There is a point in The Forgotten City — and this point can arise at almost any moment in your playthrough, or not at all — where you happen upon an old man sitting alone in a dimly lit cave. This stranger is surrounded by damp walls and artifacts of an ancient civilization strewn upon the stone at his feet, but he wears a soft smile, clearly happy to see another living being after so much time spent in solitude. He's content, despite what you may or may not know about his circumstances by now. With your permission, he proceeds to ask a series of questions that — though undeniably expository — feel like a natural extension of the game’s underlying desire to have its players linger over their answers. This man, and The Forgotten City by proxy, is wholly obsessed with one query above all else:

"Would you say you know the difference between right and wrong?"

After waking up beside a riverbed in the modern era, The Forgotten City sends you back in time to a lost Roman city entombed deep underground. There you'll come across the city's magistrate who warns you of impending doom via what he and the other 20+ residents refer to as "The Golden Rule." Put bluntly, if anyone in the city commits a sin, everyone in the city will die. The magistrate is certain someone will break The Golden Rule today, and has prayed at a nearby temple to unhook a traveler from time who can help find the culprit before they perpetrate a crime. So begins what is unequivocally the best timeloop game of 2021 and an experience I'll hold with me for years to come, because as clear as the central Golden Rule may seem on the surface, careful consideration reveals layers of depth that spiral downward further and further towards self-examined moral standing.

"Better to know that you know nothing, than to know nothing and think that you know."

The Forgotten City brilliantly ends your first conversation with the magistrate by giving the player their very first lead: He asks you to speak with Lucretia, a doctor in a nearby temple, to determine why she's so upset. This early on it's possible you don't know the location of the temple in relation to the magistrate's villa, and by wandering around with this one simple goal the player may find themselves subconsciously mapping the area in the process. While doing so it's possible to stumble into most of the city's other residents, who are all in some way involved with piecing together the larger mystery via smaller disparate side-quests and leads of their own. It's in this way that the team behind the The Forgotten City manages to take a complex and seemingly daunting web of interactions, dialogue trees, and timing and use them to their advantage: If everything is connected, every player will discover a path to progress no matter what they do. Every conversation on the path towards one lead uncovers another lead in its wake, and suddenly the player is progressing on multiple fronts simultaneously. For a game about looping through the same day repeatedly, its clock-like construction feels as ironic as it is purposeful.

"If there is one thing I have observed about rules, it is that virtuous people do not need them, and evil people will always find a way around them."

Lucretia, as it turns out, is distressed because her patient Iulia is dying. The only person in the city who holds the cure is a nearby merchant by the name of Desius, who has placed such an exorbitant price on the medication that it’s a certainty he is resigning Iulia to death. Players might assume this decision breaks The Golden Rule and wait for the thunderous voice of an angry deity to shout downwards into the city from the heavens, but the only audible sound is the soft cry of Lucretia as her patient slips away.

Desius thrives under The Golden Rule. Essentially a con-artist, he spends his time in the city considering various loopholes he can use to increase his standing and expedite his way to riches without breaking what he assumes to be any of the Rule’s core tenants. Personally, I think the sick freak finds it exciting to get away with murder beneath the nose of an unknowable cosmic force. Desius’ interpretation of the Rule is a dark reflection of what he presumes an honorable god would enact upon the city, using his conjecture to skirt around his imagined rules. After seeing his actions, players might start to challenge The Golden Rule themselves: If Desius can knowingly cause the death of another under Rule’s dominion, how truly just is this system?

"We must accept the sad truth that no human society will ever achieve the utopia for which it strives. Because the only way to create a utopia is through the ever-present threat of force, such as The Golden Rule... and life under tyranny is no utopia at all."

Although real life doesn't have a singular Golden Rule to follow, every era of human civilization has multiple moral ideologies. Depending on region, religion, or lack thereof, any individual might adopt or reject the societal code into which they have been born or raised. Reflecting on the laws of previous civilizations from our privileged position in the Now reveals entire eras of barbarism — how could they not have known their morality was so grotesque, so inhumane? The truth is that the same reaction will spew forth from any historian fifty, one hundred, or one thousand years from now when they too look back on our society as inferior.

The Forgotten City asks its players to consider the code they follow as a personal act, because righteousness from within spreads outwards into society and brings us closer to the aspirational utopia we can never truly grow into. And we shouldn’t grow into it, a humanity that has reached its apex is no longer humanity at all. Without constantly striving to better ourselves and others, we'll languish as a civilization, like golden statues with nowhere to run.