I’ve never heard of The Forgotten City until it came out and everyone was talking about it. But apparently, originally this title has been a mod for Skyrim. As a mod, this sure would be amazing. As a standalone title, though? Yeah, it’s pretty good.
This is a first person perspective action adventure game with a time loop as a main story gimmick. And it starts in a very promising way – you find yourself in an ancient underground city, surrounded by extremely lifelike golden statues that seem to follow your movement. Then you travel to the past and learn about this city’s Golden Rule, where if one of the citizen were to sin, the entire city will be punished. What is considered a sin? Who is going to endanger the entire city and you in it? And can you escape the time loop and return to your own time? It’s a very neat setup and a lot of the gameplay is fun as well, as you follow different leads and try to use your ability to start the day again to your advantage.
But the game never really goes beyond the basics that this setup allows. Yes, resolving side quests and main quest issues via several loops is a cool idea and you get interesting interactions with characters as you learn more about them. Yet, apart from one additional gameplay mechanic, that was a pleasant surprise to me, you don’t get many genuinely fun moments or ideas explored. Lots of situations you must resolve involve just one or two steps, most of which can be done in a single loop. And after it’s resolved, there’s absolutely nothing you may do with the characters involved in it, their stories are just “done”. Most of the city isn’t that fun to explore and more exciting locations are, more or less, a one-off trip, unless you somehow trigger the loop reset while in there.
Which is really the big disappointment with this game. There’s a lot of promise and a lot of multiple solutions for things, but none of them are inventive or necessary or even fun. Movement in the game is dull as locations are covered in invisible walls in the most unexpected places, Paradise Killer this is not. Finding some NPCs during the day is a chore, since some of them don’t have a set schedule and semi-randomly wander around and even those who do walk along predictable paths cover so much ground, that you still have to spend a lot of time before you can finally find them to ask some simple thing you couldn’t before. And boy oh boy how many bizarre bugs can happen in this game. None of them broke my playthrough, but a lot of them are shocking.
If I sound overtly negative about The Forgotten City, it’s not because I consider it to be bad. Quite the contrary – it’s a very decent take on this type of adventure game and I liked playing it. But it is vastly underwhelming. The plot doesn’t get any more interesting after a few early revelations (there are twists coming, mind you, they’re just not interesting). The gameplay doesn’t get more exciting. It’s no Shadow of Memories, The Sexy Brutale or Outer Wilds – I don’t love these games (in fact I didn’t even finish Outer Wilds), but they were far more exciting than The Forgotten City. But hey, it’s certainly pretty good anyway.