“Treat others as you would like to be treated in a similar situation.”
You have probably heard this sentence and its variations in different situations. This idea, known as the Golden Rule, has always been one of the foundations of moral systems throughout human civilizations, even civilizations that did not interact culturally. In a way, the Golden Rule is the closest ideal that humanity has achieved to the design of “universal morality.”
The Forgotten City is a game that tries to do a lot of things at once
, but its ultimate goal is to address the logical pitfalls of the Golden Rule and ways to exploit it; And the game does it so effectively and – if we want to be a little dramatic – shocking that it may make you never look at the Golden Rule again.
The Forgotten City is so dependent on the surprises and twists of the story
that content creators and streamers are warned in the main menu of the game not to spoil the game for their audience. It is better to take this warning seriously.
The Forgotten City begins in the present.
You open your eyes and see a woman named Karen in front of you who is happy to be alive and asks you to find your friend Al Worth. During the conversation with Karen, in the style of role-playing games, you can define your story class and background:
- Archaeologist: You can get some additional information about the mythological and historical background of the game
- Offender: You can run faster
- Soldier: A pistol with ten bullets is given to you
- Forgetfulness: You will have more resistance to damage
This woman is the first character you meet in the game. From the very first few minutes, his mysterious words and reactions create a whole question mark in your mind.
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Then you will be given a flashlight, a little further on you will enter the ruins of a Roman city, where you will find the suicide notes of El Worth and his body in the form of a golden statue and inside a temple in the ruins of the city, through a portal to the distant past – year 67 AD, about 2000 years ago – dates back to a time when the city was still intact and inhabited by Roman citizens.
Right in front of the temple, a man named Gelarius starts talking to you and asks you what you were doing in the temple of Proserpina. You ask Glarius where he knows English. Confused, Glarius says he is speaking Latin and you are speaking Latin, albeit with a very strange accent. Glarius suggests that he introduce you to different parts of the city and some of its inhabitants in the form of a tourist tour, and finally take you to Sentius, the ruler of the city, so that he can explain the situation to you in more detail.
And so begins the crazy adventure that Nick Pearce, the game’s designer and creator, has prepared for you.
If you choose the archeology class, your character in the form of a section called Archeological Insight will give you a series of additional information about some of the historical and mythological details of the game.
The Forgotten City is very ambitious as an independent game built by a total of four major people
, and as mentioned, there are many things at the same time, such as:
- A mystery story centered on murder and disappearance of the “Whodunit Story” type (so-called Whodunit Story).
- A mythical story that if you are familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, you can already guess many of its story twists.
- A philosophical story centered on ethics and analysis, and challenging the assumptions we have about “right and wrong.”
- A Visual Novel in which talking to people and getting to know them is part of the game’s main gameplay, and you can expect half-hour conversations.
- A Time Loops-themed time travel game inspired by the Groundhog Day movie that has all the twisted elements you can expect from a time-centered story.
- A scary game with Survival Horror elements.
- A role-playing game centered on performing sub-quests in which there are two or more different ways to perform quests.
In-game graffiti is part of the game deconstruction process; But you have to be careful to distinguish between real clues, tracking and sending black peas.
The presence of so many different elements in the game may give the impression that we are going to have a disjointed experience or a slut if we want to be racketeering, but when you finish the game (and the purpose of finishing is to reach the main end) , You will see how wrong this idea is.
Unfortunately, the forgotten city is one of those games
that you have to go to with zero information so that the game can have the desired effect on you. This is what streamers and content creators are asked to do in the main menu of the game: to be careful not to spoil anything unintentionally, because the forgotten city is heavily based on fictional surprises and the feeling that is always with you on your first experience of the game – that’s “I do not know what is happening, but I’m very curious” – is a big part of the experience. So if you have been interested in the game so far, it is recommended that you play it and when you have finished, read the rest of the article. Because the rest of the article is written for those who have either finished the game or do not intend to play it and just want to know why it is special.
* Read more There is a risk of leaking the story *
Some games are so special that you should not go for them by default with other games; In fact, it is better to clear your mind of the default and let the game create its own default in your mind, otherwise when you play it, you will always have the bad feeling that you are playing the wrong game.
The Forgotten City is certainly such a game, and even deliberately
tries to use the presuppositions that other games have created in your mind to surprise you.
The city where the game is located is small, but you go so far and look at all its holes that you will know it like the palm of your hand until the end of the game.
For example, consider that this game was previously Mad Skyrim, and after Mad achieved great success, its creator, Nick Pierce, decided to quit his job as a lawyer due to the great reception he received from Mad, and a few years of his life. Spend to make the game. (It is worth mentioning in parentheses that he is a lawyer from the dialogues he wrote for the game).
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The past of the game as Mad Skyrim sometimes shows itself. For example, while searching in the city, you may come across boxes that have some Denar coins (Roman currency and in-game currency) with the word steal next to them. If you’ve played The Elder Scrolls, you’re familiar with this scenario: You’ll have to look around to make sure no one is paying attention to you. Then take the money.
But when you withdraw the money, something surprising happens; The game screen turns gray, a low, scary voice rises from an unknown place that says, “The Many Shall Suffer for the Sins of One” (The Many Shall Suffer for the Sins of One). And the rest of the inhabitants of the city attack.
Each of the game’s characters has its own storyline and is from a different part of the vast Roman Empire: from Iraq and Africa to Britain. The biographies prepared for the inhabitants of the city are perfectly in line with the historical context of the game, and it is clear that there was a lot of research and thought behind them.
At this point you may think you have sabotaged and want to load the game from the last storage point, but when you first try to do so, a warning appears on the screen telling you that what happened is part of the game’s normal course of action. And all you have to do is go to the portal that Santios (the ruler of the city) created for you in the Temple of Proserpina to start the day over again and neutralize the effects of the sabotage you did.
When you enter the portal, you will see that the city is back to normal. When you leave the temple, Glarius again asks you who you are and what you were doing in the temple of Proserpina. When you tell him that you have had this conversation with him before, he thinks that he drank a lot of wine last night and his mind is not working well.
This is where the idea of the game’s time cycle works: there are many ways to sabotage the game; You may commit a sin, provoke the wrath of the god of the city, awaken the golden statues, and kill them all; You may say something to a resident of the city, upset him, and he will no longer be willing to talk to you; You may find an item to save someone’s life, but it is dead when you try to give it to them.
Octavia is a Christian woman who lives in secret among the Romans, because Christians were a repressed minority in Rome at the time of the game. Here he mistakenly says “God” instead of “Gods” and thus reveals himself to you.
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There is no problem. Because it is enough to either commit a sin yourself, or force someone else to sin, to re-enter the portal after the awakening of the golden statues and start the day again. In a game, the time cycle mechanism in the game is a way to reset all your mistakes and start almost everything from scratch.
This mechanism provides opportunities for you to experiment with the game world and its characters, and try different dialogue options, as you can always start the day over again. Unfortunately for me, there was a technical deterrent to this, and that was the long load time of the game, because every time you start the game, the whole city is loaded together with all its variables. If your computer system is a bit old like mine, this long boot time may discourage you from trying out different dialog options and playing games that might disrupt the gameplay, as you will have to wait a minute or two each time to The game is loaded.
Of course, in the field of factors that return to their original state with each time cycle, there are exceptions, the largest of which is the character of Centius. Of all the inhabitants of the city, Centius is the only one whose memory is transferred from one time cycle to another, however, when you discover this secret – the secret that is revealed after one of the great revelations of the game and the way to one of the two endings of the game. It’s too late. So if your relationship with him breaks down, it will break down by the end of the game.
In the game, a list is provided to you in which the names of all the inhabitants of the city and the necessary information about them are listed. However, I was so involved in the game that I never needed to use this list because the names of all the characters and the information about them were stored in my mind.
Game 4 has an end. One of these endings is very watery and if you know what you are doing, you can achieve it in the very first minutes of the game. To reach this end, all you have to do is choose the soldier class and, with the weapons you get from this class, go straight to the villa of Stentius and kill him. Given that Centius has taken you to the past tense, killing him creates a time contradiction and takes you back to the present tense, although when you realize exactly where the present tense is, you realize that this is the worst end of the game.
The two endings of the game are about solving the same mystery of murder and disappearing that I mentioned earlier. To reach these ends, you have to reach a part of the city called the Upper Cistern, which has two ways to reach it: one is to find the key there and the other is to use the golden arrow to gild the moss of the well. It and climbing them.
In the upper reservoir you will find Sentilla, the daughter of Sentilla, who is chained. He cries and tells you to release him, otherwise his sick father may come at any moment and take his chance to set him free. This revelation is shocking, because until that moment, Santios was playing the role of a wise guide for you, but when you find Santila, you realize that he is one of the main villains of the game. The reason he imprisoned his daughter is that he found a way to escape from the city, but his father does not want anyone to leave the city.
The ruler of the city, Stentius, plays the role of your guide in the first half of the game.
At this point you have two choices: either release the santila, drag the santila (which enters the reservoir and show off its filthiness) and return to the present by creating a temporal contradiction, or temporarily release the santila to Now tell Glarius to gather as many people as he can and take him to the reservoir as far as he can, so that when he encounters Stentius, several others besides Sentilla can be saved.
These two endings are better than the first ending, but they are not considered a positive ending, because not only are not all saved, but when you realize the nature of the city, you realize that it does not make much difference whether these people are saved or not.
This is where the end of the fourth and main game comes in, which you have to work hard to reach, an end that finding or not finding a centilla is technically irrelevant, although when you first get to it, of course, all the punches are You have searched the game and talked to everyone. In this respect, the game has a special feature, and that is that there are two different genres in it, and each genre has its own end, which does not have much effect on the other end and follows its own path.
In the city there is a Vestal Virgin named Equitia who asks you to talk to the various inhabitants of the city and ask them how they entered the city. When you talk to people, you realize that there are a number of things in common about each of their stories: It has been erased from their memory.
When you tell these details to Virgin Vestal, she realizes that her suspicions about the city are true: there is The Underworld, and everyone there (including you) is dead. The reason for announcing these details confirms his suspicion is that in ancient Greece, a coin known as the Charon’s Obol was placed in the body of a corpse while burying the dead. The coin symbolically was the fare the dead had to pay to Charon, the boatman of the Last River (or, according to some accounts, Stokes), to pass him by boat on this river, which was the border between the world of the living and the dead.
Here are some of the game’s biggest surprises: The woman who introduced herself to you as Karen at the beginning of the game is actually Charon, whose pronunciation in Latin (Karen) is very similar to that of English Karen.
Explaining the concept of Meme to a Roman woman who lived 2,000 years ago is one of the game’s masterpieces in the field of humor. In the end, he comes to the conclusion that Meem is something like Egyptian hieroglyphs, and you yourself are surprised by the logic of this resemblance.
When I mentioned that if you are familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, you can guess some of the surprises of the game in advance, I meant that. The game’s allusions to the river and the coins, Karen’s resemblance 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 it’s worth mentioning that when you find out about Karen’s true identity and let her know, changing her eyes and frightening voice is a very murky moment.
It is true that you are in the underworld and you are dead, but that does not mean that it is impossible to get out of it, 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: He succeeded in defeating the lord of the underworld by the force of his own hand, Hades, and came out of it.
- Orpheus: A musician who, thanks to his music, managed to reach the underworld to save his wife, but lost his wife again because he could not do a simple task (not looking back), but he was able to get out himself. Come.
- Aeneas: The Roman national hero, who, with the help of a woman fortune teller and an item from a magical plant sacred to Persephone (or Proserpina), traveled to the underworld, where he spoke to his father, whose father told him where to build a city, and Then he came out of the underworld.
- Sisyphus: A shrewd man who succeeded in deceiving Persephone, the queen of the underworld, to bring her back to the world of the living. He managed to stay old 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 scariest of these items is the Tersorium, or “sponge on a piece of wood,” a hygienic device used by the Romans to clean themselves after bathing and shared with everyone.
In the game, these mythical heroes are introduced as proof that it is possible to escape from the underworld, and so Aquitaine tells you that you are either a spouse either in direct contact with the underworld god or using Persephone (or Proserpina) guidance. He, you can save yourself and others from there, and thus, become the fifth mythical hero who was able to do this extraordinary thing.
In this game, both Persephone and the god of the underworld are present and you can talk to them. The identity given to them is in line with the theory of the ancient astronauts (Ancient Astronauts Hypothesis) or “the ancient gods were astronauts who came to Earth”, which was first proposed in the book of the chariots of the gods by Erich Von Daniken .
The fact is that about 6,000 years ago, at the time of the Sumerian civilization, a series of highly advanced space creatures from their planet Elysium came to Earth and decided. Teach people to draw civilization, law and regulations. But it did not take long for humans to return to their animal temperament and to break the law and torment each other. When these god-like creatures saw this situation, they came to the conclusion that there was no hope for humans, so they decided to leave them alone and return to their planet.
This painting, which is inserted in the floor of the city bath pool, is one of the biggest spoilers of the game. But we’ll safely put the photo here, because if you find out exactly what spoils it with that one photo, you have an IQ above 200 and you will no longer care about trivial issues like storytelling.
But one of these god-like creatures became interested in humans and decided to transform himself into a human. This person was none other than Persephone. His wife, known in Sumerian mythology as Nergal, in Egyptian mythology as Osiris, in Greek mythology as Hades, and in Roman mythology as Pluto, is very upset. It is possible, because Persephone no longer has the right to enter the Elysium in order to become human. Hades, then, has two options: either to leave Persephone among humans, or to prove to his contemporaries that humans deserve to enter the Elysium.
Hedis chooses the second way because of his rich love for his wife. His strategy is a kind of betting: he bets with his father Jupiter or Zeus to build a city where humans will be transferred after death. If each of these human beings can refuse to sin within a certain period of time, he breaks the bet and proves to his counterparts that they are wrong about human beings and that they deserve to enter the Elysium.
But even if one of these people does something that is considered a sin according to the Golden Rule, all of those people become golden statues and another group of people enters the city to try their luck. To select the humans to be chosen, the gods have created a thousand coins that are scattered among the humans, and whoever carries the coin at the time of death will be taken to the underworld. According to the theory of this game, this is the logic of putting a coin in the mouth of the dead; However, in the process of becoming a cultural tradition, people did not realize the real reason behind doing so, and it is only a thousand coins that can transport a person to the underworld.
One of the most memorable sentences of the game: “If there’s one thing I know about the rules, it is that virtuous people do not need them, and evil people will always find a way around them.” The reason for the memorable sentence is that it is very consistent with the events depicted in the game story.
This idea is very clever, because it explains why the ancient gods lost their importance from a historical point onwards. According to what is depicted in this game, after the year 67 AD, almost every thousand coins were used, and for this reason, the last generation of humans tested in the underworld were Romans. The reason why you and your friend El Worth move into the underworld from the 21st century is that you find two of these coins in an archeological operation (the details of which vary depending on the class you choose), so Kharon considers you a modern woman. It shows, because his appearance is different from one culture to another.
As you can guess, Pluto’s betting with Jupiter was doomed from the start. Because even if we assume that 99% of human beings are good, the same one percent is enough to break that bet. But according to what we see in the game, it is not even a question of the ugliness of human nature; The problem is that human judgment is inherently problematic under the Golden Rule, because human beings are different and one person is not treated the same as another. Therefore, following the rule of “treat others as you would like to be treated” does not lead to us becoming moral beings. As one of the characters in the game puts it: “The golden rule is that bad people can take advantage of it by beheading others, while others have no way to stop their corruption.”
For example, in the game of a swindler and swindler named Desius, there is a drug that can save the life of a woman who has tried to commit suicide, but she only if she receives 1000 denar (which is a lot of money). Is) willing to give you the medicine. Lucretia, a doctor in town, tells you that she would normally hire someone to steal 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 expected it if he had been in that woman’s situation. That no one gives him his medicine for free and he can afford to pay for the medicine and his doctor.
The choice of soldier class leads to a relatively humorous scene in which you aim a pistol at the brains of Roman citizens, but those who do not know what a firearm is, marvel at the strange object in your hand and think it is a gift from the gods. You are given.
On the other hand, there is a character in the game named Duli who is so-called sweet-minded and likes to take everything shiny and shiny that he sees. Centius imprisoned him in a cage so that he could not break the golden rule by removing valuables. You can free him from the cage in one of the main quests of the game and he will thank you very much, but the first thing he does after he is released is to remove a precious object from the counter of Desius.
Doli is a very kind and harmless human being, and his desire to take away shiny and precious things is only rooted in his genetic disorders and there is no bad intention behind it, but this causes the golden rule to be broken and all the people of the city to die, because according to judgment. The god of the underworld has committed theft from a human being, and it does not matter at all in what context this theft took place, and the object that Doli took away can be easily taken back from him.
In other words, the Golden Rule, as a moral system, has created a world in which depriving a person of a vital medicine is perfectly moral, but the removal of a precious object by a sweetheart is considered a sin by which everyone deserves to die.
There are many of these situations in the game; Situations in which lying, wearing a headscarf, cheating, concealing, harassing a person out of religious prejudice, torturing someone to the point of committing suicide, are all considered to be legally and customarily safe, because Someone who has done this either expects to be treated the same way in a similar situation, or will never put himself in the same situation.
This is where the logical hole behind the “golden rule” comes into play. At the end of the game, you can point out this moral hole to the god of the underworld and show him how stupid his bets were. If you choose the right dialogue options, the god of the underworld will eventually be persuaded to forget this futile project and return to the Elysium, returning all human beings (including his wife Proserpina) to the material world.
Of course, the final end of the game (which I do not want to spoil anymore) may seem very sentimental and emotional to some, but I think it is quite suitable for this game. Because the Forgotten City, despite its appearance, is a purely moral game, and it believes that those who are good people from the bottom of their hearts will somehow be rewarded for their work, but not in the Elysium, but in being with those we love. It lies in doing the things we are interested in doing.
Forgotten City is a very memorable game, one that can be said to have an experience unlike any other, and the way Greek and Roman mythology and literature are used in the game world is unprecedented. Beyond that, the game is very faithful to historical details, and almost every item, costume, building, or historical and political reference you come across in the game is historically accurate (except, of course, for the orthodoxy of the ancient gods, one of the theories). It is notorious in historical circles, but of course its role in the game is a tool of storytelling, and in this respect it has appeared extraordinary).
Personally, I hope that this game will become more popular and more people will experience it, because it is a great reference point in discussions about ethics, and especially the idea of ”treat others the way you like to be treated,” and in this sense it is a philosophical novel. Which explores ideologies and philosophical schools through storytelling.