I find it a little tricky to review detective games in particular, and not just because I'm actually bad at my job. In a sense, detective games at their finest let you believe that you're actually more clever than you are. They lay out a trail of clues and see how well you follow those to the solution. If a game does this well, you as a player get to feel like you unspooled the tapestry by your own wits - and if a game does this poorly, you feel like you're being pulled by the nose through an obvious series of investigatory milestones.
The Forgotten City is a damn good detective game, great even. It's an intricately designed clockwork puzzle that stands among the genre's best titles.
The titular city itself is stuck in both time and place. You come across it at the bottom of a ravine, which is itself at the bottom of a cave, and soon it's going to die. The only law that's followed here is the golden rule - any sin commited by anybody for any reason will lead to everybody's immediate destruction. One of the small group of inhabitants is going to doom them all, but you can save them. You can go back in time to the start of the same fateful day, each time with more knowledge to help you unfurl the city's many secrets.
So begins the first of many loops. You don't want me to say more because learning the intricacies of this city and its well-drawn characters is essentially the entire game. Each thread you start to pull on in your quest to unravel the mystery leads you to another, and then another still. Everything and everybody is connected here, and it's impossible not to lose yourself in the rabbit hole of learning about each inhabitant's stories and goals.
The investigation requires you to not just get to know people, but to understand and exploit the rules of the city. Sometimes the total destruction of everything around you can actually work out in your favour. It's also refreshing to have such freedom in how to approach most of the game's mysteries. Impressively, the game manages to feel open-ended and non-linear while never really being overwhelmingly loose.
As soon as I expected that I had wrapped my mind around The Forgotten City, it kept throwing me through another (time) loop. Even the ending, a bit over-the-top as it gets, felt deserved and satisfying. It was what I wanted, after so much death and pain, and I felt like be I earned it.
The Forgotten City is a damn good detective game, great even. It's an intricately designed clockwork puzzle that stands among the genre's best titles.
The titular city itself is stuck in both time and place. You come across it at the bottom of a ravine, which is itself at the bottom of a cave, and soon it's going to die. The only law that's followed here is the golden rule - any sin commited by anybody for any reason will lead to everybody's immediate destruction. One of the small group of inhabitants is going to doom them all, but you can save them. You can go back in time to the start of the same fateful day, each time with more knowledge to help you unfurl the city's many secrets.
So begins the first of many loops. You don't want me to say more because learning the intricacies of this city and its well-drawn characters is essentially the entire game. Each thread you start to pull on in your quest to unravel the mystery leads you to another, and then another still. Everything and everybody is connected here, and it's impossible not to lose yourself in the rabbit hole of learning about each inhabitant's stories and goals.
The investigation requires you to not just get to know people, but to understand and exploit the rules of the city. Sometimes the total destruction of everything around you can actually work out in your favour. It's also refreshing to have such freedom in how to approach most of the game's mysteries. Impressively, the game manages to feel open-ended and non-linear while never really being overwhelmingly loose.
As soon as I expected that I had wrapped my mind around The Forgotten City, it kept throwing me through another (time) loop. Even the ending, a bit over-the-top as it gets, felt deserved and satisfying. It was what I wanted, after so much death and pain, and I felt like be I earned it.