It's the final IGotW of the year so let's go out with a bang with the acclaimed time-looping adventure game The Forgotten City back from 2021. Now, I'm a big fan of any game that takes on the whole time-looping device—where the player's "mistakes" are quickly forgiven and forgotten by having the events of the game repeat themselves ad nauseam until the true path is gleaned, Groundhog Day-style—and moreover the distinct methods in which they're able to build branching narratives and UI features around the concept. The forebear of the time-looper adventure game (and still, perhaps, its strongest entry) is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and in particular I've always admired the comprehensive way Nintendo structured a timeline for NPCs and their daily habits learned from observation through something akin to a scheduling app. Sadly, most time-loop games haven't replicated this feature since, and while The Forgotten City is no exception owing to its modest origins (three people worked on it, basing it on an earlier Skyrim mod of theirs (and you know it's Skyrim because you get a bow almost immediately)) it makes up for it with a similar foreboding atmosphere steeped in a whole bunch of fascinating moral philosophy and Antiquity-era mythology.

The idea is that you've found yourself on an island along the Tiber river in Italy, pulled out of the water by a ferrywoman introducing herself as Karen (immediate red flags) and told that a fellow traveler, a hiker named Al Worth, has entered the nearby ruins and Karen has been waiting for him to return. Investigating on her behalf, the protagonist—about whom the player can attribute a gender and a profession, both of which can be relevant to the puzzles—finds themselves falling through a trapdoor in the nearby shrine into an ancient ruined city full of eerie gold statues that turn to watch you whenever you look away. One of those statues is Al himself, who was in the process of suiciding when he fell under the same curse: he tells you not to enter the nearby wormhole to the distant past, as you'll be trapped in the same demoralizing repeating loop as he was. Still, with no other recourse in this ancient Roman oubliette, you jump into the vortex to find a bustling town of Roman citizens slightly bemused by your sudden and unusual appearance. The task is to then do what Al could not: figure out why everything is looping and how you might prevent this "Golden Rule" that causes the entire populace to be collectively punished for the sins of the one, either stopping the person destined to trigger it thereby dooming the whole town or advocating with the being behind its enforcement to dissolve it. I've probably said plenty already without hopefully spoiling too much of the mystery, but this is certainly a game that builds on the confusion of being lost in a foreign land and slowly piecing things together by talking to the citizens and exploring the chasm-bound environs in their entirety.

Being that Skyrim is twelve years old (I know, I know, essentially ancient history itself at this point) the game's had a glow-up since its mod days and both the characters and environments look pretty good, taking advantage of the different ethnicities of those living under the yoke of the then-widespread Roman empire to give everyone a distinct appearance, accent, personality, history, and attitude towards the Romans owing to their cultural background. Some are hostile towards you, though not overtly so due to the Golden Rule keeping everyone in check, and a few are even ready to scam you, though most are happy to help or are in need of help themselves. All solutions to these problems are temporary of course given the causality loop but a neat feature is having the guy who introduces you to the town—the friendly farmer Galerius—be someone you can immediately dragoon into doing all the time-sensitive tasks for you, having him dash around saving whomever needs to be saved so you can focus on other goals and leads that have drawn your attention. He's a bro of the highest order, for sure.

While the game styles itself as a first-person adventure game, in the traditional graphic adventure sense of having an inventory and using it to solve conundrums, it does still contain aspects from its original incarnation as a Skyrim mod. That is to say, that the game has a rudimentary amount of stealth and ranged combat in it, all of which is purely optional as the main reward you get from completing these action-heavy sequences is an item that greatly helps with other tasks but isn't essential for them. The game even warns you ahead of time when you take on the NPC side-mission that initializes this chain in case you're not an action type. That said, you will have to make a mad dash to the shrine you entered the town from should the Golden Rule ever be broken (and it will, eventually, due to being a necessary reset trigger much like the supernova of Outer Wilds or the mooncrash of Majora's Mask) while avoiding bow-wielding enemies. This isn't one of those time-looping games where death will reset the loop either: dying instead causes a game over and prompts you to reload a prior save (the auto-save is pretty generous, thankfully) so you really do need to make sure your escape plan is ready.

I very much enjoyed my time with The Forgotten City, taking my time to delve into the whys and hows behind the place and uncovering more information behind the enigma of its restrictive law and its equally enigmatic enforcer all the while working on smaller puzzles regarding each citizen's immediate needs and wants and figuring out how it all ties together. I would've liked for more of the info-tracking UI features I was discussing earlier, if only to make it easier to find certain NPCs during the loop (two important characters, Galerius and Equitia the priestess, never seem to settle in one place for long), but given there's only twenty characters total it's not hard to keep all the relevant info in your head and you can at least find a citizen roster if you ever needed a reminder of who someone is, where they (probably) are, and what their role might be. Like The Sexy Brutale and Outer Wilds and the other Indie time-loop games that have popped up in recent years, it takes a bit of work to get your bearings and learn the "rules" and perhaps more than a few frustrating "failed" loops where zero progress is made, but that just means gradually acquiring the full scope of things and divining the critical path to success becomes all the more satisfying as a result. For as much as I rail against run-based games, those otherwise known as the roguelike/lite genre for which constant progress resets are par for the course, for whatever reason I have way more patience for this particular interpretation of the idea.

Rating: 5 out of 5.