You can freely explore the city and can talk with any of the characters in any order you want. Unlike many narrative adventures, however, there’s also a fair amount of meat to the rest of the enterprise. To put it simply, The Forgotten City is easily worth playing for its narrative alone, even if the true ending is a bit silly. Then there’s what the game has to say about cultures and religious myths that make everything come together so well. On top of all that, the philosophical concepts on display are thought-provoking and are integrated into the narrative in compelling ways. Most of the voice acting is high quality, although there is a performance or two that’s a bit at odds with the rest of the cast. The dialogue is wonderfully written and the game is populated by interesting, distinct characters who are mostly brought to life by spirited vocal performances. The story is probably the best thing about The Forgotten City, and it isn’t hard to see why the original mod won a Writer’s Guild award.
Entering it will return you to the start of the day. Once a crime is committed, a voice rings out and Sentius runs to open a portal.
Talking to the city’s magistrate, Sentius, makes it clear that someone is going to break the rule that day, and he wants you to figure out who it is. If any one of the city’s inhabitants commits a crime, golden statues will come to life and turn everyone into immobile golden statues. The further kicker is that the city is under The Golden Rule: all shall suffer for the crimes of one. There are Romans and folks of a few other nationalities around, but they’re all trapped in the city and can’t leave. You then stumble into a portal and find yourself caught in an underground Roman city 2,000 years in the past. You head on in, only to find that Al is not only very old, but also very dead. A woman asks you some questions, some of which have a bearing on some of your capabilities, and requests that you head into some nearby ruins to find a man named Al. The Forgotten City starts off with your character waking up on a riverbank. The game is short, taking only five or six hours to get through (or even less if you don’t go for the true ending), but the high quality of the writing and compelling nature of the world design makes it easy to recommend to anyone who enjoys narrative adventures. As the game was remade entirely in a new engine with original assets, animations, and everything else, substantial changes also needed to be made to its story and systems. The Forgotten City is actually a full-scale remake of an identically titled Skyrim mod from a few years back. Sure, I get sick of seeing them pop up in anime, but I haven’t seen them in games very often.
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