The Forgotten City Review (sleepydogboy)
agonized over whether to give this a positive or negative review. in the end i'm going with a positive, but there are some major caveats.
the forgotten city started its life as a skyrim mod, which is how i first experienced it years ago. it is, without a doubt, my favorite story/quest mod i've ever played in a game. i was blown away by the quality of its writing and by how much i enjoyed the whole experience. its existence as a skyrim mod is a major component of that -- it has a background of elder scrolls lore/worldbuilding to build on, the mod's writing quality and ability to make decisions dwarfs much of the base game's writing, and there are a few fun/interesting combat scenarios that are enjoyable in a game like skyrim.
this game is essentially an independent release of that original mod, with skyrim lore swapped out for mythology. the thing is, though, that much of the original forgotten city mod is written and structured the way it is because it's being made -for- the skyrim engine, and in an effort to maintain all the ideas and major story beats that made the mod so beloved, this game copies over some ideas that really, really do not belong outside of a skyrim mod.
the big one everyone likes to point out is combat. the combat in the skyrim mod is there because, well, it's a skyrim mod, skyrim is built for walking around and wacking dudes with a sword, and a whole mod without that combat might feel a bit odd or boring. here, though, the combat really does not belong at all. it's by no means terrible, it's just... bootleg skyrim combat. skyrim combat is already pretty shallow, deliberately so as to be as approachable as possible, so it's a weird thing to deliberately emulate, and in an independent release like this it adds very little to the experience.
i also found many of the characters and story beats to feel much more underwhelming in this independent release than they were in the original mod. without getting into major spoilers, this is a game with multiple potential endings, and those endings just seem more "natural" in the original skyrim mod. here, those endings are recreated so directly that it just doesn't "feel" right, like limitations that you could excuse in a skyrim mod are being deliberately recreated in an entirely separate game. again, without getting into spoilers, seeing a character walk up behind another character you're talking to and just stare blankly into the back of their head until you progress the dialogue feels understandable in a skyrim mod, but utterly bizarre removed from that context.
all this is to say, if i'm being brutally honest, i still think the skyrim mod is the better way to experience this story. you'll get a lot of the same content, but with a better combat engine, a lore backdrop that feels a bit "deeper" than the mythology theme on display here, and your takeaway will be more "this is ridiculously impressive for a mod!" than "this has a lot of weird problems for an independent release." if you've never experienced the story before, however, i'm sure this would still be a really enjoyable means to experience the story. plus, to be honest, the devs deserve your money. this mod and this game have had a lot of work put into them by people who clearly care about what they make