Noclip released a documentary on the making of The Forgotten City. They claim the video is spoiler-free.

How a Lawyer Sacrificed his Career to Redevelop his Skyrim Mod | The Forgotten City Documentary

We talk to Modern Storyteller's Nick Pearce about his remarkable journey to create The Forgotten City.

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Chris Davis reviews The Forgotten City.

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The Forgotten City is an excellent time-loop mystery that is a must-play for fans of The Outer Wilds. Released as a Skyrim mod in 2015, it is now a standalone game that is well-worth your money.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:51 - Making of
• 03:46 - Spoiler free review
• 08:18 - Minor spoilers
• 14:58 - Conclusion

Kotaku has reviewed The Forgotten City:

The Forgotten City Is An Australian Triumph

Modders and fanfiction authors always make the best creatives. They’re the folks who can take a toaster apart and turn it into a dancing robot, or something that pulls apart the truth of society. So it’s no wonder that Modern Storyteller, the Melbourne team behind 2015’s hugely popular Skyrim mod, managed to make one of the most compelling RPGs I’ve seen in a long time.

The Forgotten City starts as all good games do, with you waking up with amnesia next to a body of water and then being sent on a mission by a nameless stranger. Although I’m not a Skyrim player, the full game (which takes around 8-10 hours to complete) follows roughly the same plot as the original mod on which it’s based. But, instead of having to rely on the lore and set-pieces of Skyrim, it’s now set in a Roman City with problems of biblical proportions.

See, the issue here is that this city has a golden rule: don’t sin, or everyone in town will be turned into a gold statue. Unfortunately, as we’ve learned from COVID restrictions, the needs of the many aren’t always a priority in the minds of a few, even if their selfish actions will hurt them too.

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Despite not being much of a fan of RPGs, I’ve found The Forgotten City to be extremely engaging. It’s a world to be savoured, not rushed, with so much to discover. It’s not a warm blanket game, there’s certainly something creepy and unsettling going on. But it’s frankly a must play for those who want an RPG with a defined beginning, middle and end which respects your time and other commitments.

The Adventuregamers checked out The Forgotten City:

The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City began its life as a mod for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim that was so popular it was downloaded over three million times. So it only made sense for indie developer Modern Storyteller to revamp and upgrade it into a standalone game, and I’m happy to say that the result is a fascinating mystery adventure, regardless of whether you’re familiar with the mod on which it’s based. Set in a cursed city of ancient Rome, it features strong voice performances, beautifully detailed visuals, terrific writing, and a fun time-looping conceit that not only makes for a great gameplay experience, it will leave players pondering the questions it raises about authority and morality.

You wake up near the Tiber River with no memory. The hooded stranger who found you unconscious asks if you wouldn’t mind going into the Roman ruins nearby to find a man named Al. You oblige, and after taking a moment to customize your character’s gender, skin tone, name, and background (Archaeologist, Soldier, Fugitive, Amnesiac, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses), you step inside and immediately fall through the floor into a pool of water under the city. Before long you find Al, who has been transformed into a golden statue and hanged by the neck. An inscribed stone tablet from Al warns you against venturing further; he tried to set things right, but he failed and he’d rather not have someone else meet the same fate.

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Our Verdict:

Uniformly excellent writing, acting, and audio-visual presentation of an ancient Roman city and its imminently doomed citizens make The Forgotten City a mystery well worth solving - and the clever time-looping mechanics make your investigation a lot of fun.

Score: 5/5

Here are some reviews for the recently released RPG The Forgotten City.

CogConnected 80/100

To delve too deeply into the characters you meet or their particular needs would be to spoil the fun of discovery, but along the way, there are thoughtful questions about morality and culture that juxtapose ancient Roman beliefs about slavery or the role of women, for example, against present-day thinking and current conflicts. While to some extent, each of the characters’ specific quests or situations reflect a philosophical, ethical or moral dilemma, the subtext isn’t too heavy-handed. Structurally, the game is clever amalgam of Roman myth and modern references. The repeating yet increasingly wise progression of time in Groundhog Day comes to mind, but of course, it could be said that The Forgotten City is a roguelike in disguise.

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Wccftech 8.5/10

One drawback while playing through is that The Forgotten City doesn’t keep a great record of your objectives and information. While you’ll have a quest guide that walks you through your next steps, it is often missing vital information that you heard from a character, and the only way of regaining that information is to run through the same dialogue again. It's no problem for anyone with a scrap of paper or phone to hand, but it feels like the quest system could be a little more intuitive, especially when players are just getting their bearings.

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WellPlayed 10/10

Those familiar with Outer Wilds will have a very reminiscent experience here. Instead of zooming through space, transcribing ancient alien text and manipulating gravity though, you’ll be chatting with people and tending to their woes with smaller moments of combat scattered throughout. Solving these problems, and exploring and deducing from the evidence you find are inextricably linked in a way that makes the entire game feel like one large puzzle that begs to be solved. Cunningness and creativity will be required in learning someone’s story and all of its potential outcomes to then ultimately manipulate events to get your desired result. Like Outer Wilds, there’s also that fun element of accidentally stumbling into an answer for a different quest that completely changes your immediate goals.

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Hardcore Gamer 3.5/5

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Clearly The Forgotten City is a game that speaks to those who revel in conversation. Those RPG fans who’d prefer not to fight or lash out, but converse and take a more steady, expository approach to finding a solution. It’s no exaggeration to say that the mythos Modern Storyteller both utilize and borrow from here is both surprising and satisfying with where it ends up heading. And while the narrative’s conclusion can come off too immersion-breaking or plain ridiculous for one’s taste, the caliber of writing for the most part is no less impressive for a game of this physical scale. The presence of its time-loop premise may fall too far back into the shadow, but as minimal its influence on moment-to-moment gameplay may be, the consolation is that it allows the writing to rightly take center stage. Its momentary combat segments are woeful in their implementation and there’s always a worry that another annoying bug or two can crop up when you least expect it. But for all its occasional grievances — that don’t add up to too much — it’s the intriguing mystery as much the appeal of its investigative leads across many a conversation where the strengths of The Forgotten City end up standing out most of all.

IGN 9/10

In case you do turn all your suspects to gold, The Forgotten City makes genius use of a time loop mechanic to keep your investigation going smoothly. Every time you break the Golden Rule by, say, killing somebody or stealing an item, you must run back to the starting portal and begin the day anew. The world resets to its original state but you keep everything in your inventory, allowing tangible progress from day-to-day and leading to some interesting conversations, such as how you know a character is about to do something or how you have a certain item in your possession that you couldn’t possibly have without stealing it.

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Way Too Many Games 9/10

Since The Forgotten City started off as a Skyrim mod, anyone who has played that game will feel right at home with its visuals. Although, the graphics and animations in here are much more polished than what you would find in Skyrim. The facial animations in particular are much more realistic, albeit with some questionable lip syncing at times. The environments are highly detailed and feature some dynamic lighting effects as well. I did experience some pop-ins during my time with the preview build, but those issues have been ironed out for the launch build. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that it maintained a stable 60 fps at all times.

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Twinfinite 4/5

I will say that the bits of action that make up The Forgotten City are not great. Any time I fired a weapon or engaged in combat, it somehow felt sluggish and weighty. That obviously has a fair bit to do with being built around a game that was made in 2011, but there really isn’t much of an excuse for a 2021 game to feel as awkward as this game sometimes does. 

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Thanks Farflame!

Skill Up checked out The Forgotten City:

The Forgotten City - Review (PC 4k)

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The Forgotten City is a stand-alone game, spun off from one of the most successful Skyrim mods of all time. It's got a lot going for it, but some execution and presentation issues holding it back from achieving more.

The former mod The Forgotten City has been released today:

The Forgotten City is now available to buy and download!

The Forgotten City is finally here, and we couldn't be more excited for you to play it, and see why IGN scored it a 9 out of 10 [link to The Forgotten City Review] and called it "Amazing."

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Before you dive in, here are some things you should know:

The Forgotten City was made by a core team of three hard-working devs. It may have started out as a mod for an action RPG, but like the mod, this game is in a totally different genre. It’s a mystery adventure game, which rewards thoughtful conversation, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Combat is a small – and entirely optional – part of the game. If you don’t go into this expecting a Triple-A action RPG, you’ll have a much better time!

We’ve taken great care to create a game world with historically authentic ancient Roman art, architecture, costumes, and customs, with the help of two extraordinary historical consultants: Dr. Philip Matyszak (who has a D.Phil from Oxford and teaches at Cambridge) and Dr. Sophie Hay (who has 20 years experience excavating the ruins of Pompeii). We hope you have fun exploring!

Finally, we strongly encourage you to keep playing until you reach the canon ending (Ending 4). You’ll be glad you did!

We've polished the game as much as we can, but some bugs are inevitable on Day 1. So, if you experience any issues, please head over to the Discussions / Bug Reports & Fixes section, and we'll do our best to help you!

Most importantly, we hope you have fun! :-)

The Modern Storyteller team

The Forgotten City will be released soon, IGN tells it's story:

Skyrim Mod to Standalone Game

Rome wasn't built in a day. But Forgotten City's devs virtually rebuilt it in nine years.

Nick Pearce has spent the last four-and-a-half years working 80-hour weeks on The Forgotten City, so it's not the strangest thing to hear that, at one point, he began hallucinating about being in a Mario game.

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"When you start an indie game studio you're constantly running out of runway," Pearce said when asked if there was a moment during the game’s development that he felt like throwing in the towel.

"It feels like one of those subterranean levels in Super Mario Bros. where you're running along a row of bricks, and they're disintegrating under your feet, so you just keep running forward and jumping into the unknown, all the while knowing that you have exactly zero lives left, because if you fall, it's over."

Pearce hasn't fallen yet, though. And neither have his collaborators in the tiny three-person studio known as Modern Storyteller. Their first game, The Forgotten City is a time loop mystery set in ancient Rome based on Pearce's incredibly successful Skyrim mod of the same name, and it’s all but finished for a launch later this month on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Reaching this point has been quite the journey, one that began around a decade ago when Pearce first started working on the mod in his spare time. He estimates he devoted about ten hours a week, every week for three years, to the mod. Transitioning to full-time development has enabled Pearce and the Modern Storyteller team to rebuild The Forgotten City from the ground up, using the Unreal Engine and overhauling every aspect of the original creation. As the project wraps, Pearce is quick to acknowledge it's remarkable he hasn't taken a tumble and lost that last life given the level of crunch he's willingly put himself through.

"I've spent the last four-and-a-half years working 80 hour weeks with no real holiday, which I guess is about nine years worth of work," he said, notably without giving the impression that he is boasting about it.

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Thanks Henriquejr!

The devs of The Forgotten City were interviewed by Farflame.

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Interview and preview of FP story-driven game with RPG elements from ancient Rome (with english subtitles).

The former Skyrim mod The Forgotten City will be released in July. Henriquejr spotted a new trailer:

The Forgotten City: Walkthrough Trailer

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The Forgotten City by Modern Storyteller will be available in July 2021! Discover the mechanics of the game through this video commented by voice actor Steven Kelly.

The Forgotten City will be released this summer:

The Forgotten City has a new trailer!

Hello everyone!

We're extremely excited to share the latest cinematic trailer for The Forgotten City! Check it out below:

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As you can see, we're now on track to release the game in Summer 2021, a few months later than we had hoped. We're really sorry to keep you waiting so long, but the pandemic has slowed our progress, we need a little more time to polish up the game so that you (as well as all the other users on Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Playstation 4 and Playstation 5) have the best possible experience. This game has been an absolutely massive undertaking for a small core team of 3 developers, and we're continuing to work as hard as we possibly can. Seriously. We're really grateful for your continued patience and support. Thank you! :-)

If you'd like to know the exact release date, please wishlist the game and you'll be the first to know!

Thanks Henriquejr!

PC Gamer reports that the Skyrim mod The Forgotten City will get a complete overhaul:

The Forgotten City is being completely overhauled, but that means it's delayed too

The game based on an award-winning Skyrim mod will be published by Dear Villagers.

The Forgotten City is a standalone game based on an award-winning Skyrim mod that sets players off on a murder-mystery investigation in an ancient underground city, where they'll grapple with themes including morality, modern society, humanism, and time travel. It was announced at the PC Gamer Show at E3 in 2018, with launch expected to take place sometime in 2019. Given that today is December 17, you probably know where I'm going with this.

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Thanks henriquejr!

The adventure RPG The Forgotten City will be released late 2019:

The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City is a time loop murder mystery set in a mythological city.

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Deep underground in an ancient Roman city, twenty-six trapped explorers lay dead because one of them broke a mysterious law. Reliving that fateful day over and over again, you'll need to cleverly exploit the time loop, Groundhog Day-style, to avert disaster! Face tough moral choices while interrogating diverse characters, gathering their secrets, and putting together the pieces of a giant interpersonal puzzle.

The Forgotten City offers incredible freedom and respects players' time and intelligence, rewarding lateral thinking with the best of all possible endings.

• The Forgotten City is a re-imagining of the critically acclaimed mod with more than 2 million downloads, and the first mod in history to win a national Writers' Guild award.
• Key features:
• Investigate a dark, gripping mystery full of twists and intrigue
• Solve problems your own way, with reason, charm, bribery, stealth, threats, violence - or cleverly exploit the time-loop
• Explore a stunning and intricate city rendered with Unreal Engine
• Interrogate richly detailed characters with interwoven lives
• Grapple with moral dilemmas which have life-and-death consequences
• Choose your own gender, race, and backstory
• Listen to an achingly beautiful orchestral score and first class voice acting