Every gamer reaches a point in their life where they have to assume they can’t dive into all the universes they want to. The time factor forces us to choose and for this reason we end up leaving behind works that have a quality beyond any doubt. One of them is the one created by Modern Storyteller with The Forgotten City.
Incredible but true. The title was born as a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most successful games of all time, and its success has only increased to accumulate 6,929 positive reviews on Steam. The best thing is that you can put your glove on it to try it on both PS5 and PS4 via PlayStation Plus subscription Extra y Premium.
The proposal of The Forgotten City It is really peculiar, because we are transferred to the banks of the Tiber river in Italy. There we wake up after being rescued and a young woman asks us to help find her friend who has been lost among the nearby ruins that she was investigating. Without eating or drinking it, we will be magically transported to the time of the Roman Empirebut in the middle of an underground city.
If the situation weren’t strange enough, events take a turn for the worse. Every corner of the stage is infested with gold statues of people, each in vastly different poses and for no apparent reason for their existence. The rest of the citizens explain to us that there is a sacred law that must be respected and otherwise we will earn the wrath of the gods that guard the place. It is at that moment that we discover the reason for the golden figures.
There are a number of sins that cannot be inflicted, creating a system known as the Golden Rule that is unflappable, but there is a bigger problem. No one quite clear what those sins are, so discovering them means ending with a fatal outcome, although once the law is made, the trap is made. We can take advantage of the loopholes in these rules to take advantage of different situations.
Because yes, our objective is to return to our home and we will have to use a large dose of cunning and an unexpected time loop in which we find ourselves. We will keep both physical objects and memories of past events, so conversations with the inhabitants will change continuously and have really cool ramifications.
The architecture of the place is fantastic, as is the staging to simulate that we are really in the middle of Roman times. Each character has unique characteristics and exciting stories to tell us, which we can alter with certain actions. Moral dilemmas are also constanteven involving life and death, but without making it clear which is the correct path.
The methods to advance are varied, since we can create our character with a particular background. All this helps us to be more convincing in conversations, assert ourselves through bribery, intimidate with violence or taking advantage of the time loop that only we know about like old foxes. All this leads to The Forgotten City offer multiple endings, so the replayability is absolute.
However, one of the keys is behind the creation of the video game. Three people over four years were in charge of shape a project that started as a Skyrim mod. Nick Pearce, main leader, began to shape the vision of it since 2011 so that in 2012 the game was enjoyable. There were more than 1,700 hours of work and due to the success he achieved, he decided to leave everything.
He quit his job, created Modern Storyteller, and hired other developers to form a team. They wanted to be even more ambitious, making the leap to Unreal Engine 4, doubling the duration and adding more than 80,000 words. It was in 2020 when The Forgotten City he finally had the green light to endorse the Screenwriters Guild award for his great work. In addition, she accumulates up to 90 on Metacritic, which confirms an unmitigated success.
In ExtraLife | The best games of 2023 for PlayStation
In ExtraLife | The best classic games with PlayStation Plus Premium that you can now install on PS4 and PS5
