This is might be the newest game I’ve added the the backlog, but after hearing The Forgotten City be described as “Outer Wilds but in ancient Rome” I just had to check this out. Outer Wilds, but with fun history trivia? Sign me up! And boy did it deliver on that, including the aspect that it’s going to be really hard to talk about without spoiling. So, most of the post is going to be hiding behind a spoiler tag. That said, go play this! It was fantastic and you’ll want to experience all the twists and turns for yourself. It’s also way shorter than Outer Wilds (I beat it in around nine hours, but maybe I got lucky exploring). There’s also no like, physics puzzles with spaceship controls, or anglerfish, so it was a generally less stressful experience. Just pure parkouring around town talking to people.
The premise of The Forgotten City is that you’re a modern dude who’s sent back in time to help save a 1st century Roman city via time loop. An unknown god has decreed that if anyone in town sins, everyone will die, so you have to prevent that sin from occurring to save everyone and make it home. The game was actually originally a Skyrim mod that I’ve seen before on the nexus but never played. What is surprising is how much new content there clearly is, the Roman theme is woven so seamlessly into the plot that I don’t think I would have believed that the story had originally been written for anything else. You can definitely feel the Skyrim in the bones of it, the movement and physics and especially the archery that you might have to do all feels very Skyrim. But it’s all Unreal Engine I believe, so, way prettier.
The city itself is a fun little playground to explore, lots of fun architecture and elements of Roman culture easter eggs to find, such as urns of garum and raunchy Latin graffiti (I recommend the archaeologist class for this). The cast of characters is wonderful, which is a good quality to have when the game is all about getting to know people and solving their problems so they trust you with their gossip. When I say “wonderful” I mean that they’re great characters, not people, because boy are some of them complete bastards. I’ll go off more about this in the spoiler zone. It’s also very fun how multicultural the cast is, as they’ve been plucked from basically all corners of the Roman Empire. The result is that every character has a really unique perspective and background that makes them fun to get to know.
One last non-spoiler: this game pulls off the world’s funniest “Karen” joke. Those don’t tend to make me laugh but I absolutely lost it when the punchline hit, so bravo.
Click me only if you don't mind being turbospoiled
Fuck Sentius. What an utter bastard. Truly an amazing villain, I was completely gobsmacked by his last-minute heel turn. I don't know if this was intended, but his smug gloating about how foolproof his plan was really solidified my resolve to do anything necessary to get Pluto to end The Golden Rule, just to spite Sentius if nothing else. I then went to Pluto and threatened to kill Proserpina a bunch and got the "Psycho" achievement, but like, honestly? What's more psycho, threatening to kill a single person in order to potentially save twenty-some, or coating people in gold and forcing them to live immobile for eternity for the crime of *checks notes* picking up an object they don't strictly own. Like, Sentius can beat and imprison his own daughter, and that's not a "sin" because she was committing the "sin" of completely rationally and harmlessly wanting to escape the city, but then if you free Duli he just like, picks up an object off a market stall without buying it first, and that's theft and everyone's eternally punished. Get out of here. Pluto was such an asshole that it brought me joy to be able to get under his skin, whatever the cost to my karma. I realize this section reads as really angry probably but I legitimately enjoyed the visceral anger I felt at some of these characters, and it made it really satisfying in the "good" ending where all of the evil characters have gotten what's coming to them and all the nice people are living their best lives. Maybe a bit cheesy but it was a very rewarding way to end a talking-to-people game.
The exploration of the rise and fall of civilizations via architecture was VERY cool. The segment where you find the Greek ruins, which lead to the Egyptian ruins, which lead to the Sumerian ruins, completely blew me away. I was double blown away by the reveal of Pluto's audience chamber, the transition in the Great Temple from Roman to Greek to Egyptian to Sumerian to spaceship was insane and completely unexpected. The fact that you can see the Earth out the throne room's back window? Yes please.
That said, my one gripe with The Forgotten City is that its lore rests on weird assumptions about how ancient paganism worked. One of the central themes here is the cycle of conquest in which the Romans do to the Greeks what the Greeks to to the Egyptians etc. etc. The Greek and Egyptian characters you meet are mad at the theft of their religious heritage, and this drives part of the plot, but my understanding of ancient paganism is that people understood that foreigners had alternate names for the same gods? Like, these cultures didn't all have very similar pantheons because they stole them, it's because they are all geographically adjacent and religious ideas spread around organically. Pagans would actively identify their own gods with other peoples' gods as a way of understanding each others' cultures. They were also very accommodating of dieties from elsewhere, that's like paganism's central feature, no one was going to be mad if you decide you want to worship a new god, you pick one you like, and go to their temple, and not everyones doing the same thing but that's fine! It's paganism! So Georgius and especially Khabash's anger felt really misplaced to me. Trying to reason Khabash out of his anxiety that his religion was just a "copy" of Sumerian religion was aggravating because I felt like he should already accept that other people worship the same gods but differently, since that's how his world works. EDIT: see here for what I mean, ancient paganism was way more inclusive of other, foreign religious ideas than modern monotheistic religions tend to be.
Additionally, the whole Ancient Aliens reveal, while cool, gets weirder the more I think about it. The lore seems to be resting on this idea that Sumerian culture was completely eclipsed by Egyptian, then by Greek, then by Roman, then by... whatever culture you the player come from, in a linear progression. This just isn't the case, clearly Greeks and Romans and even Sumerians (though I'm not sure they'd call themselves that) still existed in Roman times and their culture was not deleted by Roman hegemony. I feel like this is based on a Percy Jackson level of understanding of the ancient world complete with its concept of gods following Western Civilization around, as if that's a quantifiable thing. As if there's a straight-line trajectory of progress for civilization based on the passing-down of knowledge from these alien olympians. All together I think its a bit stupid, but it didn't effect my enjoyment of the actual game here at all.
I thought the progression systems were really well handled. I was worried initially that it'd be like Outer Wilds in that you restart the loop when you die, and that that would make you lose your inventory. Items here stand in for Outer Wilds' ship log as a progression tracker. I actually appreciated that death just meant reloading a save, because it removed the pressure of figuring out how to die most conveniently. Also unlike Outer Wilds, the days are waaaaay longer, so you can get a ton done before someone inevitably commits a sin. It was clever how you can tell Galerius to go do completed quests for you every loop, because it both saves you from having to repeat a ton of content, and also ties into the plot - helping everyone is how Galerius wins votes in the magistrate election. Everyone else does also get dialogue options to speed up conversations as you figure things out. In general, the The Forgotten City does a great job of not punishing your story progression when you have to start a new loop, which is nice. This convenience does make it easier, to the extent that it reflects poorly on Al Worth's (the guy stuck in the loop before you) problem solving skills, that he nearly died of old age before figuring it all out.