“Or, another volume of what Andy did last night instead of writing a blog post.”
I just want to say that I had a really great weekend these last few days, and I didn’t have much of a chance to write up a blog post because of that and because of my other jobs, and I’m ok with that. My mom and a family friend came up to visit, so my weekend was spent, understandably, hanging out with them, my brother, and Cheyenne. I went skiing for the second time in my life, and I didn’t break any bones this time! I tried the original Jucy Lucy, a Minneapolis burger staple, and it was delicious. I went to brunch with everyone and we chatted and hung out together! I listened to “You Can Call me Al” like six times because my music playlist wouldn’t play anything else! It was a very nice weekend, and I’m glad I wasn’t too overwhelmed by work or writing a book or anything to enjoy some quality time together.
But, when everyone left and the weekend came to a close, and after I had to go to work pretty late on a Sunday, I decided to spend the evening relaxing with a video game instead of writing something up on here. Come to think of it, I don’t know why I feel compelled to justify choosing my downtime over writing this blog, or why I feel compelled to explain it every single time, but that’s something that I can dive into another time. But since I don’t have a ton of time to write up a whole new thing, here’s something short and sweet instead. It’s a brief review of that video game that I played instead of writing something else. Just like the title says. Let’s, uh, let’s just get moving, huh? Spoilers for the Forgotten City below! If you don’t want to know all the game’s secrets, both smart and dumb, don’t read this!
The Forgotten City is an interesting game. As at least one review says, it’s kind of a B game. It’s predictable, pedantic, and features writing that is passable at best and pathetic at worst. Lots of P’s in that last sentence, huh? It is a game that relentlessly beats the player over the head with a sort of pseudo-intelligent morality monologue, constantly going out of the way to remind you that this is a “smart game” concerned with “big ideas.” Not that it doesn’t have interesting things to say, but what it does say is, often, kind of a garbled mess. And yet, I can’t help loving it.
A quick bit of context; The Forgotten City is a mystery adventure game in a Groundhog Day time loop where you’re playing as a human from 2021 (there is just one reference to COVID, so it is at least 2021) thrown back in time two thousand years to a Roman city trapped both literally under rock and figuratively under the Golden Rule. In this city, if one person sins, some angry god will turn the entire populace into gold. The magistrate of the city has used a magic spell to pull you back in time as a detective, figure out who’s about to sin, and try and stop the Golden Rule from being broken. You have one day to solve the mystery before someone sins. Of course, soon the rule soon gets broken, and you have to run back to a magic portal and dive headfirst back to the beginning, where you can try it all again, now with new items and knowledge. Seems simple enough, yeah? Get in, make some progress, get out, do it all over again.
Maybe this sounds like something you’ve heard before. At this point, there’s so much media about existing inside of a time loop, and it’s not just video games. Groundhog Day became Palm Springs and Russian Doll, two very different takes on being trapped in a cinema time loop. Majora’s Mask, the quintessential time loop gaming experience, has now evolved into not just The Forgotten City, but now the game’s scene has everything from ass-kicking Death Loop to the stellar (heh) Outer Wilds (which I wrote about) and the regrettable Twelve Minutes, which somehow got Willem Dafoe (yes, Green Gobline Willem Dafoe) to be a voice actor. Hell, even books are getting in on the time-loopy action, with everyone telling me that the Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is something worth reading. For fuck’s sake, I even wrote one myself, kind of. It’s not very good in its current state, but writing, like time loops, is all about iteration. I am, frankly, overwhelmed and now bored by time looping stories. I never thought I’d see that day, but here it is. And yet, The Forgotten City precedes all of this, except Groundhog Day and Majora’s Mask. Because, despite coming out officially in 2021, it’s actually based on a 2015 Skyrim mod of the same name. Yeah, who knew that Skyrim, the game about shouting dragons out of the sky and beating the shit out of Thomas the Tank Engine, would be good for heady writing?
Here’s the thing about this game, though, and something that every reviewer ever has already pointed out. The fact that the game’s basis comes from Skyrim really shows. It plays like a Skyrim mod still, even though it’s gotten a lot of spitshine and polish since it first came out. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It doesn’t really bother me. The combat is fine, but the game also makes it known that every possible challenge can be entirely completed without conflict. That’s cool! There are several ways to come at every problem, sometimes three or four in a couple cases, and combat is only one viable option. But that ends up being one of my complaints about the game, too; combat is by far the easiest option, and once you get a bow that can turn stuff into gold (it makes only slightly more sense in game), you might as well be cutting out half the puzzles. Need to get into a locked room? Well, you can talk to the townsfolk, build their trust, and get them to unlock it for you. Or you can turn the conveniently-placed vines into gold and climb up the side.
Another example: trying to get into the secret upper cistern, where two of the game’s four endings can be immediately triggered? Sure, you could do what is arguably the more interesting option, and try to change the outcome of the magistrate election that evening. This involves going through a long series of events that basically involves solving the problems of all the townsfolk, getting one of the candidates to drop out by proving that he’s the man who started the great fire of Rome, and then getting your guy to win the election, unlock a prisoner, take that prisoner’s key, and open the door to cisterns. Or you could just, you know, climb the ivy that is so conveniently placed. The game is full of small moments like this, along with some overly-helpful guidance from a mysterious whispering voice that told me the solutions to problems before I asked, that absolutely shattered most any sense of organic problem-solving. The game is too easy, and not in a good way. It solves itself most of the time, and you’re just some bumbling chucklefuck who’s in the right place at the right time. The game likes to pretend that all its solutions are equally valid, and that you can find creative ways around any problems, but when it just hands me the answers, what’s even the point? Sure, you have to solve all the problems anyway to get the true ending, but I didn’t have to do any critical thinking to get there. It was just spoon-fed to me. And sure, there’s something to say about accessibility and having a clear, hand-crafted narrative experience, but why give me several solutions if you clearly want me to pick just one?
This, combined with the fact that a solid chunk of the dialogue is entirely expository and/or straight-up quoting philosophic texts, makes the game feel patronizing. This is a game that does not respect the player enough to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, or draw their own conclusions from interesting moral scenarios. One character is literally called the “hermit philosopher,” and his single purpose is to have a Socratic dialogue with you, where your only possible responses are ones created by the developer. Horatius’s whole personality is to quote Seneca the Younger at every possible opportunity. The final encounter of the game, against the God of the Underworld himself, is supposed to be you refuting moralistic certainty but ends up feeling more like hacking at a straw man with very specific examples. Sure, there are some interesting moral quandaries here and there, like with Desius, who, besides being a price-gouging asshole, also appeals to the player’s inner greed by offering a powerful weapon, and then locks you in a room with a bunch of hornets. I think of him as the love child between Martin Shkreli and Patches from Dark Souls. What could have been an opportunity to have the player reflect on what choosing power and working with terrible people might mean in a strictly moralistic sense, it instead turns into that golden bow I mentioned, giving you the most versatile item in the game. Like I said before, messy.
This constant sense of hand-holding, condescending moral superiority (which, funnily enough, the God of the Underworld can call you out on), and lack of interesting or organic puzzles leads to a game that feels more like someone ranting at you about how great of a philosopher they are than actually anything philosophical. It’s like someone took Philosophy 100 at university and turned their most successful paper into an eight-hour video game. That’s not to say it’s boring, of course, I still had a great time with it, but it is far from the most thought-provoking thing I’ve ever engaged with. Shakespeare this is not.
But then why did I have so much fun with it, all the same? Well, even though the non-puzzles presented no obstacles, and you could just as easily figure everything out by wandering around and not actually talking to anyone, I’m a sucker for exploration and dialogue. I loved poking around in the city, finding little nooks and crannies and uncovering items and secrets and unique interactions between characters across separate loops. Although I complain about the puzzles, seeing the interesting ways they overlap and interact is fun. Talking to characters and solving their problems is neat. “Making friends” with them and defusing violent situations creates a little warm spot in my heart, even if it’s entirely fabricated. There always seemed to be something new to try, or a new dialogue option to experiment with. Even if it’s a highly directed experience, it’s still a fun ride.
Honestly, perhaps the more interesting commentary in the game comes from the game design itself. Sure, it’s got that whole patronizing thing I talked about, but the city is fun to explore, and the fact that it is physically built on top of several other cities is a wild thing to discover. And the parallels between building the city on top of other cities, the iterative process of the loops, and the mod-turned-game history of the thing itself is not lost on me. Nor is it lost on anyone, I suppose. There’s something here, between the ways that the world interacts with itself, that’s worth experiencing. You can just as easily sit back and run through it all as you can do the temple-rubbing pondering the game wants you to do, and honestly, maybe it’s more fun if you take the former approach instead of the latter. Because if you’re looking for something really deep, you aren’t gonna find it here.
I mean, come on, the ending is one of the most boring twists conceivable. In the game’s true ending, you find out that the god responsible for the golden rule, and for trapping everyone in the city and whatnot, is a big ancient alien guy, with spaceships and everything. I mean, come on, I was hoping the whole time it wouldn’t be that. That shit has been done to death. It’s trite and well-trodden territory, and I hate it. Give me some sort of dead or dying god, or an actual supernatural entity, or some sort of unstable monster, at least. What’s marginally better is the uber-cheesy “where are they now” part of the ending, where you somehow meet up with every character from the game in the 21st century, and they applaud you for saving them. It is so goofy, and yet, I got little butterflies when I saw that my favorite characters are married, or the one character who helped me prevent another character from committing suicide is now a crisis counselor, or the woman who was chained up in the cistern is now free to do as she pleases. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that part. The game gets kind of weird, but in a predictable way. She was trapped by her father all along! Who could have guessed? It’s not very original. And the fact that, despite its failings, it got me thinking about it. What works? Why does it work? And why is its philosophy a failing argument? I haven’t actually talked much about why it’s so weak, but it has made me think about it and consider what I do believe is right and wrong, so that’s something. Maybe that’s something everyone should consider. But then again, maybe this game isn’t the best place for it, either. But still! Somehow, I found myself a little more attached to the game than I thought I would by the end. What it lacks in tact and subtlety it makes up for in sheer charm, I suppose.
Or something like charm. The Forgotten City is, ultimately, a bit more predictable than I had hoped it would be. It hit all the bland moral arguments I expected it would, the ending twist was exactly what I hoped it wouldn’t be, and didn’t really stop to let me consider what I was doing or why. The time loop aspect really mattered less than I thought it would, and it doesn’t have a whole lot to add to the adventure genre by the way of interesting mechanics or outcomes. And yet, like a loop itself, I kept getting drawn back in. I wanted to see how it goes, I wanted to solve the puzzles and character problems, and I wanted to see what was beneath the city or behind the next door, even if the answer was exactly what I figured it would be. The pros outweigh the cons just enough that I was never bored or frustrated, and I don’t regret my time spent with the game. Except for the final talk with the God of the Underworld, but at that point, you’re at the end anyway. Making Galerius happy is all that really matters at that point.
Yeah, I complain about the writing, but compared to some of the shit we get in big-name games like your Call of Duty’s and Assassin’s Creed’s, it’s still lightyears ahead of a solid chunk of stories in gaming. It falls short of greatness in that regard, especially when it’s sitting next to Outer Wilds on the time loop front and Hades on the mythology front. It’s no contest there. But I found the Forgotten City to still be worth a trip, if only for the chance to explore what’s probably the most accurately-constructed Roman city easily accessible from your computer. Will I be diving into the loop again anytime soon? Probably not. I’ve seen everything the game has to offer. But maybe when I want something to give me warm fuzzy feelings and clap at me for doing the barest minimum while immersing myself in a tiny slice of history, I’ll come right back here. The city may be forgotten, but the game is not. Somehow, I think I’ll be remembering it for a long time still.
