The Aggie Awards – The Best Adventure Games of 2021 page 15
Best Non-Traditional Adventure: The Forgotten City
If you were to dig deep in your imagination and guess the source for one of the greatest adventure games of the year, chances are you'd never come up with a mod for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Yet indie developer Modern Storyteller broke free of Bethesda’s popular fantasy RPG trappings to create a time-looping supernatural mystery, and the result was over three million downloads for The Forgotten City. Six years later, the commercial reworking of the acclaimed freeware release arrived, offering a new and improved experience that blew us away.
In this game you find yourself stranded beneath an ancient temple where a Roman civilization appears preserved in time, cursed to relive the same day over and over. Only, none of them know it. All they know is that they exist by the grace of an angry god and are compelled to follow a mysterious “Golden Rule.” The lively cast of characters debate among themselves what will actually happen if they break it, but you know the truth: someone will, turning the populace to gold and resetting the day to start all over again for eternity. You, our intrepid adventurer, must brave this endless time loop, learn the ins and outs of the city, its inhabitants, and the events that repeatedly unfold in order to figure out what's about to happen, why, and how to finally prevent it for good.
The forgotten city itself is beautifully designed and inviting to explore, and the game plays much like a standard investigative mystery for the most part, but the repeating-day conceit, the inclusion of some light action sequences, and the ability to manipulate events to achieve a number of different outcomes combine to make the experience stand out from your usual point-and-click fare. As you interact with dozens of well-acted characters, branching puzzle solutions offer enormous freedom to influence events, but beware that every choice comes with genuine consequences. With a rich and complex story containing many twists and weighty philosophical questions, this highly polished fable earns our Best Non-Traditional Adventure Aggie over a very competitive field.
Runners-Up:
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Minute of Islands
Overboard!
Readers’ Choice: The Forgotten City
If you’d guessed a decade ago that Skyrim would one day provide the genesis for multiple Aggies, you’d have probably been met with blank stares or laughed off Adventure Gamers’ website. And yet here we are, handing out yet another award to a game that started as a fan-made mod for Bethesda’s fantasy RPG. The Forgotten City will see you running, jumping, and even fighting enemies with a bow and arrow, yes, so a little extra dexterity will be needed at times, but its creative puzzles, rich story and deep, involving dialogues with characters whose fates are ultimately in your hands leave no doubt that it’s an adventure through and through. Throw in a compelling time-looping element and some thoughtful philosophical musing, and like all the best surprises, the end result is just not something anybody thought to expect. Anybody but its developer, Modern Storyteller, that is, who may need another shelf for all the hardware it's collecting this year, adding the readers’ choice for Best Non-Traditional Adventure to pair with the one from AG staff.
Runners-Up:
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Life Is Strange: True Colors
Overboard!
Next up: Best Traditional Adventure... the envelope, please!
