Is it ever justifiable to punish an entire community for the sins of a single member? This question is at the heart of The Forgotten City, a mystery game that offers a thoughtful exploration of ethics and some of the past year’s most compelling narrative design. You awaken on the banks of the modern-day river Tiber with no idea how you got there. A mysterious woman offers to ferry you back to civilisation if you can find her friend, who went to explore some nearby ruins and never returned. Soon you are tumbling down a hole into a city built across a vast, luminous cave system.
Between the elegant aqueducts, the market stalls and the grand temple perched on a high bluff are residents in togas and centurion garb — you have fallen not just through space, but also backwards in time. A magistrate explains that everyone in this hermetic community is beholden to a law known as the “Golden Rule”: if a single person sins, then every inhabitant will be transformed, Midas-like, into gold. Now the gleaming golden statues that litter the town can be understood as previous victims of this curse, frozen in postures of fear, fury and supplication.
The magistrate knows that somebody is going to sin today, and it’s your job to find out who before it’s too late. The 20-odd locals each have a compelling mystery to solve: why is the soldier struggling with his sexuality? Can the aristocrat with a shadowy past beat the magistrate in the upcoming election? What caused the midwife to lock herself away and conduct ghoulish experiments on the golden statues?
As you set about resolving these questions, which you can approach in any order you please, it becomes apparent that each is woven into a larger narrative tapestry, eventually revealing why you are here, who created the Golden Rule and whether there is any chance of escape from this mysterious purgatory.
Inevitably somebody will sin, triggering the curse of the Golden Rule and transporting you back to the beginning of that same day. While the locals plod through their routines once more, you return armed with new knowledge and items, learning to leverage this time loop to make progress in your investigation.
The Forgotten City started life in 2015 as a mod for Skyrim that was downloaded 3m times and became the first mod to win a Writer’s Guild award. Over the next five years, a team of three people spun the concept into a standalone game. The limits of their resources mean the game has some rough edges — the writing and storytelling are superb, but facial animations are wooden and the few combat sections feel clunky. Yet it benefits from the single-minded passion that defines the best mods: this is the work of creators who had the freedom to explore their idea, rather than water it down to appease corporate interests.
The team consulted with academics to ensure the historical accuracy of their depiction of ancient Rome, and throughout town you will find objects that provide interesting contextual information. Characters reference the myths of Baucis and Philemon, King Midas and Sisyphus, whose endless quest to roll a boulder up a hill echoes the player’s ever-repeating day and, as Camus suggested, the human condition itself. One of the game’s most interesting ideas is its exploration of how successive civilisations layer their culture and architecture directly on top of their predecessors’, creating a palimpsest of human progress that too often goes unobserved.
The conceit of the Golden Rule is inspired by the real Roman practice of “decimation”, a form of military discipline in which every 10th soldier in a unit was executed to punish large-scale crimes. Yet in The Forgotten City, specifics around the rule are deliberately unclear. What is defined as a sin? Might an action be considered sinful in one context but not in another? The game’s dialogue trees become a combat of wits, climaxing in sophisticated Socratic debates that probe the nature of absolute morality.
Though The Forgotten City is unafraid of its weighty themes, it remains light on its feet thanks to charming characters and healthy doses of humour. There are jokes about the pandemic and the besmirching of the name “Karen”, as well as anachronistic quips such as the Roman who clocked my character’s modern torch and murmured: “You carry the gift to Prometheus in your hand, remarkable!”
Each of its intellectual debates is anchored in human stories with real life-and-death consequences. This is the rare game that stays with you long after it ends not because of tense combat or stunning visuals, but because of a searching moral core that refuses to be settled.
Available on Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch (in some territories)
Mystery and morality meet in The Forgotten City
Pinoy Variant