The Forgotten City: Cloud Version Review (Switch eShop)

Note: Small spoilers from early games appear in this review, so if you want to go blind, jump to the conclusion.

Let’s get the elephant out of the room before we start. At this time of year, the suffix “Cloud version” is nothing new, and neither are the reviews. The Forgotten City is a very brilliant time-looped narrative game, but there will always be the same great conditions: you need a strong internet connection to play this, and even though it costs the same as the PC version, there is no guarantee how long. . you will have access before the servers are shut down.

Even with a good internet connection, The Forgotten City has a couple of “built in” loading screens that freeze the action and momentum for a few seconds and, more annoyingly, if you leave the game running for three minutes (ex. , to go to the bathroom or have a drink), you will return to the home screen without saving changes. You will never lose too much progress, but it is irritating nonetheless.

However, with the usual cloud version caveats out of the way, we can now get to the heart of this review: The Forgotten City is absolutely It’s well worth your time, especially if you’re a fan of time-looping games like The Sexy Brutale and Outer Wilds, intricately woven narratives, and / or ancient history.

The Forgotten City has them all. You, a modern day person (you can choose your name and your “body type”, that is, your gender expressed by your hands and pronouns) are teleported back to 65 AD, to a small Roman city that lies under some kind of curse.

If someone breaks “The Golden Rule”, all the world in the city it will instantly turn into a golden statue, a fact backed up by the golden statues scattered around the houses and streets, and the warnings they somehow had time to carve before transforming. However, the inhabitants do not know exactly what “The Golden Rule” is, so they live in fear, hedging their bets and trying not to commit any sin. But it’s only a matter of time before someone breaks it, accidentally or not.

And guess what? It’s a video game, so it’s YOUR problem to solve it. A quick meeting with the magistrate, who is basically the mayor of this city of 20 inhabitants, tells you everything you need to know to get started: Someone is about to break the golden rule. You need to find out who and stop him.

So the story begins, but the twists and turns don’t end there. You probably won’t be too surprised to learn that everyone in town has secrets bubbling under its exterior-friendly exterior, and like all time-looping games, there are plenty of ripple-effect options you can make and general mysteries to solve.

Where The Forgotten City sets itself apart from other time-looping games is in its well-judged size. Twelve minutes it was too small and too repetitive, making the mechanics of the time cycle a chore; Outer Wilds is brilliant but at times overwhelming with its world the size of a solar system. It’s hard to give a time loop game the right amount of reach and walk the line between strenuously large and restrictively small.

The Forgotten City, on the other hand, has many nooks and crannies to explore, but it is contained in a single small city with only 20 inhabitants, and it has exactly the right amount of things to do, as well as a neat system for repeating your previous successes without having to repeat them exactly. It doesn’t go over your welcome, because you’ll be able to complete the game in around eight loops (maybe a few more, if you’re a completer), which is just the right amount you never get too familiar with. the territory tread again. It’s a 6-8 hour game, which makes it perfect to play for a few nights or a weekend.

The other thing The Forgotten City does a little differently is piggyback on someone else’s game. It started life as a Skyrim mod, making history as the first mod to win a Writers Guild award for its screenplay, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s very well written, with a cast of voice actors doing an excellent job bringing the characters to life, with lots of personality and a variety of accents to represent their different backgrounds. (Also, keep in mind that there are some pretty spooky moments, if you’re sensitive to startles, just a couple, but enough to make you anxious.)

But, uh, you’ve played Skyrim, right? Let’s say it is … kindly janky, to the point where it has generated a lot of memey recreations in which people chat out loud to themselves while walking and randomly accuse you of crimes because you accidentally picked up a carrot.

Good news: The Forgotten City keeps much of this lovely jank, albeit to a lesser extent and more bearable. Facial animations are occasionally subtle and expressive, but only a smidge closer to “meat puppet” than to “human mouth and eyes”. Every now and then, a character will say something strange for no reason, or will stare at you for a long, awkward moment before beginning their dialogue. And yes, you can climb hills by jumping a lot. But it doesn’t matter, if anything, it makes the game that much better, because it almost feels like you’re playing Skyrim for the first time.

And hey, the story gets more than a little silly in some places (including some incredible moments of self-conscious humor), and you’ll have moments of extreme exposure dump, but all of that is part of what makes it completely, absolutely wonderful to play with. There are many reasons why this game was elevated from the Skyrim mod to a full release, and we really think you should find out for yourself.

And this cloud version delivers the experience admirably, albeit with the aforementioned issues that arise with any ‘Cloud Version’ Switch game. It’s pretty, but it will be prettier on PC; It works fine with a stable internet connection, but it’s definitely nice not to have to worry about something you can’t control. And we have to admit that there is something uncomfortable in knowing that you paid twenty or thirty dollars for a game that might as well not be playable in who-knows-how many years.

However, if you don’t mind the warnings, The Forgotten City is so, so good.

conclusion

The Forgotten City is a brilliant narrative work that feels like a time capsule to the jank of Skyrim, reinvigorated with a gripping story that is only long enough so you never lose momentum. As always, it is difficult to fully recommend a cloud version of a game that is available elsewhere in a more concrete form, but if you accept the associated ‘risks’, this is a brilliant and well presented time-loop game and OK. worth playing.