The Forgotten City: best time-loop story

An article-analysis of one of the best representatives of detective games.

The trend for mechanics and time travel stories seems to me to be equally curious and overused. This concept is literally created for an interactive format: no other medium can unleash its potential in the way that games can. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Braid, The Sexy Brutale, Outer Wilds, the first season of Life is Strange, the cycle of visual novels Zero Escape, Deathloop, even the domestic "Anabiosis" - in skillful hands, experiments with space and time give an unforgettable experience. But in the hands of the inept or lazy, who are much more common, they cause indescribable melancholy. There is no need to look far for examples: the recent Twelve Minutes, with its three-hour timekeeping, manages to bore to tears, ruining all good ideas and acting with a lousy performance.
However, this summer, The Forgotten City, a detective set in the entourage of ancient Rome from the independent studio Modern Storyteller, has been added to the piggy bank of successful experiments. Given the modest budget and tiny development team, I didn't expect much success from him - and as a result, I discovered one of the best story games in the genre. And now I hope to open it to you, because such things do not come out every day.
The Forgotten City: one of the best time-loop detectives
Memento mori
If you've ever wondered about custom mods for Skyrim, The Forgotten City might sound suspiciously familiar. In 2015, long before the evolution into an independent game, the project of the future studio Modern Storyteller (or rather, its founder, James Pearce) was released as a free modification on the Nexus Mods platform. The audience, like the press, greeted her extremely warmly. For an idea brought to life by just one self-taught developer, the original The Forgotten City turned out to be very, very worthy. Pierce single-handedly thought through the game design and code, brought in voice actors and even attended to the recording of the orchestral soundtrack, and the detective script he wrote was recognized by the Australian Writers Guild. In short, an impressive result for a beginner who came to the gaming industry without experience, straight from corporate jurisprudence.
Now, six years later, Pierce has assembled a small team of like-minded people and returned to the original idea in order to rethink and develop it to the scale of an independent work. The events of the "new" The Forgotten City unfold in our time: the main character wakes up on the banks of the Tiber River, from which he was pulled out by a mysterious stranger in a black jacket with a hood. He does not remember exactly how he got here, but there is no time to understand what happened, because the savior immediately asks to return the favor: to find her comrade, who went to a nearby cave an hour ago and has not yet returned. In this inconspicuous place, the ruins of an unknown ancient Roman settlement are allegedly hidden. Who knows what treasures and dangers might lie there?