The Forgotten City
PC
Adapted by a core team of three from a popular Skyrim mod, The Forgotten City is an absorbing reminder that videogames are naturally suited to detective fiction. It arrives at the perfect time, at once riding the recent wave of unconventional detective games such as Return Of The Obra Dinn and Paradise Killer, but also the coattails of the time-loop trend. As it casts your contemporary protagonist into a 2,000-year-old cursed Roman city, its hook allows developer Modern Storyteller to throw in a few timely gags. Asked if you can understand the concept of a collective being condemned by the acts of selfish individuals, you’re given the opportunity to reply that, yes, you’ve recently lived through a pandemic.
As an elevator pitch, it’s a doozy. This underground settlement – relatively compact, as videogame cities go, but “just big and dark enough to get lost in” – is occupied by just 22 characters, who live by (and in fear of) a Golden Rule: “the many shall suffer for the sins of the one”. The local magistrate, convinced your arrival means someone is about to break it, charges you with finding out who that might be. It’s a rare example of a detective game where you’re not arriving after the fact, yet you’re constantly reminded of the stakes by the unsettling presence of whispering golden statues. From the outset, they add a note of heavy portent, as you wonder what could have made a gladiator run, or leave a legionary stricken by terror. We soon find out, as a bow-wielding assassin arrives, prompting a sprint for the portal so we can start again – now armed with the knowledge that the ceiling of a nearby building is about to collapse. Rather than try to placate him, this time we lie and tell him his target is hidden within.
That is but one of a series of mysteries and plot threads that are teased out over successive runs, as you gradually grow familiar with the city’s secrets and its residents’ proclivities. Between conversations, you mull over the various moral and philosophical quandaries raised. Can an altruistically motivated crime still be classed as a sin (especially when the ‘victim’ is an unpleasant and self-serving shopkeeper charging a fortune for vital medicine)? Its few flaws stem partly from the source: in classic Elder Scrolls style, you won’t be able to interrupt characters’ routines, and each time you must wait for them to turn their heads so they can address you face on. Others are the result of limited resources: the writing is excellent, but the quality of the voice acting wavers. Yet Modern Storyteller has concocted a gripping mystery here. In exploring the past so thoughtfully, it has established itself as a name to watch in the future.