LogFAQs > #961712388

4. The Forgotten City (2021) - PC

I played this pretty late in the year, and apparently I waited until the later part of the year to play most of the year's best games. Forgotten City is a really neat experience that falls into the apparent new trend of time loop games. You find yourself sent back in time 2000 years to an underground city where, if anyone commits a crime, everyone in the city will die. The city has 23 residents, and you basically have to go around talking to them, solving their problems, and investigating the city to find out the secrets behind everything and who's likeliest to commit crimes. The small scale kind of makes it feel like Disco Elysium or something. The characters are generally pretty compelling, and I always enjoyed talking to them. It's fun being able to change their opinions of you with knowledge from past loops, but it's also fun when you meet someone whose opinion of you never changes no matter what secrets you discover about them. Some of them have pretty shocking secrets, while others are basically exactly what they seem, but it's neat to discover more about them regardless.

I found the game to be incredibly smart with its game mechanics. I've gotten used to losing stuff every run in time loop games, but here you keep your stuff every run, so you can do fun stuff like looting the same chests for money every time to become rich, or collecting multiple copies of blackmail material so you can blackmail someone every run. They also do stuff to save effort - you can basically automatically do all the stuff you "need to do every run" right at the start in no time, and there are shortcuts through conversations with people who you've talked to before. It doesn't take a lot of runs to beat anyway (I finished on my eighth run), so it never gets super repetitive. The city's well designed, so it's easy to get most places, even without a map. I rarely had troubles finding my way where I need to go, and I learned where basically everything was after a couple runs. You can do all sorts of fun stuff that has logical consequences, and it always feel good when you "cheat" the system in some way.

I had a great time making my way through the game, and it brought everything together perfectly in the end. The answers to all the mysteries both made sense and were surprising, which is one of the best ways to conclude a mystery story for me. There are multiple endings, all of which are interesting in their own ways, and the final ending gave me everything I wanted. This is my favorite story-based game of 2021.

Next game hint: Every game in the top 3 has multiple protagonists. Coincidence? Yes.