The game cleverly answers basically every question you might have right now, such as, “Wait, how do you define a sin?” and, “That seems like a raw deal, why don’t they all simply move?” Without giving too much else away, the gameplay functions as a loop, wherein you are able to replay the same day over and over again, attempting to unravel the various mysteries that stack up as you interview the city’s residents. Almost right away, you learn that everyone in the city, including yourself, is bound by a single rule: If even one person commits a sin, everyone dies.
In the process of figuring out how you got there and how to return to your own time, you get to explore the environs and talk to each of the few dozen residents you encounter, all of whom clearly have A Lot Going On. Here is about as spoiler-free a description of the game as I can manage: You as a modern-day protagonist find yourself thrown back in time to an almost-abandoned, seemingly ancient-Rome-adjacent city.
It’s called The Forgotten City, and if any of the following cultural products strongly appeal to you then you should stop reading this and just go play it without any additional context: The Legend of Zelda (Majora’s Mask, specifically), Lost, the immersive theatrical event Sleep No More, the sort of vague pre-teen conception of “mythology,” or gossip. Recently, though, thanks to a full-throated recommendation from my favorite video game podcast, I completely fell in love with a game that is the definition of small: barely 10 hours long, made by a team of only a handful of developers, and originally conceived as an add-on to a much, much larger game. I’ve mostly found it comforting to play gigantic games - JRPGs (Japanese role-playing games) that can take hundreds of hours to complete - or open-world adventures where you can wander a fictional countryside and venture beyond the walls of your one-bedroom apartment for an hour or five.
I’d played them steadily since I was a kid, occasionally becoming obsessed with this franchise or that throughout my 20s, but it wasn’t until I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody to do it with that this lightly pulsating rhythm beneath my day-to-day existence became a full-blown roar. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which I’ve become addicted to video games during the pandemic.
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