The Aggie Awards – The Best Adventure Games of 2021 page 8
Best Setting: The Forgotten City
Stumbling upon long-forgotten ancient underground ruins in the middle of the wilderness is intriguing enough; plunging through a breakaway floor into even older ruins below, only to then find them still populated by their original inhabitants is as impossible as it is captivating. In Modern Storyteller’s The Forgotten City, players literally plunge headfirst into a living, breathing Roman city, with authentic architecture all around. The city has a distinct layout, featuring baths, slums, a mercantile quarter and lavish manors for the upper crust nobility. And yet the whole space seems to float suspended in a massive cave, surrounded by sheer drop-offs on all sides and illuminated by shafts of sunlight breaking through the ceiling high overhead, with no discernible way back out. All is not as welcoming as initial appearances would lead you to believe, either. Golden statues that whisper cryptic warnings as their heads turn and follow your every move will make your blood run cold, and it doesn’t take long to learn that the seemingly idyllic peace here hides a bone-chilling and ruthless tyranny enacted by the gods, meting out a swift and terrible punishment on every living soul for any act of transgression. It’s a compelling setting worthy of such an epic mystery, and deserving of its very own Aggie.
Runners-Up:
Papetura
The Medium
Strangeland
Backbone
Readers’ Choice: Strangeland
Spend a bit of time in Strangeland’s titular twisted amusement park and you’ll understand why Wormwood Studios put its name on the (digital) box. The Stranger may be the game’s protagonist, but Strangeland is its star: a dark funhouse-mirror reflection of an everyday carnival. Its shadowy tents and unearthly attractions draw you in with the promise of even more strange and unexpected sights around every corner, whether a huge, rage-quivering starfish; a man who made himself into a furnace; or a shriveled, disembodied head who tells the future. It’s a place populated by nightmare beings drawn from the realms of Jungian archetype, where masks fall away to reveal faces falser still, and where death itself is no obstacle to progress – maybe even holding the key to salvation. It’s unapologetically creepy and bleak, so thank goodness it’s not a real place, but it’s so intoxicatingly macabre that it’s well worth a virtual visit for any adventure fan, and a deserving winner of the readers’ Aggie Award for Best Setting.
Runners-Up:
Backbone
The Forgotten City
Slice of Sea
Papetura
Next up: Best Graphic Design... the envelope, please!
