The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City is a first-person narrative RPG built around a single, brutal premise: you are trapped in a Roman underground city where a divine law holds that if anyone commits a sin, everyone dies. Gold statues start falling the moment someone breaks the rules, and you restart the day. Your only tools are conversation, observation, and whatever you carry between loops. There are no combat systems to lean on, no skill trees to optimize. The whole game is built on dialogue, deduction, and the slow accumulation of knowledge across repeated playthroughs. Originally a Skyrim mod that won a national writers' award, the standalone release strips away the borrowed engine and rebuilds with its own art and voice work. The result is a tightly authored murder-mystery crossed with a philosophical thought experiment. The cast of maybe two dozen characters is small by RPG standards, but Modern Storyteller uses that constraint well. Every resident of the city has a backstory, a contradiction, and at least one lie they are telling themselves. Pacing is excellent. You will probably finish in five to eight hours, but the game is designed to be replayed, and each loop rewards you for paying attention the previous time. The writing is the obvious star here. Dialogue branches actually change what you learn and when, and a few conversations late in the game reframe everything you thought you understood about the city and the people in it. There is a villain whose motivations are genuinely complicated, a romance subplot that earns its emotional beats, and a finale with multiple endings that feel like real consequences of choices rather than arbitrary stat checks. For anyone who cares whether words on screen hold up to a second reading: yes, they do. The Roman setting is also handled with more care than you usually get. The game engages seriously with Stoic philosophy and uses it as actual plot architecture, not window dressing. The weaknesses are real but minor. First-person navigation and some puzzle logic can feel slightly obtuse before you figure out the loop rhythm. A handful of the side resolutions feel a little convenient. And if you are expecting the mechanical complexity of a traditional RPG, the lack of stats, inventory depth, or combat will disappoint. This is closer to a very well-made interactive mystery novel than a systems-heavy game. That is not a criticism so much as a warning: set your expectations correctly and the short runtime will feel complete rather than thin. For RPG players specifically, The Forgotten City scratches the itch that Disco Elysium and Pentiment hit - the one where the writing does the heavy lifting and the choices feel like they cost something. It is a game that respects your time, respects your intelligence, and actually has something to say about guilt, complicity, and what justice looks like when the rules are absolute. Rare enough to be worth your attention.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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