How The Forgotten City Creates The Perfect Mystery

Every year, I like to dedicate my last video to one game, released in the last 12 months, that I think deserves a much closer look. A game that’s, perhaps, innovative, or bold, or just absurdly smart. For 2021, there were plenty of games I could have picked - honourable mentions later on - but there was one game that I really wanted to dive into. It’s called… The Forgotten City. Now, as usual, I’ll give you the elevator pitch, and then give you a chance to ditch this video and go play the game for yourself before I spoil the whole thing. Sound good?

Right, so The Forgotten City is a time-travelling detective game, set in a teeny Roman city at the bottom of an impossibly deep chasm. GALERIUS: “Uh… Salve friend. I’m Galerius” The 20-odd residents of this place all live under “The Golden Rule”, which basically says: if one person commits a sin, then the entire population will be punished. By death. Your job is to figure out who is about to break the golden rule - and stop them before they do it.

You’re given free rein to crack the case: so you can wander the streets, talk to citizens, find leads and rumours and clues, and piece together the answer by yourself. But if you fail to find the culprit, you’ll have to rewind the clock and start from scratch. GALERIUS: “Uh… Salve friend”. Though, now with new items and information that might help you out on the next loop… Now, you might be thinking that this whole thing sounds a tad familiar.

Going back in time to solve crimes? That’s a bit Return of the Obra Dinn, isn’t it? And how about piecing together information while trapped in a time loop? That’s very Outer Wilds. And what about interviewing the citizens of a small city to find a culprit? A bit Disco Elysium, and it also strongly reminds me of last year’s Paradise Killer. And, yeah, you’d be right to think that. Except, The Forgotten City actually predates all of those games. You see, this is actually a shiny remake of an uber popular Skyrim mod - of all things - from way back in 2015. It’s just been completely overhauled and turned into a standalone game, courtesy of Unreal Engine.

But what came first is not actually all that important - because what impresses me the most about The Forgotten City isn’t so much what it’s doing - but how it’s doing it. This is a game that instantly grabbed my attention. It’s a game where I felt a really strong sense of freedom - but without feeling overwhelmed by options. It’s a game where I was always making forward progress, without dead ends or missed clues. And a game that kept giving me surprises and revelations… up until its satisfying ending.

With one notable exception - did we really need to bring wonky Bethesda combat over from the mod? - uh, with that exception, this is a fantastic piece of interactive storytelling. And it was swirling around my head for days and days after I finished it, as I tried to figure out how the designers pulled it all off. So, if that sounds interesting to you - this is your chance to go get the game and play it. It’s on Steam, and all the major consoles, and its also on Game Pass as of this video’s release.

If you haven’t finished it and want to check it - now is your time to leave. After the break, we’ll dive deep into the game’s design.

Okay, welcome back! So, as I said in the intro, The Forgotten City held me rapt and engaged in five key ways: an instantly engaging intro. A high degree of agency - without being overwhelming. Constant forward progression. Surprises and revelations. And a satisfying ending. I wanted to know how it pulled all of these things off - so I played it again. And I watched some Let’s Players tackle the game on YouTube. And I also reached out to the game’s designer and writer, Nick Pearce, to find out more. So I’ll be quoting him throughout the video.

Let’s start with the game’s opening moments. A high concept game like this one has a lot to accomplish in its opening hour-or-so. It needs to ensure that the player understands where they are, what they’re doing, and - importantly - why they’re doing it. A strong introduction will leave players informed - but intrigued to learn more. And clear on their goal - while being motivated to accomplish it. So, Nick says “I carefully designed the introductory sequence - which is fairly linear - to include just the right amount of world-building and story set-up that [the player’s] purpose is clear, before handing over the story's reins”.

As such, as soon as we set foot in the city, we’re given a guided tour of the game’s world, events, and key characters. We meet Galerius, who tells us about the time period, the city, and teases some important gossip about an upcoming election. Then, we meet Sentius, who explains the golden rule, gives us our mission, and explains why we should care. SENTIUS: “If you manage to prevent the sin that breaks The Golden Rule, I won’t need to bring you here, I won’t create the portal, and you will never have been able to come here”.

At this point, says Nick, “I've given [players] the minimum amount of information to get them to the point where they're intrigued to find out more, they're motivated to want to help these people, they understand that helping these people is the only way to help themselves, and [that] talking to each of these people is going to be enjoyable”. So this is a great example of efficiency in introducing a game. In a very short period of time you have everything you need to start playing.

Okay, let’s talk about how The Forgotten City gives you freedom - without overwhelming the player. So, now it’s up to you to solve the mystery at the heart of the game. And how you go about it, is really up to you - this is a remarkably non-linear game, where you are free to work through the tangled web of leads and rumours however you like. It’s your choice who you speak to, where you explore, and what threads you pull on.

And while the game was still early in development, this is exactly what would happen after the introduction. Sentius would give you your mission - and then completely leave you to it, signalling that the guided tour was now over and it’s up to you to pick the next path. But, Nick understood that some players might need a helping hand. It can be overwhelming and immobilising to suddenly give players such a large amount of freedom.

Like - I adore Outer Wilds, but I have to admit that I totally bounced off the game at first because I was just overloaded with planets and people and dead ends and clues! Argh! So, Nick had Sentius give the player a lead: SENTIUS: “Oh, and one last thing. If I were you I’d start my investigation by visiting Lucretia at the shrine of Apollo, in the Forum". And this is a very smart way to start the player’s investigation.

You see, if you head towards the shrine, you’ll actually stumble upon a couple key bits of info along the way. These bickering palace guards talk about Sentilla going missing. And on the steps up to the shrine, we may be inclined to talk to Equitia, who gives us another hugely important goal - “The Common Thread”. But let’s keep going to the Shrine of Apollo. There, Lucretia will tell you that her patient has died - but could have been saved with resin. Which is being withheld by a chap called Desius.

Because we can’t afford the resin, the game gives you a different goal: steal it. Which, naturally, breaks The Golden Rule, forcing you to restart the loop. But, hey, you’ve still got the resin in your pocket. Maybe you should give that to the doctor? Now, at any point along this entire path we can leave and investigate for ourselves. We can ignore Sentius’s lead and head in another direction. We can, maybe, forget the Shrine of Apollo and do Equitia’s task instead. In fact, we can even tell Galerius to jog on right at the very beginning.

The point is - if we prefer to explore for ourselves, the game gives us really obvious off-ramps where we can ditch the guided tour and play however we want. But if we’re feeling overwhelmed, the game puts us on a rollercoaster tour that presents us with some key information that will help us out. We get given a bunch of different quests, including the two that essentially lead to all of the game’s different endings. And we get to see first hand how the Golden Rule and time loop systems work.

So it’s a good reminder that some players want to investigate and think for themselves, and the game supports that entirely. But others may find this level of freedom overwhelming and confusing, so the game provides a helping hand. It’s up to the player how much they want to follow orders… or rebel. Next up - I talked about how I made constant forward progression in The Forgotten City - without repeatedly stumbling into dead ends and missed clues. So how does that work?

Well, it’s important to look at the underlying structure of The Forgotten City, which is 20-or-so… well, in Skyrim parlance they’d be side quests. But the game calls them leads. They’re rumours and requests that may advance your investigation. For starters, there are often multiple ways to hear about these leads. Two or more characters may give you the same clue to get you started. And, likewise, there are often multiple ways to advance these quests - like, to get into Malleolus’s villa, you can jump into the pool, climb these vines, or bribe the guard.

It’s harder to miss a vital clue or hit a dead end when there are multiple opportunities to start and finish these quests. But I think the really smart thing is how all of these leads are actually completely intertwined. Let me give you an example. The assassin in the bathhouse. When you first meet him, Fabia is crushed by rocks, and the assassin tells you about a traitor with mismatched eyes… before shooting you with an arrow and triggering a new loop.

Now you can go back, save Fabia, lead the assassin into the trap, and steal his bow. So working though this one lead, Intruder, actually helps you with a bunch of other leads - the clue about the traitor helps you unseat Malleolus in Democracy in Action. Fabia helps you find Vergil’s bully in The Sinner. Saving Fabia will convince Georgius to change his vote in A Virtuous Man. And the assassin’s bow completes the lead Straight as an Arrow.

One lead contributes to four other leads. And this is not the only time it happens - in fact, I plotted out all the quests in the game and discovered that almost every single lead is linked to at least one other lead, in some fashion. And so the upshot of all this is that whenever you make progress in the game, it naturally and organically helps you somewhere else - either by starting, progressing, or finishing another lead. It’s not like you finish a self-contained quest in an RPG and then don’t know what to do next - that quest just gave you a whole bunch of new paths to follow.

There’s another benefit to this, also: a sense of immersion and believability. Nick says “In real communities, especially small ones like this, everyone knows everyone, and they're all up in each other's business. So in The Forgotten City, I made sure that each character refers to their neighbours as often as is natural”. “The alternative - and this is something you commonly see in big open world games - is characters just exist side by side as a series of disconnected individuals.

It makes the world feel shallow”. The Forgotten City, by comparison, is that age-old dream of a game that’s as narrow as a puddle but deep as an ocean. Okay. Next. I talked about how the game kept giving me a steady stream of revelations and surprises. And this is impressive, because of the game’s non-linear design. As Nick says, “Generally, players are very good at piecing together elements of a story to build an understanding of the bigger picture. However, there are certain story building blocks, or beats, which - if found in the wrong order - would make even the most intelligent players confused or disappointed. For example, where they ruined the setup for certain revelations, or made the pacing feel abrupt.”

So while the game does offer a huge amount of freedom, the designer smartly introduced “gates” to withhold certain things until the player has met some preconditions. Like, you can’t tell Sentius who you think the culprit is without first identifying a handful of suspects. And Equitia won’t reveal the city’s true nature until you’ve gathered the backstories from a number of characters. And the Philosopher in the underground tunnels won’t let you pass until you know that true nature. And so on.

Now, Nick says that “I was always conscious that gates run at cross-purposes to the game's open-world design philosophy,” so decided to use them sparingly and carefully justified them in the narrative. But the benefit of these gates is that the game doesn’t show all its cards at once. Instead, it gives you a steady stream of surprises: the true nature of the city, the history of the city, the culprit behind The Golden Rule, and so on. And, like a good page-turner of a novel, these frequent mysteries and revelations keep you engaged in the story and wanting to find out what happens next.

All the way up… to the game’s ending. Or endings - there are actually multiple ways to finish the game. For this, Nick says “the player should get the ending they deserve. In other words, whichever ending they get should be an emotional reward which is proportionate to the thought and effort they invested in the game.” So you can get an ending pretty quickly if you’re selfish, but it’s not gonna feel great. To get the most satisfying ending, then, you’ll need to have become truly invested in the game and helped out almost all of its characters.

And that’s where Nick employed another gate: you need the four plaques to open up the main temple, and getting them all means solving pretty much every mystery in the city. You’ll need to track down Khabash, unseat Malleolus, and figure out how to help pretty much every citizen. And then, on a later loop, you’ve got to make Galerius help out pretty much everyone citizen. Which is pretty enjoyable to mastermind. Time loop movies are often about exploiting the loop, becoming empowered, and having fun with it - and The Forgotten City captures that sensation really well.

As Nick says, piecing together this whole thing “feels satisfying because you're helping characters you really feel for, and it's a fun surprise when everything falls into place, and you realise that all the good deeds you've done up until now - which initially seemed like disconnected "side quests" - suddenly come together to help you pull off this elaborate coup.” So, there we have it. The Forgotten City instantly piques our interest with an efficiently designed intro.

It provides a huge amount of freedom, but gives some optional help if that’s too overwhelming. By tightly entangling its many sidequests, it means there’s always something to do. By gating off key information, you’re not going to spoil the story in the first five seconds. And because the true ending is dependent on you helping out most of the town-folk, the finale is - if not a little schmaltzy - very satisfying. This is the mark of a very smart storyteller, who understands how narrative and gameplay must be shaped by one another to create a strong story.

Which is why The Forgotten City is easily one of the best games I played in 2021.

Okay, so here’s some honourable mentions. Lightning round, let’s go! Toodee and Topdee is a dimension-flipping genre mash-up where you swap between a 2D platformer and a top-down puzzler to overcome challenges. Unpacking is a house moving simulator where the satisfying Tetris-like gameplay of plopping down blouses and bog roll slowly unveils subtle story cues. Before Your Eyes is a heartbreaking narrative adventure where you can’t stick around for long because time advances every time you blink into your webcam.

Wildermyth is a tactical board game where your party of characters are slotted into a big bucket of randomised narrative moments. Unsighted is an all-round excellent Zelda-like adventure game, with a nasty ticking clock system that forces you to spend your time - and currency - wisely. And Silicon Dreams is that bit from Blade Runner where you interview someone and look for subtle clues in their demeanour to figure out if they’re a robot or not.

It’s been a good year for inventive games! I haven’t even talked about Inscryption and Slipways and all the others worth mentioning. And I think that’s the fun thing about covering games - it’s such a fast-moving industry, with so much innovation and creativity every single year. I can’t wait to see what incredible treats we’ll get in 2022. See you in January.