After spending most of one day negotiating for that life-saving medicine, I was delighted to learn that on the next loop, I could tell a helpful NPC how to do the same thing, freeing up my time to pursue other leads. Although each plot line repeats as the game’s timeline loops, clever design touches successfully avert tedium. Solutions to one quest may provide shortcuts to solving others or even recontextualize entire characters. Over the course of the game, the city becomes an intricate puzzle box. Is that a sin? Or is it just good business? One plot line has a patient in desperate need of life-saving medicine, but the only medicine in the city is sold by a price-gouging merchant. Issues of religion, sexuality, and ethics are frequently discussed in a way that feels simultaneously modern and historically appropriate. Characters are distinctly written with backstories and life experiences directly tied to their place in Roman society. The mechanics for talking to each character aren’t particularly involved, but thankfully, the conversations themselves (as well as the voice actors) are excellent. In practical terms, this means you’ll have to talk to each of the city’s two dozen residents, doing errands and learning gossip until you can piece together everyone’s potential motivations for sinning.
When a sin is committed (and it will be committed), everyone in the city is turned to gold- everyone except you, that is! You get to restart the day with all of your current knowledge and inventory in an attempt to catch that pesky sinner and avoid a golden apocalypse. You’re trapped in an ancient, cavernous Roman city with a supernatural law that forbids sin. The game wastes little time explaining the central mystery. Fortunately, their second release seems to have benefited from this unorthodox development cycle: The Forgotten City is smart, polished, and surprising.
Developers at the studio Modern Storyteller then worked for five years to ultimately release The Forgotten City, again, this time as a complete stand-alone title.
The game was originally released in 2016 as a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It’s easy to view the very existence of The Forgotten City as its own time loop of sorts. If you want to see the very best of the best for your platform(s) of choice, check out Polygon Essentials. When we award a game the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the title is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games.
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