This is another one that's been sitting at the top of my wishlist for a quite a while. The Forgotten City is one of the handful of games that was made a few years back, during the big "time loop" craze. Following Outer Wilds, there games like 12 Minutes, Death Loop, Returnal, and a few others -- including The Forgotten City. Sadly, I didn't get around to playing The Forgotten City at the time, and it's been sitting on my wishlist, waiting to go on sale. That sale finally happened earlier this year!
When I played Outer Wilds after its Steam release (I refused to give money to Epic), it quickly catapulted into the shortlist for one of my favorite games ever! If The Forgotten City was going to be anything close to Outer Wilds, then I knew it was going to be something that I would like.
But really, the similarities kind of begin and end with the time loop gimmick. Outer Wilds is a knowledge-based, open world, sci-fi puzzle game in which the player uses their understanding of the in-game laws of physics and the schedule of the solar system, to solve a giant game-long puzzle. Forgotten City is more of a traditional inventory-based narrative adventure, which mostly consists of exploration and dialogue.
Put simply, the player travels back in time to an ancient Roman city that is stuck in a time loop. The citizens of the city are bound by a "Golden Rule", imposed by a vindictive god, that says that if anybody in the city commits a crime "sin", everyone in the city will die. So far, nobody has tried to break the rule, to find out if it's true. The player must learn everything you can about the city and its inhabitants, in order to try to figure out which god is responsible for this situation, and hopefully find a way to get yourself out -- and maybe save the city's citizens while you're at it.
The Forgotten City was one of several games (along with Outer Wilds) in a short-lived time-loop fad.
It's about damned time!
Forgotten City does not require the player to memorize the exact schedule in which all the events in the city happen. In fact, certain events kindly wait for the player to arrive before they trigger, meaning that you can do things in pretty much whatever order you want. The game also includes a quest log and objective markers, telling you exactly where to go, and giving you a good idea of what to do when you get there.
The puzzles basically come in 2 flavors: dialogue-based logic puzzles, and inventory puzzles. Inventory puzzles are pretty basic, and usually require the player to simply have the item or use it in the appropriate location. The dialogue puzzles usually require the player to learn something about a character or the game world by interrogating NPCs, or to occasionally convince (or trick) an NPC into doing or saying something that you want (by using knowledge that you've acquired from past time loops to manipulate them).
Having to run around, repeating the same conversations over again, and doing the same tasks over again would get very tedious very quickly, and would doubtlessly turn a lot of people off of the game. This isn't like Outer Wilds, where where you can just go straight to the end game and see the true ending; Forgotten City requires that you put in the legwork to make the best ending(s) possible.
There are multiple time-saving features, including a system of zip-lines between key locations.
Saving time
Thankfully, Forgotten City includes a lot of time-savers. First and foremost, inventory items that you collect in one time loop persist in your inventory into all subsequent time loops. In fact, items can even be duplicated in this way! If you find a stash of money in one time loop, that same money will be at the same place in the next time loop, allowing you to collect the same coins again and double your money! The same is true for weapons and ammunition.
The most important time-saver, however, is that you can have another character perform most of the tasks that you've completed in previous time loops on your behalf, so that you are free to follow up on different leads or explore new areas of the map. Better yet, this interaction is automatically triggered every time you walk out of the time portal after the first loop, so you can't possibly miss it.
Even better still, having this character work on your behalf actually ties into the game's story and endings. It isn't just a gameplay convenience! For one thing, it means that he actually gets credit for some of the heroic things that you figured out how to do, which changes how other NPCs in the city treat him.
On top of that, there's also zip-lines scattered throughout the city that allow you to travel quickly from one area to another without having to constantly walk the distance in between. This will likely come in handy, but I honestly didn't use it that often. The map is very compact anyway, so you're never more than like a 30 second sprint from where you want to go.
Items are not removed from your
inventory when you start a new loop.
The end result is that, despite the time loop nature of the game, The Forgotten City is largely respectful of the player's time. Once you acquire a key item, or solve a puzzle, that item remains collected, and the puzzle remains solved. You don't have to keep doing the same tasks over and over again to re-acquire basic inventory items, or to re-solve puzzles.
Solving the game's puzzles and mysteries, therefore, is not particularly difficult or mind-bending. As long as you talk to everybody and explore thoroughly, you'll find everything you need to know, and the game's quest log will point you in the right direction.
The puzzle nature of the game makes it far less compelling to replay, since you'll already know the solutions. This is especially true if you tried to solve as many quests as possible in a first playthough, but missed a few. As such, I highly recommend staggering your saves. That way, you can go ahead and let an ending happen prematurely, then just go back to the most recent save in order to continue solving other quests.
Greco-Roman philosophy
What The Forgotten City lacks in mentally stimulating puzzles, it makes up for in mentally-stimulating conversations. The entire game is a meditation on ethics, morality, and (by extension) piety. Specifically, it is an examination of the "Golden Rule" ("Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you"), and whether there is a "perfect" "Golden Rule" that would make a person or a society perfectly moral. The game makes a point of repeatedly emphasizing that variations of this rule have existed in many cultures, and that the rule itself has been modified and refined over time. It also makes a point of emphasizing how the exact wording of the rule (in any given culture) can be twisted to mean pretty much whatever an individual wants it to mean.
The entire game is a prolonged meditation on moral philosophy.
In fact, at one point in the game, you must explicitly stop dead in your tracks to have a Socratic Dialogue with another character on whether or not there is a perfect moral code. That conversation (and several others) also makes references to the Euthephro Dilemma, which is the question of whether gods command moral acts because those acts are inherently moral (in which case, we don't need the gods to tell us what is moral), or if an act is only moral because a god commands it (in which case, morality is completely arbitrary and subject to change by the gods at any time). Variations of the trolley problem also come up multiple times.
The theme of morality (and the question of "what is moral?") is also expressed throughout the game's quest and puzzle design. The character repeatedly witnesses things that seem like they should break the city's "Golden Rule", but no divine punishment comes. This begs the question of whether the god(s) in charge consider the action immoral or not. These are interesting questions. We see characters scam each other out of money, we see someone be poisoned, we see political corruption, we see tyrannical government overreach, we see bigotry and prejudice, we see slavery, and (perhaps most interestingly) we see a character commit suicide. All of this happens without incurring the wrath of the god(s). Which begs the question of whether these acts are moral, and whether they would be immoral in different circumstances. More importantly, by the end of the game, there are logical reasons given for why certain actions broke the city's "Golden Rule", and why others didn't.
The idea of "sin" is left somewhat ambiguous.
Right and wrong
Unfortunately, the game's designers couldn't think of everything. There were multiple instances in which I wanted to respond in a particular way (based on my personal perception of morality), but the game did not give me the option to do so. Specifically, the creators of the The Forgotten City didn't seem to include much secular humanist morality in the game. If questioned whether I could come up with a better moral system than the city's Golden Rule, my options were basically limited to "yes, I know the morally correct answer for every situation", or "no, because morality is subjective and relative to the culture.". I did not have the option to respond with something along the lines of "yes, I think I am more moral, but I don't know the morally right thing to do in every situation."
As a secular humanist (influenced by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Matt Dillahunty), I believe that morally right actions are those that maximize happiness and minimize unnecessary suffering. Basically, it's a variation of the Hippocratic Oath: "to help; or at least, to do no harm." While I consider this to be a reasonably objectively correct moral system, my belief in its objective correctness does not mean that I believe that it can always be correctly and objectively applied. It's a min-max formula that is only possible to optimize if a person has access to all possible information, which we don't. As such, a moral person can only make the best decision possible, given the information that they have access to, and therefore, a morally righteous person, operating under an objective moral code can still make mistakes and come to incorrect moral decisions. The point is to try to do the best you can. Personally, I prefer to also err on the side of minimizing any direct or immediate harm.
The game points out that moral laws have changed over time,
and questions whether our contemporary moral philosophies will change in the future.
But, of course, the game wouldn't let me give a nuanced answer like that. I had to choose from the options available to me, which often lead me down paths of responding in ways that I did not intend with my original answer. But this sort of thing is common in games with dialogue trees. It's hard to fault The Forgotten City for suffering from the same problem that all dialogue-based games suffer from.
Also, the game usually gives the player an opportunity to back-pedal if the game forces you onto a hill that you don't want to defend. Though doing so is almost always framed as a concession by the player that you are wrong, and that the NPC character is correct. But then again, there's a time loop, so you can always go back and have the conversation again. You might choose to do this if you really want to "win" the argument, or because you simply want to see how the other responses play out.
Generally, the game will let you pontificate on questions of morality all you want without any permanent consequences. Permanent (or ending-changing) consequences really only happen if you take some kind of action (or tell someone else to take certain actions). Again, I recommend staggering your saves, just in case.
The moral conundrums of the game occasionally mirror modern moral debates.
Morality metaphor
These ruminations on ethics and morality kept me interested. I wanted to keep playing in order to find out which god had created the Golden Rule, and to find out what the actual rules are (and the logic behind them). Even if the game had not provided satisfactory answers to those questions, the journey to get there might still have been worth it. As I've said, the discussion was interesting in and of itself.
I'm no stranger to discussions of philosophy, ethics, morality, or piety, so The Forgotten City didn't really introduce me to anything that I wasn't already familiar with. But for an impressionable teenager or college-age kid, who has never seriously thought about these subjects, The Forgotten City can potentially be an eye-opening introduction to basic philosophy.
The time loop itself may be a metaphor for morality.