Ein kleines, liebevoll gestaltetes Zeitschleifen-Abenteuer. Der große Star dieses Spiels ist für mich die Stadt, in der es spielt. Man befindet sich in einer wunderschönen, verborgenen Stadt des antiken Roms, die voller Details und Geheimnissen steckt. Dann wird der ganzen Welt durch einen Cast interessanter und gut synchronisierter Charaktere auch noch so viel Leben eingehaucht, dass man sofort in dieser Welt versinkt.
Zum Spiel an sich ist noch zu sagen, dass die lästigen Komponenten von Zeitschleifen-Mechanismen gut gelöst wurden. Ein Loop geht meistens recht lang und insgesamt muss man dadurch nicht all zu viele Loops durchspielen. Außerdem werden durch cleveres Design die meisten der frühen Aufgaben in späteren Loops obsolet.
Die Story an sich fesselt von Anfang an. Man ist sofort verleitet herauszufinden wie genau diese goldene Regel funktioniert und welcher der Anwohner Böses im Schilde führen könnte. Das Gameplay besteht hauptsächlich aus Argumentation in Dialogen und kleineren Such-Rätseln. Das macht Spaß und funktioniert gut. Mehr braucht es eigentlich auch nicht, da man in einer gut 5-stündigen Sitzung durch das Spiel durchkommen kann.
Wenn ich etwas kritisieren müsste, dann wäre es die Tatsache dass ich das Gefühl hatte eher zufällig über das Ende gestolpert zu sein, welches dann sehr abrupt eskalierte.
Insgesamt hat mich The Forgotten City aber durchweg gut unterhalten und ich ziehe meinen Hut vor der Leistung des kleinen Entwickler-Studios.

I liked it. The character writing here is good, the overarching narrative and mystery is compelling, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I wish they had done more with the time loop - there’s very little of the “oh at this point in the loop X person will do Y thing, so I need to do Z” kind of thing that Outer Wilds did, but that’s more of a missed opportunity than a fault of the game. I also don't think the combat stuff really fit here - I would have much preferred it to have been purely focused on the adventure aspect. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of Modern Storyteller in the future.

A valiant, but ultimately messy effort. At times I was so immersed and fascinated by the world and setting that is crafted and all the systems interacting with each other only to be forced out by overall jank, repetition and systems not fully recognizing my actions. The last point is the most important one. Systemic games like this one that are built on choices, consequences and player knowledge live and die by the integrity of their simulation. What happens if the player pushes against the systems presented in the game? If the game doesn't break and even anticipated the choice a feeling unlike any other is created. The problem is, though, that you have to support an enormous number of interactions in a game where you interact with a decently sized cast of characters going about their lives in a roman city across multiple time loops. And this game unfortunately broke the illusion a few too many times for me in the end. I would still wholeheartedly recommend this game to everyone who is curious due to its low time investment, as I mentioned, this is a truly valiant effort that hits on so many points, I just wish it were a little more polished in the end. Also I was incredibly weirded out by that final ending, a bold direction certainly to put it favorably.

The Forgotten City is a pretty cool experience that's still a little rough around the edges. While a time loop game isn't 100% unique they're definitely few and far between, and really cool when done well. This one mostly succeeds, and does so while being very heavy on NPCs and dialogue which I think are difficult to get right. While those aspects aren't perfect I think it still did an admirable job with them. My problems with the game are mostly minor but sort of add up to it feeling like a less polished experience overall than it could have been.

While the dialogue is pretty well written for the most part, the dialogue choices feel forced the large majority of the time. You start out with the same handful of options when talking to pretty much any character, which is pretty uselessly repetitive when you could just have fully scripted conversations. Thankfully the player character doesn't actually speak so there's no dialogue choice mismatch nonsense, but still even past the initial options I mentioned it feels like your choices aren't very meaningful. You can play into the role the game wants for your character, or not, but if you don't you probably won't be making much progress. Overall I'm fine with that, I don't need this to be a roleplaying game, but the presentation of it is in conflict with that and feels like a leftover from its origins as a mod.

Speaking of leftovers, the combat sections are just awful and really unnecessary to the extent they're used. Don't get me wrong, it's not a ton, but I still didn't need to do it more than once. I also ran into an unfortunate number of performance issues and glitches that did affect gameplay, I did play this fairly close to launch so hopefully those will be fixed but it is worth mentioning.

Before I get into somewhat spoiler-y territory I'll say that I would recommend this overall and it's a very interesting game if you're into this type of thing.



==Minor spoilers for the ending below==

The endings for the game are kind of a mixed bag in my opinion. The first two are pretty much the same, and while they are unsatisfying I doubt anyone is going to stop there, I just wanted to see them out of curiosity. The third ending is actually my favorite, while it isn't the "true" ending I thought it was very strong on its own. Maybe this is because it's the first one I saw, and some of the others reuse content from it which I mostly skipped through, but it felt well thought out. The true ending I think was still worth getting, and the very end I have to say was touching, but the conversation with you-know-who was ultimately kind of boring and unneeded, and I didn't really like the design of that final area. It was fine though, I didn't hate it or anything. I also thought it was a bit awkward at the very end how most characters didn't really recognize you if you did the ending towards the beginning of a loop, it makes sense but probably would've been better if they plot-magic'd that away. Thankfully all of the endings are pretty quick to see if you have a save in the late game anyways.

Got completely sucked into the world of this game. I enjoyed the writing and characters, with their multitude of arcs and varying responses to different scenarios, and the amount of different interactions and alternate paths I could have taken towards certain routes makes it fun for replays and experimentation. The world just felt so fully realized, I loved just wandering around experiencing things and stumbling upon little details I didn't notice earlier. It's a hell of a counterpoint to 12 Minutes, with essentially the same general concept but far more effective in its writing and execution. Things follow logically here; there isn't the same need that 12 Minutes seemed to have to provide shock value with its convoluted, meaningless plot. It's not a perfect game, but it resonated with me in just the right ways - I adore it. I wish more games could do this sort of Majora's Mask approach to a fleshed out, relatively compact yet full and vibrant world... timeloop not necessary, but appreciated.

Also, did any any% speedrun time of 3 minutes and 15 seconds. One of the only times in my life I'll ever be able to say that, probably!

(Light spoilers and impressions ahead)

I picked this game up after hearing people rave about it, including suggestions that it would be a GOTY contender. Ultimately, it didn't blow my mind as these impressions would have led me to expect, but I still thoroughly enjoyed my (time) travels throughout the mysterious Roman city.

The premise is really interesting. The city is governed by a mysterious Golden Rule, "the many shall suffer for the sins of the one," and this poses a dilemma, not only for the cast of characters in their interpersonal dramas, but for yourself as the player. For example, killing someone probably breaks the rule, but what about selecting a dialogue choice to verbally threaten to kill someone? In my playthrough, this led me to adopt a cautious, tactical, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" roleplay, which feels pretty awesome in a murder mystery-like game.

In practice, though, the morality system is far less consequential than the game leads you to believe. When a sin is committed, the game resets the world state (described in-universe as time travel), and you start fresh, albeit with some new (and often enjoyable) dialogue options. But, as I discovered midway through the game, the player's actions never have lasting negative consequences: there's no functional difference between resetting because a genuinely evil character murders another, or the player abusing the resetting mechanic by killing a random NPC after making a mistake. This came as a disappointment because the game explicitly urges players to make deliberate, thoughtful choices, and not to "brute force" the game. In truth, it doesn't matter that much—the endings have less to do with your individual choices and more to do with how many video game quests you've linearly completed.

I found the story to be pretty good overall. Some of the twists weren't as mind-melting as were hyped up to be—again, the devs sorta set up my expectations by placing an explicit warning against sharing spoilers on the home screen. For instance, the big antagonist reveals are genuinely surprising, and in some cases lead to fascinating conversations. And then they kind of just get resolved soon after.

Where I will give the game credit is the moral and philosophical questions that underlie conversations with characters vis a vis the Golden Rule. For instance, how does a community with differing views interpret a moral law? How effective is the rule if bad people can just create loopholes and good people don't have a way to fight back? There's definitely some interesting food for thought.

On a side note: I played on base PS4 and the performance issues were awful. The framerate rarely exceeded the mid-20s, and dipped significantly during action sequences. Loading times were horrendous—at least 30 seconds on average—which made it really rough to travel between areas or even load checkpoints after dying (which happened far more frequently due to the janky framerate). It's a shame, because it doesn't do the beautiful environments justice. I'd probably recommend you play this on a next-gen console or PC for a smoother experience.

What an excellent, unique experience! The Forgotten City is a wonderful narrative mystery game that sees you stuck in a timeloop until you can save a mysterious city from an accursed fate. The gameplay, mostly involving exploration and dialogue but with a tidbit of combat, was much more engaging than I thought it would be. I had a blast weaving through all the different narrative threads to get all 4 endings.

It helps that the writing is so solid as well. I came to really love or appropriately despise all the characters, and the different twists and turns of the plot were not only engaging but surprising as well. The devs did a great job of researching multiple different cultures to inform the narrative, and their effort pays off in dividends! The final ending is one of the most satisfying I've reached in a game, with an interesting undercurrent that's more insightful into humanity than you'd think.

The rest of the production is mostly excellent as well. The music is wonderful, and the environments are absolutely gorgeous. On PS5 the game ran at a mostly locked in 60fps with only some stops when new areas were loading. The character models too looked good at a glance, but unfortunately the facial animations kind of spoil them. It's really the biggest issue with the game, as it not only makes the characters look goofy but undermines the excellent voice performances and writing as well. Characters will consistently go cross-eyed, have pieces of their outfit clip through themselves, or just look stiff and lifeless. It's a shame, but thankfully it doesn't completely ruin the experience.

This game won't be for everyone; no slower adventure narrative game is in a medium so centered around violence. However, if you're looking for that next engaging narrative experience, The Forgotten City is a great choice!

I find this a difficult game to rate. When I played it (Steam, PC, version 1.2.1) I encountered many, many bugs, up to the point that I had to restart my PC not once, but twice, because of how badly the game crashed. This cast a pall over the whole experience. Yet there were still things I loved, and other things still that fell flat. Averaging out the excellent experiences, the middling experiences and the awful, awful bugs doesn't feel quite right.

So, the good; the central mystery of the Golden Rule and the fate of the Forgotten City is excellent, the voice acting is great, several characters are huge standouts. Talking philosophy or digging into religion is great fun, and if you're a Classics Nerd like me it's awesome to stroll around the forum and see Romans going about their lives. Without getting into spoilers, the plotline to recover the Egyptian Plate & searching for Sentius' missing daughter were my personal highlights of the game.

The middling; the game is centred around a time loop mechanic and it just doesn't feel very well thought out. Many sidequests or little exploration options reward in money, but because you keep money after a timeloop AND it respawns you can line your pockets in no time and these rewards are meaningless. To avoid repeating involved actions you can tell the first guy you run into to just go and do quests you've completed for you, and this feels like an incredibly weird solution that creates problems down the line. The ultimate path towards the Canon Ending lost me a bit, and the Ending itself didn't do justice to what came before. There's also one particular questline- the one "with horror elements" that feels so utterly atonal to everything else in the game. It's a fine little story on its own, it just doesn't fit, and other parts of the ending have to just ingnore it in order to work.

Overall I would recommend giving it a go for yourself. It's not long (as long as the bugs don't keep you back) and you'll find out pretty quickly how you feel about it.

The combat feels like an afterthought and I wish it didn't exist; I think the idea of being able to negotiate/talk your way out of everything with prior knowledge is more than enough. Also as a very minor gripe, the controls are set in such a way where you can't sprint and jump at the same time, which irritated me during the limited sections of platforming and climbing. But besides that, these guys have the right idea on how to make a good time loop puzzle game with an interesting narrative and discussion. I think they've done it even better than The Sexy Brutale in fact. The epilogue is a great catharsis, and overall I'd say this is a nice snug little game if you're just looking for an interesting take on walking simulators with puzzles.

I've never been the biggest fan of RPG's. Games like Skyrim and Fallout were ones I could never sink too much time into. So after my friend recommend The Forgotten City, a game that was originally a mod for Skyrim I put it off for a bit. A few weeks later it arrives onto gamepass and looking at the reviews that had nothing but positive things to say about it. What could be so special about a game that was simply just a mod developed by three people, but oh boy was I wrong.

This game blew me away. I'm not one to play the same game for a prolonged period of time but I played the first 6 and a half hours of this straight. The story being told, the characters and the writing kept me captivated and speechless. This game has 4 different endings and to get all of them you need a bit of patience but it is so worth it. Each character has great writing, traits, personality and motivations that are aligned with the story and no one feels out of place. I could not recommend this game enough and if you do have gamepass it's an absolute must play. The game is a marvel is a true brilliance in story telling that uses it's cast incredibly well. Not to mention the S tier writing the game has. I hope Modern Storyteller continue to make games like this because I'd be all over them. In many ways it's quite like a telltale game but 10x better due to the decisions you make actually impacting the story. Honestly a terrific game all round