This commandment is fascinating for its brutality, inspired by the Roman military practice of decimation. This includes the player, unless they can make their way to a portal, which sends them back in time to start a new time loop. The key premise of The Forgotten City is that the player and all of the NPCs are governed by the Golden Rule, which the game formulates as, “The many shall suffer for the sins of the one.” In practice this means that if anyone in the city commits a sinful act, every single person is hunted down for it. Or, in the Biblical formulation: “Do to others what you want them to do to you.” The formulation is positive in the sense that it obliges someone to act in a particular way, rather than simply to refrain from acting. Georgius cites another negative formulation of the Rule, this one due to the Greek philosopher Thales: “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” Meanwhile Khabash gives a positive formulation, which he attributes to the Egyptian goddess Ma’at: “Do to the doer to make him do” (although it is disputed whether the Golden Rule dates as far back as ancient Egypt). Ulpius quotes the Jewish thinker Hillel the Elder: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” This is a negative formulation it does not oblige anyone to act, but only to refrain from acting in a particular way. The Forgotten City itself notes several versions. The Golden Rule is one of the oldest and most universal ethical beliefs, although there are multiple formulations with different implications. So here I will focus on just three concepts that are central to the game: the Golden Rule, natural law theories, and the time paradox. Are people fundamentally good? Is there a single correct morality system, or should we adopt value pluralism or perhaps even moral relativism? Is building on the foundations of older civilizations a natural part of progress, or does it amount to cultural appropriation? In fact, there are so many ideas that my notes for this roughly 8-hour adventure ran to several times the length of this column. So it’s fitting that The Forgotten City is also crammed with philosophical and historical ideas, themes, and questions. It is, in many ways, an old school point-and-click adventure in first-person guise, complete with a few progress conditions that are perhaps a little too obscure, but elevated by its clever writing, excellent atmosphere, and sense of mystery.
It’s a game that relies less on action (although there are weapons and several opportunities to use them) than it does on exploration, deduction, and trial and error.
And when the time loop you are stuck in inevitably restarts, you bring your knowledge and your inventory with you, creating opportunities to sequence events in a different order on your gradual way to one of four endings.
The Forgotten City plays like elaborate clockwork: Perform an action or make a dialogue choice and watch the roughly two dozen citizens trapped in the titular Roman settlement respond accordingly, shifting their positions relative to you and to each other to reveal new dialogue options, items, and locations.