I reviewed this game with a key provided by the publisher.
About four years ago, I was winding down my first playthrough of Skyrim on PC and was hunting around Nexus Mods for well-rated new questlines. At the top of the list was The Forgotten City, a significant new expansion with rave reviews. I downloaded it and dove into the hole in the ground to visit the cavernous world below. Inside, I found an underground ghost town full of petrified people and a time portal back to the past. Diary entries told me of the Golden Rule, a curse placed on the city. If one person committed a single sin, the entire city would pay the price.
This mod became one of the most popular story expansions of Skyrim, beating out the thousands available on Nexus. Although I didn't finish it back then, I had a great time diving into the mystery of the Forgotten City. I was beyond intrigued when I saw the same modders formed a genuine studio, Modern Storyteller, and created a brand new narrative adventure game based on the mod. I'm pleased to report that this small team of four developers has delivered - sort of.
The player begins by exploring ruins when suddenly they're washed down a river and saved by an explorer. This explorer begs them to find a friend of hers who went missing down a well in the ruins. The player agrees to dive in and proceeds to the Forgotten City. Traveling through time backward roughly 2,000 years, the player finds themself in a huge but brightly lit underground cavern thousands of feet below the surface. 22 Romans are trapped in the tiny Forgotten City with the player.
Through the friendly, Roman tutorial character Galerius and the Magistrate Sentius, the player learns the rules of this world. A mantra called the Golden Rule reigns over the city: "The many shall suffer for the sins of the one." Hundreds of Romans who failed the challenge, now petrified into gold statues, fill the streets. Magistrate Sentius commands that no one will sin, lest the curse turn them to gold. As you know, people can only last without lying, cheating, stealing, or killing for so long. The main quest is to assist Sentius in finding who broke the Golden Rule, condemning them all to death, and then stop them by looping back in time.
The world of The Forgotten City is gorgeous. There's some excellent lighting work that leads to a very directed and controlled atmosphere, and the textures are beautiful. My RTX 2060 Super was overheating, running it at 1440p 60 FPS on ultra graphics, but knocking it down to high graphics settings was a great compromise.
The world is relatively small, so it's not too hard to track down specific characters. Gameplay consists of navigating branching dialogue trees, gaining new information from investigating or talking to other people, and using that information to open up new dialogue paths. The dialogue system is almost identical to DONTNOD's action-adventure narrative Vampyr, and I mean that as a great compliment.
You'll traverse the city, find items, clues, information, do quests, and plan out your next loop. There is very little combat, though there is one dungeon where your player wields a somewhat wonky bow and arrow. When anyone (including your player character) breaks the Golden Rule by sinning, the gold statues awaken. They raise golden bows sent by the goddess Diana and begin to turn everyone in the city into gold statues. Your player can escape back into the Shrine of Proserpina, the goddess of rebirth, and enter a time warp that sends them back to the start with their items intact. It is impossible not to draw a parallel to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The greater narrative cannot progress without repeatedly looping, changing things at least a bit each time, and learning a bit more.
My first complaint is that, especially at the beginning of the game, many logic chains are broken. When I first spoke to Sentius, he affirmed my status as a time traveler, but a few sentences later, he didn't believe me when I mentioned I was from the future. I experienced several more instances of this in the first hour. With characters being so angry, they would never speak to me again one moment and then amiable and charming the next once I clicked a dialogue option. Characters would forget information I just told them seconds ago. Logic chains in the dialogue are the entire game of The Forgotten City. It was a bad first impression for a game so focused on speaking.
When this concept works, it is brilliant. I had a half dozen moments of euphoria playing The Forgotten City as my mind clicked the puzzle blocks into place. I found myself rushing down the street to the next task, knowing exactly what to do and being rewarded with simply being correct. I swear I had a Jimmy Neutron Brainblast at one point. Many of the quests feel incomprehensible when you first glance at them but have obvious solutions in retrospect. After the first hour or so, I didn't run into any breaks in the logic chain and began to have fun solving the interpersonal puzzles.
The fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters didn't do much to help me care about their fates. Yet, not caring about them didn't stop me from enjoying prying information and secrets out of them. There was a moment where a character offered me a way out of the city in exchange for a lot of cash, and I remembered not to agree because her equivalent character had successfully duped me back in the Skyrim version.
This leads me to my second negative point: The Forgotten City contains some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard in a video game. I have played through several dozen quest mods for both Skyrim and the Fallout games, and the volunteer voice actors for those mods have been better than the performances here. I was astounded that the developers were comfortable putting the game out like this. Additionally, it sounded as though most of the actors were recording on low-quality microphones. Some voices were much louder than others, and I could hear certain characters like Sentius with their mouth pressed against the mic. On top of the subpar acting abilities of the cast, there was no consistency to accents. Most had a British accent, although they were Roman, except the one Greek character who had a very prominent Greek accent.
The sound mixing was unacceptable. The music was quiet in the overworld, got louder when someone was speaking as if to cover up their words, and then when climactic moments hit and the orchestral sounds swept in, the music got even quieter. The voice reciting the Golden Rule was so loud that my speakers began to shake, even turning my volume down to 1. I was constantly turning the volume up and down to set the levels right, and it never got better. Almost all my issues with the Forgotten City are sound-related, but the audio and voice work here is so shoddy it has nearly ruined the entire game.
Despite this, the gameplay of The Forgotten City works almost too well. I would see this game more as a proof-of-concept than anything. This style of narrative adventure mystery can work, and when it does work, it's ingenious. Tremendous audio and voice issues, many minor bugs, and clunky movement hold The Forgotten City back from being truly great. In the future, with the injection of a larger budget, Modern Storyteller could produce a masterpiece in this fashion. As of now, I recommend this game to all interested parties, if only to see that this kind of high-concept narrative adventure thriller is not only possible but inevitable.
About four years ago, I was winding down my first playthrough of Skyrim on PC and was hunting around Nexus Mods for well-rated new questlines. At the top of the list was The Forgotten City, a significant new expansion with rave reviews. I downloaded it and dove into the hole in the ground to visit the cavernous world below. Inside, I found an underground ghost town full of petrified people and a time portal back to the past. Diary entries told me of the Golden Rule, a curse placed on the city. If one person committed a single sin, the entire city would pay the price.
This mod became one of the most popular story expansions of Skyrim, beating out the thousands available on Nexus. Although I didn't finish it back then, I had a great time diving into the mystery of the Forgotten City. I was beyond intrigued when I saw the same modders formed a genuine studio, Modern Storyteller, and created a brand new narrative adventure game based on the mod. I'm pleased to report that this small team of four developers has delivered - sort of.
The player begins by exploring ruins when suddenly they're washed down a river and saved by an explorer. This explorer begs them to find a friend of hers who went missing down a well in the ruins. The player agrees to dive in and proceeds to the Forgotten City. Traveling through time backward roughly 2,000 years, the player finds themself in a huge but brightly lit underground cavern thousands of feet below the surface. 22 Romans are trapped in the tiny Forgotten City with the player.
Through the friendly, Roman tutorial character Galerius and the Magistrate Sentius, the player learns the rules of this world. A mantra called the Golden Rule reigns over the city: "The many shall suffer for the sins of the one." Hundreds of Romans who failed the challenge, now petrified into gold statues, fill the streets. Magistrate Sentius commands that no one will sin, lest the curse turn them to gold. As you know, people can only last without lying, cheating, stealing, or killing for so long. The main quest is to assist Sentius in finding who broke the Golden Rule, condemning them all to death, and then stop them by looping back in time.
The world of The Forgotten City is gorgeous. There's some excellent lighting work that leads to a very directed and controlled atmosphere, and the textures are beautiful. My RTX 2060 Super was overheating, running it at 1440p 60 FPS on ultra graphics, but knocking it down to high graphics settings was a great compromise.
The world is relatively small, so it's not too hard to track down specific characters. Gameplay consists of navigating branching dialogue trees, gaining new information from investigating or talking to other people, and using that information to open up new dialogue paths. The dialogue system is almost identical to DONTNOD's action-adventure narrative Vampyr, and I mean that as a great compliment.
You'll traverse the city, find items, clues, information, do quests, and plan out your next loop. There is very little combat, though there is one dungeon where your player wields a somewhat wonky bow and arrow. When anyone (including your player character) breaks the Golden Rule by sinning, the gold statues awaken. They raise golden bows sent by the goddess Diana and begin to turn everyone in the city into gold statues. Your player can escape back into the Shrine of Proserpina, the goddess of rebirth, and enter a time warp that sends them back to the start with their items intact. It is impossible not to draw a parallel to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The greater narrative cannot progress without repeatedly looping, changing things at least a bit each time, and learning a bit more.
My first complaint is that, especially at the beginning of the game, many logic chains are broken. When I first spoke to Sentius, he affirmed my status as a time traveler, but a few sentences later, he didn't believe me when I mentioned I was from the future. I experienced several more instances of this in the first hour. With characters being so angry, they would never speak to me again one moment and then amiable and charming the next once I clicked a dialogue option. Characters would forget information I just told them seconds ago. Logic chains in the dialogue are the entire game of The Forgotten City. It was a bad first impression for a game so focused on speaking.
When this concept works, it is brilliant. I had a half dozen moments of euphoria playing The Forgotten City as my mind clicked the puzzle blocks into place. I found myself rushing down the street to the next task, knowing exactly what to do and being rewarded with simply being correct. I swear I had a Jimmy Neutron Brainblast at one point. Many of the quests feel incomprehensible when you first glance at them but have obvious solutions in retrospect. After the first hour or so, I didn't run into any breaks in the logic chain and began to have fun solving the interpersonal puzzles.
The fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters didn't do much to help me care about their fates. Yet, not caring about them didn't stop me from enjoying prying information and secrets out of them. There was a moment where a character offered me a way out of the city in exchange for a lot of cash, and I remembered not to agree because her equivalent character had successfully duped me back in the Skyrim version.
This leads me to my second negative point: The Forgotten City contains some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard in a video game. I have played through several dozen quest mods for both Skyrim and the Fallout games, and the volunteer voice actors for those mods have been better than the performances here. I was astounded that the developers were comfortable putting the game out like this. Additionally, it sounded as though most of the actors were recording on low-quality microphones. Some voices were much louder than others, and I could hear certain characters like Sentius with their mouth pressed against the mic. On top of the subpar acting abilities of the cast, there was no consistency to accents. Most had a British accent, although they were Roman, except the one Greek character who had a very prominent Greek accent.
The sound mixing was unacceptable. The music was quiet in the overworld, got louder when someone was speaking as if to cover up their words, and then when climactic moments hit and the orchestral sounds swept in, the music got even quieter. The voice reciting the Golden Rule was so loud that my speakers began to shake, even turning my volume down to 1. I was constantly turning the volume up and down to set the levels right, and it never got better. Almost all my issues with the Forgotten City are sound-related, but the audio and voice work here is so shoddy it has nearly ruined the entire game.
Despite this, the gameplay of The Forgotten City works almost too well. I would see this game more as a proof-of-concept than anything. This style of narrative adventure mystery can work, and when it does work, it's ingenious. Tremendous audio and voice issues, many minor bugs, and clunky movement hold The Forgotten City back from being truly great. In the future, with the injection of a larger budget, Modern Storyteller could produce a masterpiece in this fashion. As of now, I recommend this game to all interested parties, if only to see that this kind of high-concept narrative adventure thriller is not only possible but inevitable.