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The Forgotten City
Released On: Jul 28, 2021
84
8.3
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Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 37 Critic Reviews
84
78% Positive
29 Reviews
29 Reviews
11% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 37 Critic Reviews
84
78% Positive
29 Reviews
29 Reviews
11% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Uniformly excellent writing, acting, and audio-visual presentation of an ancient Roman city and its imminently doomed citizens make The Forgotten City a mystery well worth solving—and the clever time-looping mechanics make your investigation a lot of fun.
The Forgotten City tells an interesting story and uses a unique timeloop mechanic. Sadly, from a technical perspective, there is a lot that went wrong, going from bugs to weird animations. Nevertheless, we cannot stress enough how much we enjoyed this game.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 173 User Ratings
8.3
76% Positive
132 Ratings
132 Ratings
18% Mixed
31 Ratings
31 Ratings
6% Negative
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 173 User Ratings
8.3
76% Positive
132 Ratings
132 Ratings
18% Mixed
31 Ratings
31 Ratings
6% Negative
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
Criminally underrated Witcher 3 story telling meets inception in Greece.
I am not the greatest fan of ancient Greek/Rome story setting, but this game made it so interesting I stayed till 5 AM till I finished the game in at least different 3 ways.
The game is no doubt masterpiece. Clearly product of love for the few developers that worked on it.
The story, characters and dialog are well ground, fantastically delivered, and respect your critical thinking. Ending is elegant and although the plot is intricate all the loose ends are tied flawlessly.
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PC
The most beautiful and magnificent work of art and dedication i ever seen in my 12 years of gaming truly a once in a life time masterpiece of writing and design
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PC
Deftly written, smart, and consistently clever, The Forgotten City makes for a rousing, spirited adventure that is well worth taking part in. I wish it were longer, but that doesn't do much to knock what has been accomplished here.
A brilliant game that’s all about conversations. You get stuck in a time loop which sounds potentially frustrating but actually isn’t because you don’t have to repeat yourself in any way. It’s just a shame that the game’s a bit ugly and the puzzles a bit trivial.
With top-notch writing and screenplay, The Forgotten City manages with disconcerting ease to embark the player in a gripping, supernatural and historical tale. A success that is not necessarily obvious from the first moments, when the technical shortcomings of the title (some display problems, animations not always at the top) and the very many dialogues may be put off. But this first impression quickly fades when entering straight into the cursed city of the Modern Storyteller studio, where the famous golden rule is likely to result in the death of all its inhabitants if one of them between them commits the least sin. This initial idea thus gives birth to a whole lot of reflection, on the human condition as well as on the culture of each one, and will bring the player to face many reversals of situation, all well brought up. A very pleasant surprise for fans of the investigation / adventure game.
The Forgotten City is a great game, even more if you think it's built by 3 people. They deserve more credit and more money, because this game is full of good ideas and a very interesting lore.
For all its occasional grievances — that don’t add up to too much — it’s the intriguing mystery as much the appeal of its investigative leads across many a conversation where the strengths of The Forgotten City end up standing out most of all.
Unique, well-written, surprising, and interesting throughout it all, The Forgotten City is a great game that deserves your time.
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PC
This is a story focused game. Literally the only combat is an occasional area that you fire your bow in where the enemies take two hits and all they do is rush you if they see you. I never came close to dying by an enemy so you shouldn't either. If that sounds fine with you then keep reading.
The premise is you have been transported to a lost ancient Roman city that is cut off from the outside world. AND you are stuck in a timeloop. It is your duty to explore and chat with everybody, discover leads, follow leads, and break the timeloop. The city area is not so big but I think it is the perfect size for this game. I'm going to spitball and say there are about 12 people in the city. The characters and the mystery are enjoyable. The characters will probably not be so memorable in the long run but I imagine the mystery will be.
In a game such as this there is a lot of possibility for the little annoyance of needing to repeat your actions everyday if you want to build off of something you previously did. There is no such annoyance here I am glad to tell you. For one, there is a very nice, overly trusting man that will run and do your important errands at the beginning of the loop. Also, all the characters you interact with are totally cool with being blunt and cutting to the chase.
There are 4 endings and one of them is THE ending. The others are options but they don't leave you satisfied. So why do I think this game is only a 7 out 10? It is not that the game does anything wrong I just, for whatever reason, don't have any strong feelings toward it. It is good. It is solid. If you like this kind of thing you will enjoy yourself. I enjoyed myself.
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PC
Massively overrated. For a game that relies so heavily on dialogue, the dialogues themselves aren't all that good. Voice actors do their best to elevate this material, but there's only so much they can do. This game wasn't written by a professional script writer, and it clearly shows.
This whole timeloop mechanic is very tedious. I have no idea how both this game and Outer Wilds are some of the most well-received adventure games of the last five years, despite the timeloop implementation being equally as awful in both of them.
The journal is a joke. It lets you put a tracker on a quest you wanna follow, except half the time this tracker doesn't work and you have to navigate on your own. I hate this kind of approach. You either let a player track every quest or none of them. The way it's done here, it just creates confusion.
The graphics are nothing to write home about. A tad more fidelity than you'd expect from your typical indie game, but still nowhere near enough to compete with big budget contemporaries. I couldn't help but think that instead of these "pretty" graphics and fancy voice acting they could've invested more funds and effort into the actual gameplay, quests, etc. Take, for example, Age Of Decadence, which, yes, looked way behind times, but it had a much better writing, actually interesting characters, more and better quests, even more locations variety. Better score too. The soundtrack in The Forgotten City is basically just stock "ancient music" and lacks severely in originality and memorability. Once again, if we're talking smaller budget, indie titles, take something like Enderal, which had a massive 5-hour long OST with tons of memorable tunes.
Overall, this game is an admirable attempt, but still a letdown in so many ways. The developers clearly bit off more than they could chew. Perhaps they should've started with something more lowkey, prove themselves and gain more experience, before undertaking something so ambitious.
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PC
If your bar for quality has dropped so low to the point where this is some of the best writing in gaming, please seek help or play more narrative video games.
For a game made for "Adults who like figuring things out for themselves" the mission path is extremely straight forward, and there isn't much thought required to get through the game. Just go with the blatantly obvious solutions or just cheese your way through it because the game breaks at the slightest hiccup. And aside from a single moment, nothing really feels clever. For a game with a timeloop mechanic, they do **** all to give you interesting puzzles or narrative beats to get around by using the timeloop. Most solutions basically play out with you choosing dialogue until you say the wrong thing. Then on the next loop you go back and say something different. And it's not like you really have much input either as the options are pretty rigid and several times the game would not let me say the one thing I very easily could have said to sway the conversation in my favor. It's so surface level and rigid that I can't fathom why anyone would think the dialogue or choices are interesting. I mean I literally got the "True" ending on my first run through and I didn't even feel like I did anything special to deserve it.
Speaking of the ending, the big reveals in the last act are unbearably corny and play out like something you'd probably see in a random Gmod level. And despite coming out, what, almost a decade after the mod? It still looks a plays like a skyrim mod, though I'd argue the original mod's visuals almost fit better and Skyrim's facial animations are about on par with this 2021 release. I seriously can't believe this game was made in Unreal 4. It looks like it was made Unity, by people who don't understand lighting and post processing.
I just don't understand what anyone sees in this game. The illusion of choice is paper thin, the ending is eye-roll worthy, and it's just kinda corny as a whole. The 4th wall breaking jokes are facebook level humor and having a "Karen" joke literally 2 minutes into the game does not set a great tone.
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PC
Summary The Forgotten City is a mystery adventure game of exploration and deduction. Travel 2,000 years into the past and relive the final days of a cursed Roman city, where if one person sins, everyone dies. Combat is an option, but violence will only get you so far. Only by questioning an intertwined community of colourful characters, cleverl...
Rated T
for Teen
Platforms:
- PC
- Xbox One
- Nintendo Switch
- PlayStation 4
- PlayStation 5
- Xbox Series X
Initial Release Date: Jul 28, 2021
Developer:
- Modern Storyteller
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Genres:
