if you've grown up in the american south like i have then you've probably had the experience of being a child and plopping an extremely well prepared pile of grits and just grits into a bowl and then sitting down and eating it, and feeling an uncanny amount of love and technique coming from a bowl of flavorless porridge.

the forgotten city has a truly fantastic premise and some legitimately impressive open-ended story structure. there are anecdotes and sections from this game that are actually pretty pristine.

but like. what is this game? is it a thrilling detective/investigation game? no lol. you do as much actual investigating in this game as you do in shenmue- strung along by a help system that tells you explicitly where to go the lion's share of the time even if you disable all of the settings in the options. And let me tell you, this city is no Yokosuka.

is it an impactful invoking of the time loop mechanic? ehhhh not really. there's no sense of schedule or temporality even really existing in the loop. nothing in this world happens until you will it to happen, so the time loop almost comes off as an easy way to make all the puzzles reset so the player is liability-free lol

fine. is it at least a decent narrative adventure about an absurd scenario that explores some interesting moral ideas? yeah fair enough that's where the game earns the most points. but even then, the game seems to shy away of having you actually tangle with characters about their ethics most of the time. you get to either stare at the camera like jim from the office or, if the game is feeling generous, you get to dispense threadkilling r/stoic reddit burns onto NPCs' ideologies to win the speech check and save the day. after which point the npc will return to its default dialogue options unchanged or just refuse to speak to you outright.

fundamentally this game gets to exist because it was a really really good skyrim mod and this narrative is like very neat and attractive. and as a skyrim mod it demonstrated incredible creative verve and technical ingenuity. i don't blame this obviously talented dude for polishing this up as a standalone experience and making a little dosh with it and we will be playing whatever he makes next but i am not inspired to pragmatically recommend it over its growing list of meta time loop mystery contemporaries.

also it has danganronpa ending real bad lol just a warning in advance