The Forgotten City Preview: Let's Do The Time Loop Again
The Forgotten City was not content with being one of Skyrim's most popular quest mods and it was not content with winning a Writer's Guild award while it was that mod. Instead, the game morphed into its own standalone title, using the gorgeous graphics of the Unreal Engine.
Set for release in July 2021, The Forgotten City takes the mod and recasts it among an abandoned Roman citadel off the River Tiber. With backing from the Australian government and 4 years of development, the game has come an awfully long way. In fact, The Forgotten City dropped a release trailer at the Summer Games Fest on the cusp of E3 2021, revealing even more of the title's time-bending antics.
In a preview for The Forgotten City, the developers highlight the huge, comprehensive revamp of the original mod with radically altered context. By recasting the mod in Ancient Rome, a lot of history appears throughout the title. The Roman element gives the game an interesting anthropological focus, where the different attitudes of NPCs in the game show how varied and dynamic thought and opinion was in an era long-gone. And things become more complex with the time loop mechanic, which weaves neatly throughout this setting. It becomes a really interesting way of manipulating and shifting events if the player uses their head. Alongside the time loop, the "Golden Rule" looms over the city. If any character commits a "sin," the rule is broken, and everyone in the city faces death, leading to some fraught moral decisions.
The Forgotten City opens with a bang. Or at least, it can, if players choose the soldier background and get a gun with ten rounds. Obviously, the game's origins as a Skyrim mod do impact the final product, and these backgrounds seem connected to that. In the original mod, players would import whatever character build they had been using throughout the open-world epic, complete with different skill trees and stat investments. The Forgotten City begins where the original mod quest did, but with the protagonist washing up on the shores of the river Tiber, rescued by a mysterious woman. During dialogue with their rescuer, the player can choose between several different backstories that define the extra skills of their protagonist.
Players can choose between being an archaeologist, a soldier, a criminal, or an amnesiac. The criminal and amnesiac backgrounds both give physical boosts, the former to run speed and the latter to durability. If a player chooses the archaeologist background, insights into the historical context of various items and several archaeological deductions become available to the player. While these choices might not always have the biggest impact, they can provide some interesting and dynamic alterations to the plot. For example: being able to draw a revolver on an uppity Roman guard certainly changes the options the player has available.
The Roman theme is not just pretty set-dressing; The Forgotten City uses its time-lapsed metropolis to explore an often-ignored plurality of opinion and culture that existed in Ancient Rome. The casual but thoughtful inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters was also nice to see, especially when depictions of Ancient Rome often lack that diversity. Alongside the authentic recreations of Roman architecture and society, each character espouses very specific and thoughtful ideas that inform their worldviews.
In particular, the city's ruler, Sentius, is a fascinating example of the game's stellar character writing. When players first meet Sentius, he pontificates on the wonders of the "Golden Rule." In particular, the leader comments on the role it plays in the ideal Roman society, and stands as an ardent defender of the status quo. In many ways, his dialogue is reminiscent of Caesar from Fallout New Vegas, in terms of his rhetorical deftness and ideological zealotry. It is not hard to see why 3 million players downloaded the mod when the characters are arguably better than many of the best NPCs in Skyrim. Whatever the player's take on Sentius' politics, he tasks them with figuring out who plans on breaking the Golden Rule, and how they can be stopped.
Although there are some staggeringly picturesque views thanks to the ornate environmental design and use of the Unreal Engine (rather than the decade-old Creation Engine that the Skyrim mod used), the game's sound design also deserves significant praise. While moments of calm wonderment at the very pretty Roman city are plentiful, so is the intense foreboding atmosphere throughout the game, mostly generated by ambient noise. Throughout the strolls along The Forgotten City's streets, frozen gold statues adorn the various corners and walls of the city. When these statues are among the eerie sliding of cold steel in the game's ambient soundtrack, this feeling of unease is heightened to a delightful degree.
As the game's website notes, combat is optional in The Forgotten City. However, players quickly realize that the rare weapons are much less effective than efficient manipulation of the time loop. The same is true for various puzzles in the game - brute force is possible, but often less satisfying because the combat is lackluster. Although the first few combat encounters are especially tense, they eventually become tedious. Of course, combat is not exactly what this game advertises itself on, and mostly exists as a last resort or a quick solution to certain puzzles.
All told, The Forgotten City weaves a tight murder mystery across a gorgeously realized environment, one that is a far cry from the Skyrim mod of 2016. The story has several branching paths and multiple endings, some of which come at very surprising moments. The game's time loop unfolds at a much slower, more player-led pace than titles like Deathloop or 12 Minutes. Despite the wealth of clever puzzle and roleplay mechanics in the game, the writing stands above all else. It is no wonder the game won an Australian Writer's Guild award when it was just a mod.
The Forgotten City will release July 28th 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X and later in 2021 for Nintendo Switch.
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