When it comes to The Forgotten City, this is one of those games where talking in-depth about the story means you’re well and truly in spoiler territory. Sure, any review that outlines a narrative-focused title’s big story beats would inherently be ‘spoiler-filled’. But, biting one’s figurative lip here is tantamount to saying “trust me, you’ll dig this”. The Forgotten City presents a fascinating and often thought provoking journey into the nature of morality, religion, and myth.

Elevator pitch time.

The Forgotten City is a time-travelling tale about an ancient and cursed Roman city. After stepping through a Sliders or Stargate-like portal, you’re whisked 2,000 years into the past and tasked with uncovering this mysterious underground locale’s, err, mysteries. Its citizens' motivations, and ultimately... changing the course of history. All those golden statues you saw before tripping the light fantastic? They were actual people. People in togas.


‘The Golden Rule’ is in full force here and very literal. If anyone sins the entire city is punished by the Gods and turned into gold. Translation, they all die like Daenerys’s brother in Game of Thrones Season 1. Well, not quite as graphic because here magical bows held by a squad of magical golden figures shoot the citizens after a loud voice (and that’s super loud) gets all declarative and says “by the sins of the one the many shall perish”. Something along those lines.

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The Forgotten City presents a fascinating and often thought provoking journey into the nature of morality, religion, and myth.

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Anyway… so begins a time-loop of discovery, choice (or lack thereof), mistakes, paradoxes, and little morality plays. There’s an element of Groundhog Day, a dash of Majora’s Mask, and even a sprinkle of that ‘Whodunit?’ Dark Brotherhood quest from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The one where you visit a party and need to learn a bit about everybody and their habits before quietly taking them out one at a time.

The Forgotten City deals in history, from Roman to Greek to other cultures. It also deals in myth, legend, science, and philosophy. Going into specifics, outside of the fairly straightforward setup, would lessen the punch its narrative is more than capable of delivering.


Developed by a very small team out of Melbourne, The Forgotten City’s own history is equally fascinating. What began as an critically acclaimed mod for Skyrim has now become a built from-the-ground-up standalone and fleshed out title by a team of three. In that sense the fact that the presentation remains very much in that highly detailed Skyrim first-person realm is impressive.

In fact, you could describe the early parts of the game as that bit in a large-scale Skyrim-style RPG where you visit a new town and spend upwards of an hour speaking to all of the people and checking out all the houses and shops and staring at the various loaves of bread sitting on tables everywhere. Here complying with the ‘Steal This Yeast Beast Bro!’ overlay and flashing ‘X’ button triggers the Golden Rule. And what they, in the co-op biz, call a wipe.

Where The Forgotten City shines... is with the many golden statues you see adorning the often beautiful locales you get to explore. Ahem. Where it shines as a slice of digital game-ness is as a spellbinding interactive mystery. The characters are wonderful, and speak in that mix of exposition and personality that can be found in the very best point-and-click adventures from the days of VGA graphics. Which is, aptly speaking, the toga of display technology.


Behind the 4K visuals, the HDR, the impressive architecture, the serviceable lip syncing, lies an experience all about story and story-related storyness. Exploration and discovery, learning the players, but also using the very nature of the time-loop as a mechanic and narrative structure to solve puzzles or otherwise learn something unexpected and then ‘do better next time’ by virtue of the fact that you’re slowly becoming a prognosticator of prognosticators. For those clicking, yeah, that's the second Groundhog Day reference.

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The Forgotten City deals in history, from Roman to Greek to other cultures. It also deals in myth, legend, science, and philosophy. Going into specifics, outside of the fairly straightforward setup, would lessen the punch its narrative is more than capable of delivering.

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Where the story ultimately ends up isn’t so much surprising as it is ambitious, and very much the result of pulling back the curtain and seeing an intricate machine doing its thing. With multiple endings The Forgotten City offers a non-linear approach to how it presents most of its quests, but here the seams begin to show.


Tracking movements and what gets a quest icon versus what doesn’t is a little strange, and if you do something out of sequence you can even find some characters stuck in their own videogame time loop. In that a quest might not progress on the account of underlying misfire of code. On that front the combat you’ll find in The Forgotten City isn’t all that exciting or engaging. You might even say this side is, ahem... forgettable.

The narrative though is anything but slight. The characters are not only memorable, but the questions they and the overall story raise go beyond plot twists for the sake of plot twists. There’s care and an attention to detail worth celebrating here. Roman culture isn’t simply a cool historical backdrop, customs, behaviours, what we now know of the times can be found and felt in every corner of the world. And in many of the conversations you’ll have.

In keeping with the game’s own structure, we’ll end things there and with a time loop of sorts. “Trust me, you’ll dig this”.