The Forgotten City is 2021's most inspiring game

Video games’ most inspiring victory of 2021 could have easily never existed.

Subterranean civilizations; Ancient Sumerian tablets; surprisingly not terrible Karen memes. These are just some of the ideas that contribute to The Forgotten City’s immense narrative breadth, which encompasses everything from complex philosophizing on the tensions between various mythologies to, again, literal jokes about the name ‘Karen’. A pretty accurate halfway house between these elements is vestal priestess Equitia confusing memes for Egyptian hieroglyphics – to be fair to her, they both have loads of cats.

It’s The Forgotten City’s ability to flit between tones and moods as varied as these that affords it such a well-earned reputation for being unpretentiously clever and, when it wants to be, wonderfully silly. In a year where just about every day felt like its own timeloop, this is a game that somehow accomplished the Sisyphean task of making doing the same thing over and over again feel fulfilling… well, over and over again.

Before we move on to The Forgotten City itself, there’s an important part of that last sentence worth lingering on. Every December, a lot of different people make a lot of different cases for a lot of different games. As you’ve probably read approximately one million times by now, 2021 has been a uniquely strange time for video games on top of everything else. The most obvious indicator of this is the slew of blockbusters that were delayed to 2022 and beyond, which has led a lot of people to believe 2021 was left sparse as a result. 

To be fair, this isn’t untrue. In many ways, 2021 was comparatively slower to stockier years packed with Red Dead Redemptions and God of Wars and The Last of Uses (that’s the official plural, I checked). Because of this, however, hundreds of indies that might have otherwise gone under people’s radar garnered the attention, respect, and acclaim they deserved. Of all these titles, The Forgotten City shines the brightest. 

The Forgotten City isn’t just inspiring in that playing it is inherently heartwarming or uplifting. Rather, it is inspiring because of the story behind it at least as much as the one within it. Everything about this game that isn’t emphatically the game itself is a victory worth celebrating, particularly when you consider the impact it will inevitably have on both aspiring developers and established triple-A studios at large.

This starts with the game’s genesis, but reverberates through every single facet of it from concept to ship. It’s relatively well known at this point that The Forgotten City started life as a Skyrim mod that then-lawyer, now Modern Storyteller creative director Nick Pearce worked on in his spare time. After being awarded an Australian Writer’s Guild award for his work – marking the first time a mod ever earned a WGA – Pearce quit his job and started working on converting the mod into a fully-fledged game.

When I spoke to him earlier this year, he said this solved his first problem in that he now had time, which was obviously in short supply during his tenure as a high-earning legal consultant. The other issues were that he had no money and, worse yet, no idea how to make a game. In some ways, it might seem easy to say Pearce was lucky – he had more of a monetary safety net than a lot of other people and already had a bona fide Writer’s Guild Award to prove how good his story was. On the flip side, quitting a job you worked a decade to switch professions isn’t easy – especially when you probably have to spend a good chunk of time explaining that no, you’re not doing it to make ‘a Nintendo’. 

This has all been documented though. What fewer people have discussed is how inspiring The Forgotten City is in how it exudes a kind of confidence and ambition that are becoming ever rarer in the games industry. It’s not driven by combat or quickfire twists and turns. It is not bloated or stretched or otherwise inflated. And while its atria and aqueducts are gorgeous in their own right, The Forgotten City is not overly concerned with inching its way towards realism. In fact, its animations are even uncanny on occasion, but only to an innocuous extent given their presence alongside such incisive writing and thematic depth.

All of this is to say that The Forgotten City is a game with a very clear and uncompromising vision. In a time where games are launching in unfinished states more and more frequently, which obviously necessitates 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 isn’t really riffing off any majorly popular tropes or taxonomies – at least not from other games. It’s very much its own thing, influenced at least as much by films and books as it is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. This becomes especially evident the more you play, as the game becomes not necessarily more confident in demonstrating how well-read it is, but more open about it. 

The Forgotten City is essentially a game that could have easily never existed. From the team’s own difficulties in making it to the fact it doesn’t look like it came from a sure sales pitch, there are so many points along its journey that could have changed, truncated, or completely stopped it. 

And yet, here we have a widely lauded title that ran the full gauntlet from mod to independent game, all the while defying any of the compromises 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 dead set on examining cultural theft through various mythologies, The Forgotten City’s originality is arguably video games’ most inspiring victory of 2021. 

Written by Cian Maher on behalf of GLHF.