“Treat others as you would like to be treated in a similar situation.”
You have probably heard this sentence and variations of it in different situations. This idea, known as the Golden Rule, has always been one of the foundations of ethical systems throughout human civilizations, even civilizations that have had no cultural interactions. In a way, the Golden Rule is the closest ideal that humanity has come to to design a “universal morality”.
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The Forgotten City is a game that tries to do many things at once, but its ultimate goal is to address the logical holes of the Golden Rule and ways to abuse it; And the game does this in such an effective and – to be a little dramatic – shocking way that you may never look at the Golden Rule the same way again.
The Forgotten City is so dependent on surprises and plot twists that the main menu of the game warns content producers and streamers not to spoil the game for their audience. It is better to take this warning seriously.
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The Forgotten City begins in the present. You open your eyes and see a woman named Karen standing in front of you who is glad you are alive and asks you to find your friend Al Worth. During the conversation with Karen, in RPG style, you can determine your class and story background:
- Archaeologist: You can get a bunch of additional information about the mythological and historical background of the game.
- Offender: You can run faster
- Soldier: You will be given a pistol with ten bullets
- Amnesiac: You will be more resistant to damage
This woman is the first character you meet in the game. His mysterious words and reactions create a question mark in your mind from the first few minutes.
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You will then be given a flashlight, a little further you will enter the ruins of a Roman city, where you will find Ellworth’s suicide notes and his body, which has been transformed into a golden statue, and inside a temple in the ruins of the city, through a portal to the distant past – 67 AD, about 2,000 years ago – back when the city was still intact and inhabited by Roman citizens.
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Right in front of the temple, a man named Gelarius will start a conversation with you and ask you what you were doing in Proserpina’s temple. You ask Glarios how he knows English. Confused, Glarios says that he is speaking Latin and you are speaking Latin, albeit with a very strange accent. Glarios offers to introduce you to different parts of the city and some of its inhabitants in the form of a sightseeing tour and finally take you to Sentius, the ruler of the city, so that he can explain the situation to you in more detail.
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And thus begins the crazy adventure prepared for you by Nick Pearce, the designer and creator of the game.
If you choose the archaeologist class, your character will give you a series of additional information about some historical and mythological details of the game in the form of an episode called Archeological Insight.
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As a four-man indie game, The Forgotten City is very ambitious and, as noted, many things at once, such as:
- A mystery story centered on a murder and a disappearance of the type “Who is the killer” (so-called Whodunit Story).
- A mythological story that, if you are familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, you can already guess many of its plot twists.
- Philosophical story centered on ethics and analysis and challenging the assumptions we have about “right and wrong” work.
- A visual novel where talking to people and getting to know them is part of the main gameplay of the game and you can expect half an hour of conversations.
- A time travel game based on time loops (Time Loops), inspired by the movie Groundhog Day (Groundhog Day) that has all the twisty elements you can expect from a story based on time manipulation.
- A horror game with survival horror elements.
- A role-playing game focused on completing side quests where there are two or more different ways to complete the quests.
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In-game graffiti is part of the game’s puzzle-making process; But you have to be careful to distinguish between a real lead, a scam, and being sent on a black pea trail.
Having so many different elements in the game might give the impression that it’s going to be a disjointed experience, or to be more blunt, sloppy, but when you finish the game (and by finish I mean reach the main ending) , you will see how wrong this idea is.
Unfortunately, The Forgotten City is one of those games that you have to play with zero information so that the game can have the desired effect on you. This is what is asked of streamers and content producers in the main menu of the game: to be careful not to spoil anything unintentionally, because The Forgotten City is very much based on surprises and story twists and the feeling that is constantly with you in your first experience of the game – that ” “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m very curious” – is a big part of the experience. So if you’re interested in the game this far, it’s recommended that you play it and read on when you’re done. Because the rest of the article is written for those who either finished the game or don’t intend to play it and just want to know what makes it special.
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*In the following, there is a risk of revealing the story*
Some games are so special that you shouldn’t approach them with the same assumptions you have about other games; In fact, it’s better to completely empty your mind of defaults and let the game create its own defaults in your mind, otherwise you’ll constantly have the bad feeling that you’re playing it wrong.
The Forgotten City is definitely that kind of game, and it even deliberately tries to use the assumptions that other games have made in your mind to surprise you.
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The city where the game is located is small, but you travel so much in it and visit all its holes that you will know it like the back of your hand by the end of the game.
For example, consider that this game used to be a Skyrim mod, and after the mod became a huge success, its creator, Nick Pierce, decided to quit his job as a lawyer and take a few years off his life because of the mod’s popularity. spend making games. (In parentheses, I should point out that he is a lawyer from the dialogues he wrote for the game).
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The game’s past as a Skyrim mod sometimes shows itself. For example, when you are searching in the city, you may come across chests that contain some Denarus coins (Roman currency and in-game currency) with the word Steal written next to them. If you’ve played The Elder Scrolls games, you’re familiar with this scenario: you have to look around to make sure no one is paying attention to you. Then take the money.
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But when you take the money, a surprising thing happens; The game screen turns gray, a loud and scary voice from an unknown place says: “The Many Shall Suffer for the Sins of One” (The Many Shall Suffer for the Sins of One) and the golden statues of the city come to life and shoot you with their slingshots. And the rest of the city’s residents attack.
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Each of the characters in the game have their own story background and are from a different part of the vast Roman empire: from Iraq and Africa to Britain. The biographies provided for the city’s residents fit perfectly with the game’s historical context, and it’s clear that a lot of research and thought has gone into them.
At this point you might think you’ve screwed up and want to load the game from your last save point, but the first time you try to do so, a warning will appear on the screen telling you that what happened is part of the normal game process. And just go to the portal that Sentius (the ruler of the city) created for you in the temple of Proserpina to start the day again and undo the damage you did.
When you enter the portal, you will see that the city is back to normal. Once you’re out of the temple, Glarios will ask you again where you are and what you were doing in Proserpina’s temple. When you tell her that you’ve had this conversation before, she’ll think she had too much wine last night and is out of her mind.
This is where you realize how the idea of the game’s timeline works: there are many ways to screw up the game; You may commit a sin, anger the god who rules the city, awaken the golden statues and kill everyone; You may say something to one of the residents of the city, you will hurt him and he won’t be willing to talk to you anymore; You might find an item to save someone’s life, but when you try to give it to them, they’re dead.
Octavia is a Christian woman who lives in secret among the Romans, because in the historical period in which the play is set, Christians were an oppressed minority in Rome. Here he mistakenly says “God” instead of “gods” and thus reveals himself to you.
There is no problem. Because it is enough to either commit a sin yourself, or make someone else commit a sin, so that after the awakening of the golden statues, you can re-enter the portal and start the day anew. In a way, the time loop mechanism in the game is a way to reset all your mistakes and start almost everything from scratch.
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This mechanism provides opportunities for you to experiment with the game world and its characters and try out different dialogue options, because you can always start the day over. Unfortunately for me, there was a technical deterrent to this, and that was the long loading time of the game, because every time you start the game, the entire city with all its variables is loaded at once. If your computer system is a bit old like mine, this long loading time might discourage you from trying out different dialog options and playing around with things that might disrupt the gameplay, as you’ll have to wait a minute or two each time. Load the game.
Of course, in the field of factors that return to their original state with each time cycle, there are exceptions, the biggest of which is the character of Centius. Of all the town’s inhabitants, Centius is the only one whose memory can be transferred from any timeline to the next, though when you learn the secret—a secret that’s revealed after one of the game’s big reveals and the way to one of the game’s two endings. It is – it is late. So if your relationship with him is ruined, it will stay ruined until the end of the game.
In the game, you will be provided with a list that contains the names of all the residents of the city and essential information about them. However, I was personally so engrossed in the game that I never needed to use this list because I had all the characters’ names and information about them stored in my head.
Game 4 ends. One of these endings is pretty juicy, and if you know what you’re doing, you can get it within minutes of starting the game. To reach this end, it is enough to choose the soldier class and with the weapon you get from this class, go straight to Centius’s villa and kill him. With Centius taking you back in time, killing him creates a time paradox and brings you back to the present, though when you find out exactly where this present is, you realize it’s the worst possible ending.
The two endings of the game are related to solving the mystery of murder and disappearance that I mentioned earlier. To reach these endings, you need to reach a part of the city called the Upper Cistern, which can be reached in two ways: one is to find the key there, and the other is to use the golden slingshot to turn the well’s moss into gold. That and climbing them.
In the Upper Reservoir you will find Sentilla, the daughter of Sentius, chained up. She tearfully tells you to free her, or her sick father may arrive at any moment and take away her chance to break free. This revelation comes as a shock, as up until that point Centius has been acting as your wise guide, but when you find Centilla, you realize that he is one of the main villains of the game. The reason why he imprisoned his daughter is that she found a way to escape from the city, but her father does not want anyone to leave the city.
Centius, the ruler of the city, acts as your guide in the first half of the game.
At this point you have two choices: either free Centilla, kill Centius (who enters the reservoir and flaunts his vileness) and return to the present by creating a time paradox, or temporarily send Centilla to Leave it alone, tell Glarios to gather as many people as he can and take them near the reservoir so that when Centius is confronted, a few others besides Centilla will be saved.
These two endings are better than the first ending, but still they are not considered positive endings, because not only not everyone is saved, but when you realize the nature of the city, you realize that saving and not saving these people is not much different.
This is where we come to the fourth and main ending of the game that you have to work the hardest to reach, the ending that whether or not you find Centilla technically has no effect on reaching it, although when you first reach it, of course all the pinholes You have explored the game and talked to everyone. In this sense, the game has a special feature, which is that two different genres take place in it, and each genre has its own ending, which does not have much impact on the other ending and follows its own path.
There is a Vestal Virgin named Equitia in the city who asks you to talk to the different residents of the city and ask them how they entered the city. When you talk to people, you will realize that there is a series of commonalities about each of their stories: for example, that the last thing they remember was some kind of fire, that they opened their eyes after escaping the fire by a river, that they had a coin with them, and a part of It has been erased from their memory.
When you tell the Vestal Virgin these details, she realizes that her suspicions about the town are true: it is The Underworld, and everyone there (including yourself) is dead. The reason these details confirm his suspicions is that in ancient Greece, when the dead were buried, they put a coin in the mouth of the corpse, known as Charon’s Obol. This coin was symbolically the fare that the dead man had to pay to Kharon, the boatman of the Akhroon River (or Stokes according to some accounts) to ferry him across this river, which was the border between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Here you will come across another surprise of the game: the woman who introduced herself as Karen at the beginning of the game is actually Kharon, whose pronunciation in Latin (Karen) is very similar to the English Karen.
Explaining the concept of a meme to a Roman woman who lived 2000 years ago is one of the game’s masterful moments in terms of humor. In the end, he comes to the conclusion that memes are something similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and you yourself will be surprised by the logic of this similarity.
This is what I meant when I mentioned that if you are familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, you can already guess some of the game’s surprises. The reference of the game characters to the river and the coin, the similarity of Karen’s name to Charon and Karen’s suspicious reactions at the beginning of the game are all things that a mind familiar with Greek and Roman mythology can easily identify as clues. And I have to mention that when you find out about Karen’s true identity and let her know about it, the way her eyes change and her voice becomes scary is a very heart-wrenching moment.
It is true that you are in the underworld and you are dead, but that does not mean that it is impossible to come out, because there have been others who have managed to save themselves from the underworld. You may be familiar with the story of some of them:
- Hercules: succeeded in defeating Hades, the lord of the underworld, with the strength of his arm and came out.
- Orpheus: A musician who managed to find a way to the underworld thanks to his music to save his wife, but because he couldn’t do a simple task (not looking behind him), he lost his wife again, but he managed to get out himself. Come.
- Aeneas: Roman national hero who, with the help of a fortune-teller’s guidance and taking an item from a magic bush sacred to Persephone (or Proserpina), found his way to the underworld, where he spoke to his father, who told him where to build a city and Then he came out of the underworld.
- Sisyphus: A clever man who managed to trick Persephone, the queen of the underworld, to bring her back to the world of the living. He managed to live into old age in the world of the living, but when he died a natural death, he was punished in Tartarus.
By interacting with some items, you can get historical information about them. One of the most feared of these items is the tersorium, or “sponge on a piece of wood,” a sanitary device that Romans used to clean themselves after ablutions and shared among all. Ough.
In the game, these legendary heroes are presented as proof that escaping the underworld is possible, and so Equitia tells you that you can either face the god of the underworld directly or use the guidance of Persephone (or Proserpina), the wife of He, you can save yourself and others from there and thus become the fifth mythological hero to do this extraordinary feat.
Both Persephone and the god of the underworld are present in this game and you can talk to them. The identity considered for them is in line with the theory of ancient astronauts (Ancient Astronauts Hypothesis) or “ancient gods were aliens who came to earth” which was first proposed in the book Chariot of the Gods, written by Erich Von Daniken. .
The point is that about 6,000 years ago, during the period when the Sumerian civilization emerged, a series of super-advanced space beings from their planet Elysium came to earth and made a decision. Teach people the customs of civilization and laws and regulations. But it didn’t take long for humans to return to their animal nature and start breaking the law and tormenting each other. When these god-like beings saw this situation, they concluded that there is no hope for humans and therefore decided to leave them alone and return to their planet.
This painting, which is inserted on the floor of Hammam Shahr pool, is one of the biggest spoilers of the game. But we’ll safely put the picture here, because if you can figure out exactly what it’s spoiling with this one picture, you’ll have an IQ above 200 and won’t care about trivial things like story leaks anymore.
But one of these god-like creatures became interested in humans and decided to turn himself into a human. This person was none other than Persephone. His wife, who is known as Nergal in Sumerian mythology, Osiris in Egyptian mythology, Hades in Greek mythology, and Pluto in Roman mythology, is very upset about this. It is possible, because Persephone no longer has the right to enter Elysium due to her transformation into a human. So Hades has two options: either to leave Persephone among the humans, or to prove to his fellow humans that humans deserve to enter Elysium.
Hades chooses the second way because of his deep love for his wife. His solution is a kind of bet: he makes a bet with his father Jupiter (Zeus) to build a city where humans can be transported to after death. If each of these humans can stop sinning within a certain amount of time, he wins the bet and proves to his peers that they were wrong about humans and that they deserve to enter Elysium.
But even if one of these humans does something that is considered a sin based on the Golden Rule, all of those humans will turn into golden statues and another group of humans will enter the city to try their luck. In order to choose the people who are going to be chosen, the gods have made a thousand coins that are distributed among the people and whoever has this coin with them at the time of death will be transferred to the underworld. According to the theory of this game, the logic behind putting a coin in the mouth of the dead is the same; However, in the course of this work becoming a cultural tradition, people did not realize the real reason behind doing this work, and it is only the thousand coins that can transport a person to the underworld.
One of the game’s most memorable lines: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about rules, it’s that good people don’t need them, and bad people will always find a way around them.” The reason the sentence is memorable is that it is very similar to the events depicted in the story of the game.
This idea is very clever, because it explains why the ancient gods lost their importance at some point in history. According to what is depicted in this game, after 67 AD, almost every thousand coins were consumed, and therefore the last generation of humans to be tested in the underworld were Romans. The reason you and your friend Al Worth are transported to the Underworld from the 21st century is because you find two of these coins during an archaeological mission (the details of which vary depending on your chosen class), so Kharon presents you with a modern female form. shows, because his appearance is different from each culture to another.
As you might guess, Pluto’s bet with Jupiter was doomed from the start. Because even if we assume that 99% of humans are good, that one percent is enough to ruin this bet. But according to what we see in the game, the issue is not even the ugliness of human nature; The problem is that judging people based on the golden rule is inherently problematic, because people are different, and the way one person likes to be treated is not the same as another person. Therefore, following the rule “treat others as you would like to be treated” does not lead to becoming a moral being. As one of the characters in the game says: “The Golden Rule has made it possible for bad people to put a cap on others by abusing it, while others have no way to stop their corruption.”
For example, in the game there is a conniving businessman named Desius who has a drug that can save the life of a woman who ate hemlocks to commit suicide, but he will only pay 1000 denarii (which is a lot of money). is) ready to provide you with the medicine. Lucretia, the doctor in town, tells you that normally she would hire someone to steal the medicine from her and save the patient’s life, but the Golden Rule has her hands and feet tied.
Later, when you meet the god of the underworld, you can talk to him about this as one of the weaknesses of the Golden Rule, but he replies that Decius would have fully expected it if he had been in that woman’s situation. that no one gives him his medicine for free and that he has enough financial ability to pay the money needed to pay for his medicine and doctor.
Choosing a soldier class leads to some rather comical scenes where you shoot the brains out of Roman citizens with a pistol, but they, who have no idea what a firearm is, express surprise at the strange object in your hand, thinking it’s a gift from the gods. you have given
On the other hand, there is a character in the game called Duli, who is so-called sweet-witted and likes to pick up everything shiny and shiny that he sees. Centius imprisoned him in a cage so that he could not break the golden rule by taking the valuables. You can free him from the cage in one of the main quests of the game and he will thank you profusely, but the first thing he does after being freed is to take a valuable object from Decius’ counter.
Dolly is a very kind and harmless person and her desire to pick up shiny and precious things is just rooted in her genetic disorders and there is no bad intention behind it, but this causes her to break the golden rule and all the people in the town die because according to the judgment The god of the underworld has committed theft from a human being and it doesn’t matter in what context this theft took place, and the object taken by Doli can easily be taken back from him.
In other words, the Golden Rule, as a moral system, has created a world in which depriving someone of vital medicine is perfectly moral, but taking away a precious object by a sane person is considered a sin for which everyone deserves to die.
There are many of these situations in the game; Situations in which lying, putting on a sharia cap, cheating, concealing, harassing a person due to religious prejudices, tormenting a person to the point of wanting to commit suicide, etc. are all considered as actions that are without problems in sharia and mysticism, because Someone who has done these things either expects to be treated the same way in a similar situation, or will never be in a similar situation.
This is where the logical hole behind the “Golden Rule” is exposed. At the end of the game you can point out this moral hole to the god of the underworld to show him how stupid his bet was. If you choose the correct dialogue options, eventually the god of the underworld will be convinced to forget about this futile project and return to Elysium, bringing all humans (including his wife Proserpina) back to the material world.
Of course, the final ending of the game (which I don’t want to spoil any more) may be too sentimental and emotional for some people, but I think it’s perfect for this game. Because the Forgotten City, contrary to its appearance, is a completely moralistic game and believes that those who are good people from the bottom of their hearts will somehow see the reward of their work, but this reward is not in Elysium, but in being with those we love and It lies in doing things we are passionate about.
The Forgotten City is a very memorable game, a game whose experience can be claimed to be unlike any other game, and the way in which the mythology and literature of ancient Greece and Rome are used in it is unprecedented in the game world. Beyond this, the game is extremely faithful to historical details, and almost every item, clothing, building, or historical and political reference you come across in the game is historically accurate (with the exception, of course, of the anthropomorphism of the ancient gods, which is one of the theories Badamin is infamous in historical circles, but naturally its role in the game is a storytelling tool and it has appeared extraordinary in this respect.
Personally, I hope that this game will become more popular and more people will experience it, because it is a great point of reference in discussions about ethics and especially the idea of ”treat others as you would like to be treated” and in this respect philosophical novels who analyze ideologies and philosophical schools through stories, there is nothing lacking.