The Forgotten City – PAX East Preview
The Forgotten City is a narrative driven first person adventure from Australian developer Modern Storyteller. The game was playable for the first time on the show floor at PAX East, and we had a chance to play with the lead developer and company founder, Nick Pearce.
Right off the bat, the game intrigues you with its mysterious story elements. Not knowing how you got there, our protagonist starts out in the woods having just been pulled from a river by a despondent woman. This woman was searching for her long lost brother who she believes wandered into an ancient Roman ruin site. In exchange for saving your life, she asks that you venture into the ruins to find clues of her brother’s whereabouts. Shortly after wandering into the derelict structure, you discover ominous golden statues strewn throughout. The chilling expressions on the faces of the statues make them appear less like they are posing heroically and more like they were tragically frozen in time.
It’s not long after you discover the woman’s ill fated brother who’s rotted corpse is hanging from a tree. The man, who we now know as Al, left behind a suicide note indicating he had inadvertently opened a portal that unlocked a pathway to a doomed past. Luckily (or unluckily depending on what sort of trouble we get into later in the story) the portal is still active and transports our curious wanderer into a mystic ancient city.
After entering the city, you are escorted to the leader for indoctrination. On the way, your nervous usher divulges the strict nature of this tiny twenty-six person society – namely “The Golden Rule” which dictates that no person shall ever commit any sin. All of the people inhabiting this seemingly forgotten land are required to blindly abide by this rule. If just one person breaks The Golden Rule, everyone will die. “The many shall suffer for the sins of the one.”
The method of mass execution, which now somewhat explains the ominous statues at the outset, is that all will be frozen in time in a cask of gold. The game cleverly describes this awful penalty as “Medusa meets King Midas” but without the mythical or monarchical frill. Another of the city’s lost inhabitants possess knowledge that, at some point in the near future, someone will sin and lead to everyone’s death. He claims that you are the only one who can stop this from happening.
Before long, you are granted the ability to travel back and forth through time. You will use this ability to solve mysteries, aid the townsfolk, and ultimately uncover the rest of the cryptic and enigmatic story of The Forgotten City. In one instance in the demo, a medic in the town is found distraught after one of her patients passes away. This happened because the medic was unable to obtain the appropriate medicine from a greedy tradesman in the town. But by stealing the medicine, and traveling back to the moments before the patient’s death, you are able to save her life.
The Forgotten City is a visually impressive game. It clearly draws inspiration from modern mythical first person role playing games that have dominated the medium for the past decade. But a lack of originality in that sense certainly isn’t a bad thing, and it’s particularity awe inspiring that the detailed environments and true to life landscapes were built by such a small development team. Building on this is a substantial and personality driven group of voiced characters. You’ll spend a lot of time in The Forgotten City conversing with NPCs, so it’s great to see that time and care was put into making the worlds characters sound genuine. What’s more is that narrative choices allow you to mold and develop your relationships in many different ways. In the short thirty minute demo that we had, I was given multiple opportunities to lie or give vastly different answers to peoples questions. These high stakes conversational and moral choices can have substantial impacts on the game and lead to multiple different endings.
Based on my brief time with The Forgotten City, I can best describe it as immensely intriguing. This is a game about mystery, steering narrative choices and thinking laterally rather than combat or fast paced action. The Forgotten City is set to launch late in 2019 for Xbox One and Steam.
