The city exists within a tenuous caste system, a hierarchy nobody wants to threaten for fear of breaking The Golden Rule and invoking its ominous unseen wrath. So I spend my earliest moments getting my bearings learning the city layout, talking to the various citizens to learn important knowledge and trying hard not to piss anyone off or inadvertently “sin” myself. As the newest citizen, I am presumably subject to this law, something I’d rather not test out. After all, you must have implicit trust in everyone, while also not being able to trust a single person. Thus far, everyone seems to live in a harmonious balance, a teetering knife’s edge that makes you wary of everyone around you. Should even one person within the city sin, everyone would be punished. I quickly discover that those who find their way to the city are unable to find a way out, and that they are all governed by something called The Golden Rule, a law that ties the fate of everyone in the city to an individual’s sin. Suddenly the ruins aren’t so ruined, and I find myself thousands of years in the past, at the height of this great city’s prominence. Golden statues litter the environment in various horrifying poses, looking like a rich man’s version of Pompeii. The mystery starts quickly as I pursue another explorer into an ancient temple and find myself trapped underground in the ruins of an ancient Roman city with no way out.

And once it has its hooks in you, the pull of this perfect civilization won’t let you go. The Forgotten City is a narrative adventure, a mystery that springs from a lost underground city, thousands of years old. But this isn’t an RPG, and the combat that it does feature is rather secondary overall. At the outset, similarities are there sure. While The Forgotten City did spring from an extremely popular quest mod for Skyrim, the full game is far from the mod and the game that sprouted the seed of an idea that was ultimately reimagined into what it is now.

Forgotten city mod walkthrough