underground civilizations; Ancient Sumerian tablets; surprisingly not terrific Karen memes. These are just a few of the ideas that contribute to The forgotten city immense narrative breadth, which encompasses everything from complex philosophy on the tensions between various mythologies to literal jokes about the name “Karen”. A fairly precise halfway house between these elements is Vestal Priestess Equitia who confuses memes with Egyptian hieroglyphics – to be fair to her, they both have loads of cats.

It is The forgotten city ability to oscillate between tones and moods as varied as these which gives him such a well-deserved reputation for being unassumingly intelligent and, when he wants to be, wonderfully silly. In a year where almost every day felt like its own time loop, this is a game that has sort of accomplished Sisyphus’s task of making doing the same thing over and over again be rewarding … well, again and even.

Before moving on to The forgotten city itself, there is an important part of that last sentence that deserves our attention. Every December there are lots of different people making lots of different cases for lots of different games. As you’ve probably read about a million times now, 2021 has been a particularly weird time for video games on top of everything else. The most obvious indicator of this is the multitude of blockbusters that have been delayed until 2022 and beyond, which has led many to believe that 2021 has therefore remained sparse.

To be fair, this is not wrong. In many ways, 2021 has been comparatively slower than stockier years filled with Red Dead Redemptions and The god of war and The last of uses (this is the official plural, I checked). Because of this, however, hundreds of indies that might have gone under people’s radar garnered the attention, respect, and praise they deserved. Of all these titles, The forgotten city shines the most.

The forgotten city isn’t just inspiring in the sense of performing, it’s inherently heartwarming or uplifting. Rather, it is inspiring because of the story behind it at least as much as the one it contains. Everything about this game that isn’t categorically the game itself is a victory worth celebrating, especially considering the impact it will inevitably have on budding developers and triple studios. -A established in general.

It starts with the genesis of the game, but spills over into all of its facets, from concept to ship. It is relatively well known at this point that The forgotten city started life as Skyrim mod that then lawyer, now Modern Storyteller’s creative director, Nick Pearce, worked on in his spare time. After receiving an award from the Australian Writer’s Guild for his work – marking the first time a mod has ever achieved a WGA – Pearce quit his job and began work on converting the mod into a full-fledged game. .

When I spoke to him earlier this year, he told me that this solved his first problem in that he now had time, which was clearly lacking during his tenure as a well-paid legal consultant. The other issues were that he had no money and, worse yet, no idea how to play a game. In some ways it might seem easy to say that Pearce was relatively lucky – he had more than one. monetary safety net than many other people and already had a genuine Writer’s Guild Award for proving how good his story was. On the flip side, quitting a job you’ve worked for a decade to earn just to eventually change professions isn’t easy – especially when you probably have to spend a good deal of your time explaining that no, you don’t. do not make ‘a Nintendo’.

All of this has been documented however. What fewer people have discussed is how inspiring he is The forgotten city It’s in the way he exudes a kind of confidence and ambition that is increasingly rare in the gaming industry. He’s not driven by twists and turns of combat or rapid fire. It is not inflated or stretched or otherwise inflated. And while its atriums and aqueducts are magnificent in themselves, The forgotten city isn’t overly concerned with making your way to realism. In fact, his animations are even odd at times, but only to an innocuous extent considering their presence alongside such incisive writing and thematic depth.

All this to say that The forgotten city is a game with a very clear vision and without compromise. In an age where games increasingly launch into unfinished states, which obviously requires a variety of cuts and changes, it’s refreshing to see something as proudly unique as this. Contrary to what this year’s abundance of timeloop games might imply, The forgotten city doesn’t really laugh at the most popular tropes or taxonomies – at least not the other games. It’s really his own thing, influenced at least as much by movies and books as it is The Legend of Zelda: The Mask of Majora. This becomes especially evident as you play, as the game doesn’t necessarily become more confident in demonstrating how well read it is, but more open about it.

The forgotten city is essentially a game that could easily have never existed. From the team’s own struggles with achieving this to the fact that it doesn’t seem like it came from a sure-fire sales pitch, there are so many points throughout its journey that could have changed, truncated, or ended it altogether. .

And yet here we have a widely acclaimed title that has traveled the entire gauntlet from mod to indie play, while defying any compromise that might have been demanded of it by modern standards. As an experience, it’s as brilliant as the wonderfully mysterious city at its heart – for a game determined to examine cultural theft across various mythologies, The forgotten city originality is arguably the most inspiring victory for video games in 2021.

Written by Cian Maher on behalf of GLHF.