The Forgotten City started life in 2015 as a quest mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It went on to become one of Skyrim’s most successful and popular mods ever. Not only was it downloaded over 3 million times, it also became the first game mod to win a national Writer’s Guild award.
Now, that mod has been reworked, refined, and greatly expanded on to produce a standalone game version. The Forgotten City releases today across multiple platforms, allowing both those who experienced its ancient Roman city murder mystery plot as a mod, and entirely new players, an opportunity to relive the time-looping adventure.
“The many shall suffer for the sins of the one.” This is the fabled Golden Rule that serves as the central focal point of The Forgotten City’s story, and it dictates that you and the city’s 23 or so residents can’t steal from or attack another human, lest the city’s guardian statues spring to life and methodically turn each citizen into solid gold - trapping them forever. But you don’t need constant combat to make it delightfully fascinating to unravel each of the city’s many delicate layers, and the deeper you go the more obvious it becomes that a life without clear crime is no utopia. The city’s least savory denizens use loopholes, social engineering, and deception to entrap and purposefully mislead one another, skirting the Golden Rule altogether.
The Forgotten City is positively dripping with brain teasing moral quandaries as a result – without spoiling anything, there are points where you have to break the Golden Rule, as well as times where you must stop it from being broken, even if it would mean helping innocent people out of awful predicaments.
Game Features
- Explore an open-world ancient Roman city with historically authentic art, architecture, costumes and customs
- Investigate a gripping, non-linear mystery with multiple endings
- Become entwined in the lives of richly detailed, deeply interactive characters
- Grapple with moral dilemmas which have life-and-death consequences
- Role-play as whoever you want, by choosing your own gender, origin and backstory
- Solve problems with reason, charm, bribery, intimidation, violence, or by cleverly exploiting the time-loop
Here’s an idea of the gameplay, with 8 or so minutes from early in the game.
The Forgotten City is available now (with a small launch discount on PC) on Steam, Epic Games, GOG, Xbox Series, Xbox One, PS4 and PS5, and will come to Nintendo Switch in Q3 2021.
Steam @ R135 (R150 from 4 August)
Epic @ R158 (R176)
GOG @ $23 ($25) / ~R333 (~R363)
Xbox @ R509
PlayStation @ R539
https://store.playstation.com/en-za/product/EP1302-PPSA03134_00-THEFORGOTTENCITY/
