The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City is a modern classic, an utterly compelling video game that reinvents the adventure genre through intriguing writing and exploration. With stellar voice acting, sparkling conversation, and story twists to spare, The Forgotten City is one of the best games I've played this year, and one of the best video game narratives I've ever encountered. Utterly original, completely entrancing.

The Forgotten City is this year’s unexpected contender for the “GotY 2021” award. Exceptional writing and wonderfully built world, all come together in a wonderfully balanced adventure game that finds the golden line/ rule between the hardcore fist person adventures of the past and the more modern walking simulators, offering a deep experience for all type of players.

The Forgotten City rewards your inquisitive mind with equally satisfying rewards at every turn, making its time-travelling tale one not to miss out on.

The Forgotten City does a fabulous job exploring interesting moral quandaries through excellently written dialogue and characters.

A masterclass in narrative driven storytelling. Every character is important and every choice could lead to your doom. Play it and see if you can solve the mystery for yourself!

The Forgotten City is a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging murder mystery where the decisions that you make actually matter. Exploring the beautifully rendered city is a treat and I look forward to whatever the developers create next.

The power to immerse into 6 hour gameplay originates from the great narratives of the game. Even though the animations and face expressions are a bit clumsy, The Forgotten City's deep story added on award-winning original mode is something that should not be missed by those who love mysteries and adventures.

The Forgotten City looks like the result of crossing Skyrim, Outer Wilds and Deadly Premonition. Fascinating. One of the stories of the year. The Skyrim mod that transformed into a swan.

Utterly absorbing and rarely anything less than completely fascinating, The Forgotten City is an intoxicating microcosm of Ancient Roman society embedded in a dialogue heavy adventure and wrapped around one of the most smartly designed mysteries and sleuthing yarns to come along in a good long while. Occasional technical creakiness and issues aside, it's a deeply pleasant irony that The Forgotten City will remain long in your memory after the credits have completed their roll the first, second, third and fourth time.

The Forgotten City is a consistently engaging mystery that I couldn’t help but get trapped in. It features an amazing blend of narrative mystery buoyed by some fun bouts of exploration and light combat, just enough to really break up the pace. It’s a game that encourages you to put pressure on its established boundaries to see what you can break and change. There’s a brilliant web of mystery within a time loop that you can manipulate, delivering some great and clever commentary around a whole bunch of topics. Seeing how far Modern Storyteller has come from “The Forgotten City” mod to this full game makes me beyond excited to see what Nick Pearce and the team come up with next.

A fantastic investigation-drive game that, even with the limitations of an independent studio, manages to deliver a compelling adventure from beginning to end.

Choices matter, both in life and in The Forgotten City, which uses ancient Roman beliefs about morality, ethics, and law to subtly comment on our present-day conflicts. But it’s never heavy-handed and what you’ll mostly pay attention to are the characters and their needs, your own objectives, the mysterious city, and the clever way time loops and puzzle-solving work together. Whether you play it once or try for the multiple alternative endings, The Forgotten City is a unique adventure.

Based on a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it’s great that The Forgotten City has been expanded upon and given a chance to truly shine as a standalone product. The writing is stellar, and the whole affair is so unique and interesting that you can’t help but get sucked in, attempting to find a way to put an end to The Golden Rule once and for all. Not all of the endings available are particularly gratifying, but follow The Forgotten City through to its true ending and you’ll be left with an experience that you won’t soon forget.

The Forgotten City would have been a good game, if the developers would have remained in the lane of adventure games. The action scenes are more of a miss, since the whole game was built on the idea of observing and solving puzzles. Although you have other means at your disposal, the strongest suit of The Forgotten City remains its slower gameplay focused on problem solving. For a small group of people, putting together The Forgotten City is no small feat, and they deserve the praise.

For fans of storytelling, The Forgotten City is a solid recommendation. Freed from the shackles of Skyrim, the full game tells a captivating story elevated by clever and humorous writing. With the interesting time loop mechanic creating further situations full of comedy and intrigue, settling down across a few evenings with The Forgotten City will delight. We just wish the combat was either improved or not there at all, and the technical setbacks weren't quite so rampant.