The Forgotten City: We Can't Be Moral Alone (Patreon)

Enbies, ladies, gentlemen, welcome. I am Sophia, the mythical goddess of video games. Sonic the hedhod? That was me. You’re welcome. Today I want to talk about The Forgotten City, by Modern Storyteller, a game about… well, you’ll just have to wait and see, and here at the temple of Sophia - my name is an ancient word for “video games” - you may receive deeper knowledge through my 1337 blessings.

Near the start of The Forgotten City, you have this really interesting conversation with Sentius. So, Sentius is the magistrate of a strange little town in the Roman Empire in about the year 64 AD. The town is strange for a few reasons: firstly, it’s underground, full of really creepy golden statues that sometimes whisper to you; secondly, all of the 23 inhabitants arrived there less than a year ago through a big trap door through which they can’t escape, although 3 inhabitants are currently missing so even that breaks down into further mysteries; third, in this town there is only one law, “the golden rule”. If anyone commits a sin then everyone in the town will be turned into golden statues by magic, or as the game puts it “THE MANY SHALL SUFFER FOR THE SINS OF THE ONE!”

You are the fourth weird thing about this place: a time traveller from the current year brought back through a time portal that Sentius can activate in case of the golden rule being triggered. You were brought to the start of the day when some sort of sin was committed.

Building mysteries upon mysteries upon mysteries, the game invites the player not just to find an answer, but first to discover the question to which that answer would correspond; the question that binds all the other questions together.

Let’s backtrack and say what you were probably thinking when I described “the golden rule” - what counts as a sin? Well, the game is a few steps ahead of you.

When Sentius explains “the golden rule”, the game lets you bring this up. It does this a lot, pre-empting your natural questions. Why hasn’t the basic nature of Roman society triggered the rule? In Rome, after all, it was legal to own human beings. In our society it’s only legal to own Steven Crowder, and even then only online. But hang on, you can say: okay, there are people in our society living hand-to-mouth on dehumanising subsistence wages merely to enrich their bosses; that’s not that different to Roman slavery, or like, the prison-industrial complex sells the labour of low paid or unpaid prisoners in a way that is almost identical to american chattel slavery, and to be honest, I think that shit-eating prick Sentius absolutely knows that’s how our society works too, but one way or another we can’t escape the fact that clearly terrible things exist, and yet “the golden rule” hasn’t been triggered.

The time portal you arrive through can reset the day over if a sin happens, and if sin is completely prevented then the portal would never have been activated in the first place, creating a time paradox which will get you out of here, so Sentius tasks you with this;  to discover and waylay the sin. We’ve found out what the unifying question of the game is:

How do you behave ethically? What system of morals lets you do the right thing every time?

It’s a game about ethics! It’s a philosophy game! I love it!

I described this game’s premise to my mum and she said “who is this game for?” which, just, fantastic response. Savage. Get their asses, mum. Fuck them up.

But it’s an interesting question. The game isn’t a blockbuster but it’s not some obscure Russian cult classic translated three times and made twice over 10 years for an audience of depressed nerds who love sadness and hate fun either. It actually started life as a Skyrim mod, and that base has brought The Forgotten City a comfortable success.

The reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Everyone seems to have had a fun and thrilling time but nobody talks about the fact they were explicitly engaged in a conversation about the integral substance of ethical philosophy for 10 hours. It’s like reading people review dating me.

Even Jacob Geller, my boy, my beloved Jacob, my Haunted House loving son, my liminal spaces exploring video-poet made a 23 minute video that doesn’t talk about the ethical discussion that the game is engaging in at all. In fact, when I tweeted about a part of the philosophical discussion the game makes the player engage in, I got a DM from the developer that said:

Sorry What?! Nobody has commented on it? Not a one?!Nobody is talking about the moral thesis of this game about what constitutes a sin? What?! Why is nobody talking about ethics in video games? Subscribe to my patreon to defend freezepeach  in video game journalism and stop the feminazis from–

This means the game is doing something really clever, because it’s explaining enormous concepts to people in a fluid and diegetic conversation they cannot anticipate and don’t know they’re even having. Everyone is engaging with a conversation about ethics, but nobody is using the words “ethics” or “moral” or “ontologically” or “phenomenological” - and that’s probably a good thing because if this game is going to take a shot at making gamers into better people then making them say things like “deontologically” really isn’t the way.

So to answer the original question, I think maybe this game is for me. I’m enough of a massive loser to be excited about what’s going on here and enough of a gamer to be hyped about the game adapted from a Skyrim mod where the statues turn to look at you when you aren’t looking. AAA!

How do I explain this: there is an action sequence in this game and… I could take it or leave it. The game might be better without it. The real action in this game is the action of talking to people about what they believe and trying to change their minds about things and being shocked when you end up having your mind changed instead.

The action of this story is like the action of a detective novel - You see it was not Mrs. Harrington in the woodshed but rather her long lost twin sister. Yes! The gymnast from the travelling circus is in fact Petunia Harrington, and when the groundskeeper’s plot failed he became aware of this deception. And if I’m right we haven’t a moment to lose! Driver! To Toffingsley Manor!

But instead of a murder you’re solving life’s deeper questions

But if man contains any kind of fundamental social instinct then social exclusion as a form of punitive justice is definitionally inhuman, meaning that the real criminal here is a society which uses such a method! Ontological my dear Watson.

The action is all in ideas, the leveling and progression is social puzzle solving and the boss fights are debates about ethics with particularly invested characters. If that sounds good, then to the 5 of you still watching I say this game might be for you too! If you enjoy a philosophical journey as much as an emotional, characterful or narrative one, then you might really like The Forgotten City.

So, come with me in my most self-indulgent video essay yet created, as I fawn over epistemic debates that I had with imaginary ancient romans in a video game.

The Forgotten City: We Can’t Be Moral Alone

Section Zero: The Cave

We should probably talk about the setting of The Forgotten City before we get going because it’s an interesting one - in one sense very unique but in another very very expected. It’s a city with strange rules that you find yourself stranded in and have to both become hopelessly entangled in all its mess and fundamentally overturn in order to ultimately complete the game.

See, all the people who were teenagers when Bioshock came out are making games now, and they imprinted on it like an orphaned baby bird seeing a toaster, so buckle in because I guess every game is going to be Bioshock for a little while, but like, better? The Forgotten City is much smarter than Bioshock. “Should I kill children or should I not kill children?” Alright, nice moral quandary you’ve got there big wheels, but try this one on for size: “Can you be ethical in a society built on immorality?”

What I mean is that a lot of people who really loved Bioshock learned on a deeper level that this is how video games tell stories about society, and human nature, and ideology. Bioshock and games like it showed gamers a certain way to appreciate a game, and games generally take a really long time to make - and even longer to make well - which is part of why there’s an interesting cycling pattern in the kind of games getting made at different times. Aren’t people fun and fascinating? Anyway the other part of what games get made is the soulless cogs of capital rolling over all creativity and experimentation chasing the promethean flame of focus group approval. That’s going to be relevant later!

The Forgotten City does the classic routine of a special microcosm of society where the rules are a little different to remind us that yes, we live in a society, but let’s be fair here, it does it really well.

Regardless, the setting of The Forgotten City is unique for a few reasons. The city is deep underground in a cave, the mouth of which is slowly waxing shut over hundreds and hundreds of years, the city slowly sinking deeper, deeper, ever deeper.

None of this would be apparent to you if you weren’t able to see the ruined city as it is today immediately contrasted with the city 2,000 years ago. Time is integral to the world of this game - generations heaped upon generations upon generations. The spatial relationships of the game are necessarily also temporal.

This sets The Forgotten City apart from other games like it because the nature of the world is omnipresent but elusive. You can’t just play back audio logs or read diary entries, the environmental storytelling exists only to deepen the questions you are already struggling with - like the graffiti that says “Theophilus had an orgy with four women and disappointed them all equally” y’know that really makes you think.

Seriously though, take for example Durotas the Younger: in the theatre there is a statue kneeling by the podium, arms raised in despair and disbelief with a scroll laid out in front of him. In brief, the scroll tells us that Durotas the Younger - this guy - didn’t believe that the golden rule was real, because all they have to go on are the creepy gold statues and inscriptions that say the many shall suffer for the sins of the one. He says in the scroll he was orating from that he would prove the golden rule was fake by striking someone, and the results are apparent. Now this is pretty solid environmental storytelling, because we learn that there was at least one previous generation of roman inhabitants in the city, and that there was another generation already turned to gold when Durotas arrived - he says that he was the one who went around town putting them all up on plinths and so on - but here’s the rub: all the reasons that he has laid out for doubting the golden rule is even real still hold true, at least for all the other inhabitants of the city. You came here through a time portal, you’ve been hearing the statues whisper creepy things to you - hell by this point you might have tried stealing something just to see what happens and witnessed the golden rule enacted - you know that magic is real, but everyone else only has inscriptions, graffiti and statues to go on.

What the residents of the Forgotten City are experiencing is known as “epistemic injustice” - Franz Kafka, eat your heart out. It means that they are subject to the consequences of rules that they haven’t been told. Since the rules, or in this case the rule incurs such a heavy penalty, there is no process by which they can empirically deduce what the rules are. They can’t just try out different things to see if they’re sins, because they only get one.

Okay, we’re getting into the weeds too much, let’s back up.

The game begins with you awakening by a river in a forest with a mysterious hooded stranger. You can’t remember how you got here, and the stranger has a boat they say they could use to help you get back to civilisation if you do something for them.

I’m just checking in here: we all get by this point that you’re dead, right? I know people - well, gamers - can be sensitive about spoilers, but from this first scene I think it’s pretty apparent that you’re dead. I suspect that the developers may have only held back this information because if you go into the next few scenes thinking “this is the afterlife” it would colour everything, not to mention make things more confusing, but in the format of a video essay is there any reason I should pretend? I don’t know, I’m asking. Also I’m going to uh “spoil” the whole game in this video, but I really don’t think of discussing the themes and ideas of the game as spoiling it, but I’ll give you one more spoiler warning later on anyway.

There are already a lot of plates I need to spin in discussing this game - information to withhold, philosophy to discuss - I don’t wanna make things harder than they have to be. Just bear in mind that you died. Some things make more sense that way, some things make less, but it’ll all come together in the end, and the best approach is simply to vibe and enjoy the ride. It’s hard to spoil The Forgotten City because it isn’t a game, not really - and its plot isn’t plot. These are arguments, and The Forgotten City is a philosophical thesis.

So the grim reaper - sorry the mysterious stranger in the black hood - tells you that her friend Al Worth went into nearby ruins and she’d like you to go find him. You run over to check it out and find a note from Al outside a strange little roman shrine. The note says that the shrine invites explorers to “step forth and be judged” and that Al has gone in looking for adventure and he hopes you will as well. Well, it’s very mysterious that this guy disappeared, but what the heck, adventure sounds good and even if it’s tough it’ll be Al Worth it in the end… jesus christ, just throw me down a big hole.

Anyway then you get thrown down a big hole! The shrine floor was a trap door over a long plummet into a roman bath, and now you’re trapped in this spooky ruin with all these… statues… everywhere.

You may already know these are people who’ve been turned to gold, but even if you don’t these statues are really unsettling, all in poses of pleading or running away or cowering in fear. Visually they immediately evoke the images of the citizens of Pompeii who were encased in the pyroclastic flow in the middle of their daily activities. And if you’ve played the game through before, you even recognise some of the individual statues.

Lucretia is on the bridge, here, praying for help. It might look like she’s praying to that ruined temple up on the bluff, but if you look at her eye-line you can see that she actually isn’t, and if you’re revisiting this you can tell that she’s looking at where the hole in the cave ceiling used to be. She’s praying to the sky, or the gods above, or just the sun that no longer shines in this despairing dark place.

In fact, if you’ve played the game before, this whole sequence is even more chilling, or just as chilling but in a very different way. These are people you know; people you’ve met. They have their own perspectives, internal lives and hopes and dreams. What’s worse is that if you accidentally bump into them you can knock them over and you can’t pick them up again, so they’re just fallen down… forever? On the floor for eternity? It feels horrible to do this. Actually y’know what… Domitius you little fuck, get on the ground! Not so tough now are you?

Past the bridge you find a golden statue hanging from a golden rope, this one wearing modern clothes. You’ve found Al. He’s left a suicide note carved in a tablet. It’s warning you, essentially, “abandon all hope ye who enter here”. He says that going into the Temple of Proserpina would be a mistake, because he tried to help but he couldn’t do it, and if you’re reading this now you should either just try to find a way out of the cave, or you should kill yourself too.

There’s a textual mechanism here whereby the text reclaims power from the reader or in this case the player by undermining their belief in their own faculties and fortitude. The sheer impossibility of imagining the events that must have happened to Al to take him from being unbridledly optimistic to being destitute and suicidal within such a short space - at least for you - makes you doubt that you could ever have the tools to deal with the challenge ahead. If this optimistic, upbeat adventurer could be driven to such despair you have to question whether you have the fortitude to continue. You’re being disempowered by comparative example.

It might seem sudden, but so is the striking appearance of the statues and the ruins. In between Al’s two notes, his invitation and his warning you’ve travelled through time the way an archaeologist does. You’ve walked a journey from exciting adventure to abject suicidal despair in about 300 paces.

Welp, shall we check out the Temple of Proserpina then? Holy shit there’s a time portal in here!

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How much philosophy will you need in order to get this game? Well, that’s part of what makes it so good: absolutely none! If you know the concepts that the game is building on already, and you can put a name to them, or recognise the little easter eggs it gives you, then sure, that’s delightful, but you don’t need to have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to appreciate fully what the game is doing - and as an aside, you never need to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and anyone who is trying to make you is by definition, a cop.

All the philosophy you need going in is your own opinions and a curiosity about life’s big questions: what is justice? Why are we here? In the future will everyone have a weewee and a hoo-ha?

You won’t need background reading for this game, or this video, but if you really think about what this game gives you I think you can end up with a pretty grounded understanding of basic ethical theory. If you want to be a real teacher’s pet and know what the philosophy is going in, the first big idea is this:

Are holy things holy because gods like them, or do gods like holy things.

In other words, if you know that there’s a divine punishment handed down to the citizens of this place, and you want to figure out what counts as a sin, you first should have a think about what informs the preferences and ethical beliefs of the almighty. We’re going to need to figure out what gods find tasteful or distasteful if we wanna know what would make them angry, so keep that one in mind.

Part I: Do the gods like holy things?

When you step out of the time portal you will first notice how good the place looks! They really did the place up good, it’s amazing what a little time travel can do! As you step out of the shrine you will meet number one roman Mr. Clean impersonator, Galerius. He’s going to take you to Horatius who will take you to Sentius so you can learn the golden rule and by extension the rules of The Forgotten City.

I’d like to spend a minute talking about Galerius though because A: he’s a fairly significant character; and B: he’s really nice? Like, he’s a lovely, lovely guy, like

You don’t know yet but you’re in a Groundhog day style loop and when you figure out how to achieve things in the time you have - or rather stop things from happening - they’ll reset on the next time around, but if you talk to Galerius and tell him there’s an emergency and he needs to rush to give Lucretia this silphium resin right away, he’ll do it, because he’s just really nice. Not only that but after the first time you meet he’ll give you a device he invented so you can ride the ziplines he put up all around the city, and then the next time around after that, when you have the exact same device that nobody else could have because he literally invented it, he believes you that you’re from the future, especially since you knew all the things that were going to happen, so he says that if you ever need any help you can ask him, even on other time-loops where he hasn’t figured it out, because he just likes to help people, but also that you can just tell him you’re busy if you ever find him annoying because he knows when he’s not wanted. He’s just really nice.

Something I really like about meeting Galerius is how his expressions read a little janky at first, when he’s telling you about the golden rule, as if they didn’t quite animate him right, but if you think about it he’s trying to emote to you basically “listen, I know this sounds whacky as all hell, but please just don’t freak out and get us all turned to gold”.

The characters often have historical references or parallels interwoven in their writing, but aren’t necessarily the historical figures that are being alluded to. All the characters in the game are from Nero’s Rome, and the year is 64 or 65 AD, so they definitely aren’t the historical figures that they are alluding to, but if you want to pretend they are, go on, have fun, nobody can stop you. Become ungovernable, do whatever you want, break the conditioning, undermine the vile apparatus of the state and--

Galerius the farmer is named for a fun little historical nod by the writers. See, among many roman history nerds, many of the emperors are pseudo-mythological, each imagined as a character in the great story of history rather than a human person who lived and died. To be clear, a lot of this comes down to contemporary roman propaganda - basically, how the emperors wanted people at the time to see them and people in the future to remember them. Augustus the great, Caligula the tyrant, Claudius the wise - and among them, emperor Diocletian plays a very interesting character.

Diocletian came to power during a very tumultuous time in Rome, when the empire had become unmanageably large and was struggling under its own weight. Diocletian implemented the “tetrarchy” - four caesars instead of one, ruling different parts of the empire. After a brief reign, Diocletian retired to farm cabbages (one of the crops that Galerius grows) and even when people begged him to return because his ideas had been so helpful before, he refused. A lot of people see the life of Diocletian as indicating someone who was humble and wise, turning away personal power in favour of the greater good, but in actuality the tetrarchy, or something like it, was a pretty inevitable evolution of the empire’s growth, and Diocletian had health problems which led to his retirement. Also, Diocletian famously killed a tonne of christians for their faith in horrific ways, which isn’t great.

Galerius is, in fact, the name of one of the first four rulers of the tetrarchy, the basically, “caesar junior” under Diocletian, who actually ended the persecution of christians. It’s like naming your character Niceguy McGoodleader.

Obviously some of his niceness is just a game design solution for how to implement progression in a game where you live the same day over and over, but Galerius’ character is written so fittingly and so charmingly that you don’t really notice.

So Galerius tells you there’s this golden rule and takes you to the mayor so he can explain it, or at least takes you as far as the mayor’s villa, where his bodyguard, Horatius, takes charge of you instead.

So, Horatius is a weird guy. He’s the first person to start explaining the golden rule to you, using the roman practice of decimation as a kind of allegory for it. [clip here of Horatius explaining]

He’s also very into his particular philosophy, which in a way is a kind of tutorial for the rest of the game, like “ok you met the helpful farmer, what will the other people be like” and Horatius is constantly quoting Seneca and Cicero, so you get an implicit understanding that different characters will subscribe to different philosophies, albeit usually a bit more subtly than Horatius does.

Horatius would love Jordan Peterson. He in technical moral philosophy terms is “A himbo” and he thinks his boss is his boss because of some innate goodness that makes him better than Horatius, he’s absolutely drunk the “natural hierarchies” kool-aid, but you know what? Fine. Have fun considering the lobster my guy. He’s mostly not hurting anyone, and it makes sense: he’s a soldier. He’s used to the perspective on life where he’s just a little cog in what he sees as his rightful place in a machine.

I think about Horatius a lot. They say it takes all kinds to make up a world, and ultimately Horatius, stoic that he is, is only as bad as the society around him. His philosophy dictates that he change what he can and accept what he can’t, and he is so into that philosophy that he doesn’t even pretend to have his own thoughts. Quoting philosophers usually comes off as pretentious, at least that’s what my dates all say on my Yelp page, but for Horatius it really reflects the way he conducts himself. He does right by people in the ways that he can, but he simply accepts what he can’t change, and to some that might not be enough, but provided that the society he lived in was an otherwise fair one he would be assured to live perfectly morally.

You’re about to go talk to Sentius now. You might talk to his daughter Sentia, who also lives here, either before or after seeing Sentius, and either from her or someone else you glean that Sentilla, her sister and Sentius’ youngest daughter, is missing. Her disappearance is interesting for a few more reasons than a disappearance usually is: If she was murdered or kidnapped and that didn’t activate the golden rule, that would mean that the golden rule didn’t consider her murder or kidnapping a sin; If she wasn’t murdered or kidnapped that means she escaped, which would mean there’s a way out of the cave somewhere; Most interestingly, when other people notice she’s gone they’ll think about all of this too, which might undermine their belief that the golden rule is even real, just like Durotas the Younger…

Either way, you go see Sentius and he explains about the time portal, the ritual he performs to activate it, and the mission: create a paradox so you can escape the time loop.

The game is afoot: You set out around town trying to figure out who might have sinned, and probably the first place you’ll go is the town square and marketplace where most of the city’s residents work and spend most of their time, mostly just hanging out, because yeah - making bread or clothes or whatever the fuck use Desius claims to be to everyone doesn’t really take that much time when there are less than 30 people in the whole place. It’s essentially the hot hangout spot in town, so if there’s a sin to be found it may well be here.

And oh boy is there ever

Pretty much everyone in the marketplace is doing or being harmed by some kind of incredibly obvious wrong, none of which are triggering the golden rule: Iulia is dying from poison that Aurelia the bartender sold her, Lucretia can’t treat Iulia because Desius won’t sell her the antidote for less than a thousand denarii, and Vergil is being threatened with homophobic graffiti, not to mention the sin Vergil is committing himself by dressing like Steve from Minecraft.

By now you’re realising that this place is far from utopian. In particular, Iulia’s situation is actually really upsetting. You almost certainly arrive too late to help her and have to hear from Lucretia that Desius price gouged her on the life-saving medicine, but if you look into it even further, you find out that Iulia saved up a thousand denarii herself to pay Aurelia, because Aurelia told her she knew a way out of the city, and when Iulia gave her the money, Aurelia gave her poison. It’s a horrible thing to do to someone, and you understand that because she didn’t lie or steal, Aurelia wouldn’t have sinned, and Iulia would know she couldn’t do anything to get revenge without sinning. At least, those seem like reasonable assumptions anyway, maybe the golden rule is just fucking bullshit. Or maybe whatever god implemented the golden rule has a really specific list of sins in mind, or only thinks that enjoying anime is a sin, or is some kind of space alien who has a wildly different conception of what sin even means. In my opinion, Lulia just can’t handle mids.

It’s a bit too easy to get swept up in the ethics, I’m sorry. It’s horrible what’s happening to these characters and that’s just so compelling.

Speaking of what constitutes a sin, going a little deeper in towards the baths, you find Fabia the baker cowering in fear, and hiding from a man with a bow and arrow who has arrived and is threatening everyone he encounters until he is led to a man called Quinctius who you’ve never heard of. This must be a sin. Surely, this is a sin?

On top of that, Fabia ran into a little shrine to hide and the shrine collapsed on her,



so that’s two people you failed to save so far and your first time loop is going great as you end the conversation with the assassin shooting at you, triggering the golden rule. Okay, let’s regroup at the shrine with Sentius and think about how to do this better next time. Maybe try to steal 1,000 denarii on the way out so you can buy the silphium for Iulia.

Hey, it’s our boy Galerius! Thanks for being here bud, I know you don’t remember me right now but seeing you always cheers me up.

The next time around, you’ll see that you can not only save Iulia and warn Fabia not to go in the shrine, but you can tell the assassin that that Quinctius guy he was looking for is in the shrine that’s about to collapse, which is very useful because then it collapses on him, and then you don’t trigger the golden rule and you can take his bow and arrows!

Desius is immediately interested in the bow, because with his help you can swap it out for a magic bow like the statues that turn everyone golden, but true to character if you take his deal he’ll betray and try to kill you - apparently not a sin - which leads to a lengthy horror survival side quest.

However, being the keen and attentive player that you are, you will have noticed something now. Your mission objective here doesn’t say “find out what counts as a sin” or “prevent the sin in order to go back to your time”, it says “create a time paradox”, and you know what would create a time paradox? If Sentius wasn’t around to create the time portal for you.

Yes, the game will absolutely let you shoot Sentius with the bow, spitting you back out in the present day and letting you escape the forgotten city. This is ending 1 of 4, which yeah, alright, that seems fair. I did a murder, I didn’t save anyone from the city, I didn’t really even try to figure out what is and isn’t a sin or why. The game wants you to know you really fucked up though - on the screen for ending 1 it gives you a “tip”. Great, I love tips to help me be a better and more elite gamer. “Tip: how many people could you have saved if you hadn’t murdered Sentius in cold blood”
(emotional damage)
Ah fuck. Right, reload the last save, we’re going back in!

Part II: The Fool

People care a lot about ethics. Literally nobody likes to admit they don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and that’s… pretty darn fair because telling the difference between right and wrong is pretty much the most basic form of agency. Ethics is a topic of discussion like politics, where because people are so invested in it, it feels really hard to admit that you know less than someone else, and maybe even harder to admit that people who feel a different way about it could have just as much of a valid position as you do, but based on different information, life experience, and cultural context.

That’s not to say that there aren’t provably bad both politics and ethics - like hot take: being a fascist is bad - but people care so much about these things that they get very angry at people they have relatively minor disagreements with and ironically not at people they have major disagreements with because they see people further from their politics and ethics as very easy to just other, to treat as unchangeable, immutable, or concrete.

I’m saying this to really get into the guts of The Forgotten City’s core thesis here, we’re going a level deeper, dolls take your bong rips and make peace with your anime waifus. Okay:

What do we do about people with a fundamentally different understanding of ethics?

For a second let’s evaluate the project at hand here, not from our side but from the side of the god that imposed the golden rule, i.e. defining a rule or system of rules which people can follow to be moral all the time - a system of rules which you are so sure are right that if one person breaks them, everyone dies instantly.

Let’s talk about the technical restrictions, mostly specifically:

Your ethical system has to account for people who do not understand the rules.

In the town, in a warehouse off the marketplace, there is a prisoner - a man kept in a cage. It isn’t because he’s done anything wrong, of course - if he had none of them would be alive. This next bit will be heavy. Dulius, known as Duli for short, is kept in a cage because he is severely developmentally disabled and can’t comprehend that it would be stealing for him to take things he wants if they belong to someone else. He also can’t remember much outside of the current conversation he’s in, and has a note to tell him why he’s in a cage, but can’t read so doesn’t understand why he suffers, only that he is suffering.

He isn’t entirely without comfort though: Equitia comes to visit him every day to chat with him and make sure he’s doing as well as can be expected, as part of her duty as the vestal priestess, and Galerius visits Duli every day as well, just because… Galerius.

Duli’s imprisonment is not only not a sin by the rubric of the golden rule but is actively done to uphold the golden rule and prevent Duli from sinning. This is the direct impact of designing a system of rules to be moral, because it is done in service of the system, but I think that we can look at any way that people manipulate and harm one another under this system as the consequences of the system as well. Think about it, it’s a matter of scope: if your system aims to create a moral society, by definition all injustice in your society is the consequence of your system.

Like, when I say that your system has to accommodate people who don’t understand the rules, I don’t just mean Duli. Aurelia sold Iulia poison not just because she wanted to scam someone out of a thousand denarii, but because she doesn’t understand the unkindness she is doing as inherently wrong in and of itself, and because the system cannot account for that kind of wrong, she isn’t punished.

Malleolus, a rich guy living in the biggest villa in town, has two slaves, or endentured servants, people in debt bondage, however you prefer to categorise it. Iulia and Ulpius have sworn a suicide pact they are enacting on the day that you arrive, which is why untangling the web of reasons they die by suicide and therefore saving them is so complicated. Luckily you can get Galerius to do it for you once you’ve done it once.

So Malleolus, along with a little help from Desius and Aurelia, is clearly making these people suicidally miserable, which is not triggering the golden rule. He doesn’t understand the things he does as sins, otherwise he wouldn’t do them. In fact, I’m pretty sure Malleolus is a perfect example of someone who doesn’t understand the rules.

Remember Durotas the Younger, and how I said people still didn’t have better evidence for the golden rule being real? Well Malleolus doesn’t believe in it either, and something I didn’t mention earlier is that you arrive on election day when the town picks its magistrate, and Malleolus is running against Sentius to prove that the golden rule isn’t real. He’s an interestingly Trumpian character, suffering delusions of grandeur and unconcerned with the wellbeing of others - I think he probably doesn’t believe in the golden rule because he doesn’t personally believe that he can do anything wrong.

His bodyguard Domitius has been going round town threatening to beat people up if they don’t vote for Malleolus - somehow also not a sin, but whatever, you’re used to it by now. You can make it so that Sentius wins the election instead if you like, but because Malleolus doesn’t believe in the rule, either way he’ll get Domitius to attack Sentius, triggering the rule. It’s the underpinning sin that will happen at the end of the day no matter what else you manage to prevent, so it feels just like elections in real life.

Here’s an unavoidable tangent, we’ll wind back in towards the point, don’t worry: as I was writing this I kept wanting to go on tangents about episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation which touched on similar ideas and themes, but that’s actually a total nightmare for making a smooth cohesive video if I’m going to explain the plot of a bunch of Star Trek episodes in order to talk about this video game, so instead, here’s some additional reading:

Season 4, Episode 13: Devil’s Due

Season 2, Episode 9: The Measure of a Man

Season 5, Episode 25: The Inner Light

And of course, the best single episode of Star Trek ever made Season 5, Episode 2: Darmok

So if I can boil all the Star Trek I’ve had to cut from this script down into a quick, crucial idea, it’s the concept of the ethical man. In Star Trek TNG it is shocking whenever Jean Luc Picard is wrong about things, because in that story he is the ethical man, everything else is moral in relation to him. Data is rational but struggles with human socialising and feelings, Riker wants to be like Picard but is hampered by his own ambition, everyone looks to Picard for advice and guidance and that’s why he’s such a good captain. For another take on the ethical man a lot of apocalypse stories and westerns deliberately make sure no character can be considered what Hegel would call “based and morality-pilled”. In A Series of Unfortunate Events the orphans’ parents were that stories’ “ethical man” so to speak and their absence from the world imparts a deeper sense of the vulnerability of orphaned children - there is no adult coming, nobody who knows the right thing to do. It’s like twitter.

In The Forgotten City, Galerius is the ethical man, and him being a lowly impoverished farmer is one of the ways that the game telegraphs to us early on that the society we’ve wandered into is flawed.

Luckily, he isn’t destined to always be a farmer, because with all those nice things you get him to do to help, people are quite fond of Galerius, so if you get him to do them and convince him to run in the election then he wins pretty easily, and releases Duli!

I thought that to get the best ending I needed to elect Galerius. It isn’t my belief that electing the right leader could ever solve society’s problems, but it is what a lot of people seem to believe, and I thought that the game might have proposed it as its answer too - maybe with all its greco-roman philosophy it had decided to take from Socrates’ approach in The Republic. So I tried electing Galerius, and the game laughed in my fucking face.

As soon as Duli is released, he spots something he wants and steals it, triggering the golden rule, because even though you know it’s wrong to keep him in a cage, and you know it isn’t really harming anyone for him to take shiny things that catch his eye, the golden rule doesn’t.

The game has disempowered us again, not by comparison this time, but by utter abject failure. This problem with a rule for doing the right thing has proven insurmountable, no rule can exist if it can’t account for differences in interpretation, and maybe in fact a system of rules for human beings would have to be infinitely complex and so by definition impossible.

Even playing along with what you think the game wants is just a practical lesson in the misery of the forgotten city, and every attempt at preventing the golden rule being triggered ends up defeated. For thinking that I could fix a bad system by putting a nice guy in charge of it, I am the fool. I pushed towards what I thought would be the best ending and all of my hopes have been dashed by a logic as unforgiving as gravity.

Part III: Sysiphus, the king

After everything you’ve been through already, by the time you try to talk Ulpius down off this ledge it feels like one of the single most sisyphean moments of the game. You can’t persuade him with just words, because he made a suicide pact with Iulia - there goes the boulder back down the hill. But okay, you can save Iulia for the eye-watering price of one thousand denarii, but it’s worth it and you can tell Ulpius and he… still won’t be dissuaded, because the reason he and Iulia were going to kill themselves is their debt bondage to Malleolus. They’re each living like slaves, and unless you can pay another two thousand denarii to free them, he’s going to jump anyway. There goes that boulder back down the hill. You really can understand the struggle that brought Ulpius to this point, and you’re starting to understand the struggle that brought Al to his end as well.

Fittingly, the most horrifying part of the game concerns the doctor, Naevia. In her struggle to find a cure that might free people from the golden statues she has created these “peeled” statues, half-alive gold people suffering in agony and begging for the sweet release of death, or at least return to their gilded imprisonment. I say this is fitting, because in a discussion of ethics, it’s interesting that doctors all swear the hippocratic oath, to “do no harm”, but medicine is a process of trial and error. Even in developing a treatment for a single patient doctors can waste time with unpleasant and painful remedies that don’t help if they make a mistake, causing the patient suffering in the name of making them more healthy, and when it comes to an ailment that doesn’t have a known cure, this process of trial and error is going to yield a lot of negative results before it reaches a positive, if it ever does.

It is immediately striking how similar Naevia’s trial and error approach to freeing the statues from their gold is to your trial and error approach to saving the city. How many times now have you caused them all to be turned to gold? How many times have you failed? There goes the boulder again.

Naevia has become so desperate, and locked herself away because she could hear the statues whispering to her. She is the last person that Proserpina tried to reach out to in order to end the golden rule, and instead of looking for an end to the golden rule, Naevia wound up digging around in vain for a way to free the statues that she thought were the ones talking. Naevia’s struggle isn’t just similar to yours, she was you.

Okay, so it feels like a good time to talk about the fact you’re in hell a bit more.

When you’ve talked to the inhabitants of the city a few times about how they got here, you’ll start noticing some things in common, most obviously that they all died in the great fire of Rome - the one emperor Nero was famously but probably apocryphally fiddling throughout. Additionally every story involves a coin, the storyteller falling in a river, losing their memory, and a hooded stranger dressed in black. Eventually if you talk to Equitia the priestess, she’ll ask you to investigate this connection, and if you do she takes you to the baths for a little one-on-one greek mythology study. Sorry, that’s not a euphemism, she takes you to look at the mosaic in the baths that shows death in the woods with their special coin, and their boat.

She explains that the Romans call this mysterious ferryman Kharon, with a K. The greeks called them Charon with a C - singular they/them in this scene btw can I get a hell yeah - the Egyptians had a ferryman myth they called Khetty, and that every culture has a god of the underworld too, Osiris, Hades, Pluto - and that Pluto is also the god of wealth, which would perhaps explain the coins. Together you surmise that this place must be the real actual underworld, and that you are held here by Pluto, or Hades, or Osiris.

This is a fun little bit of syncretism where the game begins to slap together different cultures’ concepts of death, the afterlife, the underworld, the god of the underworld et cetera. It is of course, total nonsense, and the similarities between all these cultural elements are entirely superficial and even then have to be at least massaged to look the same, but that’s okay - the game is trying to construct a rigid world with certain fundamental pillars in order to make points about human knowledge and culture in relation to ethics, and to do that it has to fuck around with the real history a bit, because

Sophie From Mars catchphrase incoming

Culture is not a monolith but rather comprises the infinitesimal actions of individuals, some of them contributing to larger noticeable patterns but all of them ultimately unique and informed by particular conditions and context.

And that’s why you should never learn history, anthropology or archaeology from video games. You should just learn all your ethical philosophy from video games.

A story about human society demands a certain amount of continuity across cultures to be able to make its points, and that momentum, direction and drive simply does not exist in real human culture. This is why it’s extra funny that the game tries to make light of its own motivated reasoning.

When you woke up by the river, the stranger was hesitant to tell you her name but then says it’s “Karen” to which you can say that the Karen memes must have caused her problems. When Equitia is asking you about the name of the stranger you have an option to explain to her about the cultural relevance of the name Karen which Equitia interprets as like “so there’s a glyphic language you use in the future called memes and they depict a character that people dislike called Karen???” And that’s just funny. This is a great use of counterbalancing levity to keep a counterweight on the very very “*hits blunt* bro what if all these cultures had a god of the underworld because he’s a real guy broooo” vibes.

There is someone else who knows that you’re in hell already. Livia the town hairdresser has been deeply depressed for a while, barely talking to anyone except to recite passages about hell from Virgil - the poet Virgil, not the minecraft cosplayer Vergil. She realised some time ago that she and everyone around her is dead and in the underworld, and she’s devastated.

I tell Livia that I know we’re in the underworld every new day that I begin, because… it just matters to me that she knows I know. I know she won’t remember but she’s really suffering and she says that someone else knowing what she knows helps a bit. Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in his play No Exit that “hell is other people” - and yes, this is one of the most misquoted sentiments in philosophical history, but assuming that I know what I mean, just like deleting the comment you’ve started writing is free, and easy - but what Livia needs more than anything is someone else to know that she is in hell, because then it won’t be quite so bad. It’s a small thing, and I even skip through the dialogue most times, but it matters to me. It’s wild how much this affects me, actually. This is a fictional character in a video game, it shouldn’t matter, but it really, really, really does. I think about Galerius and Equitia visiting Duli every day even though he can’t remember what’s going on, because even though he can’t understand or change his situation he can understand that he’s suffering. I guess I would just like someone to act that way towards me if I were in her shoes.

So from talking to Equitia you decide that you either need to confront the god of the underworld (we’ll talk about how in a bit) or else figure out how to escape the underworld. Well thanks to Duli you have a key to the cisterns, so let’s have a look for a way out there.

This is where you find Sentilla, Sentius’ missing daughter - she didn’t escape, she wasn’t murdered, she’s been kidnapped and held prisoner in the upper cisterns, and this is also how you find out that Sentius is the one who did it. It turns out Sentius retains all his memories on every loop, even though he kills himself to initiate the ritual, and he kidnapped Sentilla to stop her from escaping, because he likes it here. He knows he gets to live forever for as long as he does nothing about it. He even watched Al drive himself to suicide trying to solve the golden rule, and he’s perfectly happy to see it happen to you as well.

I’m struggling for words to describe what an evil piece of shit this guy is. They gave me a major guilt trip for killing this guy and he’s actually the biggest sicko of all, a genuine Lex Luthor motherfucker! I’ve been played like a fiddle!

You can get to a couple of mediocre endings through the cisterns here, because it is literally the secret way out of the city. Either you and Sentilla can escape if you free her, or if you loop around and get Galerius to be a good zoomy boy you can get a few people out, but either way you know it isn’t enough. It isn’t everyone, but furthermore the revelation of what Sentius has really been doing this whole time is just staggering.

I’ve been pretty light on talking about the mechanics of this game, the inventory, the equipment, the item management and so on, and part of that is because it doesn’t really matter, does it? If you’re living the same day over and over again indefinitely, you could just pick up the same money lying around every day until you’re infinitely wealthy. The thousand denarii obstacles are daunting when you first encounter them but with a little exploration you realise there are several different ways to overcome them, and of course with limitless time even the knowledge of where you can pick up 5 denarii is a way to overcome them really.

That’s part of the torment of your situation, the overwhelming meaninglessness of everything around you. The Forgotten City does something really clever here, because notoriously in practically every RPG a weird shallow facet is the way the NPCs just stand around repeating the same lines, one-dimensional cardboard-cutout people, but when there’s a canonical reason why they act like this - say, they forget they already said it - it makes you take them counterintuitively more seriously. They seem realer because they are acting perfectly in line with the horror of the situation, albeit somewhat accidentally.

It has a strange flipping effect, in that to me, a player of a video game, it makes them all seem way more real, but I get why to Sentius, a character in the video game, it would make them all seem less real.

To Sentius, they’re all just cardboard people. By this point it should be clear that the nature of sin is at least somewhat subjective, and none of the things he does can register as a sin because to him there is a fundamental, intrinsic difference between him and the people around him, and they are worth less than he is because of the knowledge he possesses that they do not. He has broken every bond of fellowship, he is free of the obligations of social morays entirely and has literally god-like power because he is on the side of the epistemic injustice that he is on, and everyone else is on the other side. To him, knowledge is quite literally power, and he will never relinquish that power. This is why I feel that even the god of the underworld is not the true antagonist of The Forgotten City. The god of the underworld is just essentially a force of nature, but Sentius is evil.

French absurdist Albert Camus famously wrote that we must “Imagine Sysiphus happy” - see the satisfaction and fulfilment to be found in repetitive routines and tasks - but The Forgotten City aptly observes that if Sysiphus’ happiness comes at the expense of others he isn’t rebelling against the absurdity of his situation but rather imposing the horror on everyone else. Sentius doesn’t believe in the ability to deeply change the nature of the world he occupies, not just coincidentally but because of the power that he has been granted as a part of that scheme. He will never tell the others what he knows because in his choice not to is not just a cynical seizure of power, but a quiet confession that he thinks not even everyone working together could change anything about their situation. It is totally within his power to stop every harm, foul, cheat, inconvenience and petty evil that happens that day, and he would rather live the shitty miserable day which always ends badly where he is eternally more powerful than even try to change things.

There goes the boulder back down the hill, and Sisyphus is just fine with it. There goes the boulder back down the hill. There goes the boulder.

If I’m going to get everyone out of here, get the best ending, resolve all of this, I’m going to have to confront the god of the underworld. Let’s do it! Equitia points out that there’s an obelisk in front of the temple on the bluff and the doors have never opened - clearly this must be the temple to the nameless god, or more relevantly, the god with four names because there is a space where a plaque for the name of the god has been removed on every surface of the obelisk. One for the Romans, one for the Greeks, one for the Egyptians, and one (although Equitia doesn’t know this) for the Sumerians.

The roman plaque is easy enough to find, in a little nook in the tunnels. The Greek plaque is in Duli’s cage and you can take it when you free him. The Egyptian and Sumerian plaques, however, are nowhere to be seen. Equitia says to start by looking for the only Egyptian resident of the city, Khabash, who was last seen going into the Temple of Demeter and not coming out. Checking out the temple I find a boarded up little passageway hidden behind the statue.

Okay, looks like the game has big plans for me here. The city is fucked, everyone is literally in hell, two people kill themselves every time the day repeats, obviously manipulation, trickery and intimidation go on unaddressed because of the imperfections of the golden rule, and to top it all off a tyrant is perpetuating the epistemic injustice, but I have some plaques to find.

SO I GET OUT MY LAMP AND GO IN SEARCH OF A MAN.

Part IV: While Rome Burns

It’s interesting - when you talk to Georgius the Greek, he gives it the big legs about how Romans stole everything from Greeks, and even the current forgotten city is just Greek with a Roman coat of paint. There isn’t anything distinctly Greek save Georgius to be found. However, when you start going down into the tunnels beneath the Temple of Demeter you realise that the cave system in which the city sits is much deeper than you knew, and as you go at first you start to find all sorts of Greek stuff - amphorae and vases and statues and so on - leading you to a huge underground cave underneath the much bigger underground cave, with a stream, a bunch of hoarded Greek cultural artefacts, and an old man.

Now I said I mostly wasn’t looking to conflate the game characters with their historical analogs, and the game doesn’t want to admit it explicitly, but this old guy is Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher. He says he’s seen Khabash and he’ll give you the key to the catacombs to go find him, but first, just to humour an old man, won’t you have a little conversation about right and wrong?

Finally, a debate!

[megalovania philosophy debate interlude]

Diogenes’ role in the game, true to his philosophy, is to live alone outside of society. It’s easy for his actions not to trigger the golden rule because he never interacts with anybody else. He, and the friends he used to live with before they all died off, chose to hide away from the city, deep in the caves, both figuratively and literally out of God’s sight. Because they somehow hid from the golden rule they were able to survive longer than anyone else, which again: fits to Diogenes’ real philosophy. Diogenes, AKA “Diogenes the cynic” was the original we live in a society philosopher, and in real life he engaged in a lot of philosophical “stunts”, violating rules of politeness and arbitrary social customs to demonstrate his cynicism. Don’t eat in the marketplace? I will eat in the marketplace! No shoes in the house? I’m keeping mine on! Bedtime? Shut up mum you’re not the boss of me!

His rise to fame began when he defaced a bunch of currency because, yeah, money is fake, but it can’t be overstated how much The Joker from popular comic book series Robin is literally based on Diogenes. Over time, rejecting more and more social traditions, Diogenes started living in a clay pot in the middle of town, his only possessions the clothes on his back and a bowl he would eat from, and according to a story, when Diogenes one day saw a child drinking water from his cupped hands he smashed his bowl to pieces declaring that he had been a fool for carrying all this unnecessary baggage!

Another of his philosophical stunts was allegedly to carry a lit lamp around in the daylight, looking for something, and then when people would ask what he was looking for he’d say “a man” - his point being that there’s this imaginary thing we live in which we call society, and he can’t find even a single dude who’s just vibing, being a bro: everyone’s all “pay taxes!” “eat your greens before dessert!” “stop coming to my house Diogenes I don’t find this funny”

So I really like it when you go looking for Khabash in the tunnels with your flashlight, and the guy you find instead is Diogenes. It’s a reference intended for the most insufferable kind of nerd: a philosophy nerd.

I feel like I’m being taunted by Moriarty the Napoleon of crime, like who the fuck was this niche reference for? Me. They made this game for literally me, Sophia.

Diogenes is also the subject of a parable by Friedrich Nietszche where he is looking for god instead of for a man, and that parable is where the phrase “God is dead and we killed him” comes from - yes Diogenes is responsible for every piece of edgy pop-cultural philosophy. I also think Yoda is based on Diogenes. Anyway, speaking of “God is dead and we killed him” you are quite literally on a quest to defeat god at this very moment. These references - philosophy nerds, I tell ya.

The debate is broadly about the situation that you’re in, and I really like that the game insists you have this conversation. If you don’t do it you can’t progress and ultimately can’t rectify the verify dilemma about which Diogenes wants to converse with you. In particular, I just want to admiringly take note of the part of the conversation where you can either say that everyone should be able to determine right and wrong for themselves or else should follow a specific code, and whichever you choose Diogenes quickly and concisely tells you that you’re full of shit. It was great getting my twitch chat to vote on which dialogue options to pick here and seeing the votes become more and more split as people had more nuanced but even more strongly held beliefs about each successive point.

So you get the key, head down further through the catacombs and you find one of the most fascinating parts of the game. Under the Roman, formerly Greek city, there is an Egyptian forgotten city, and beneath the Egyptian forgotten city there is a Sumerian forgotten city. There are more of Naevia’s half-statues down here, though it’s not explained, probably just for the jump scares. A part of me feels like it would be scarier without them, because when you clear them all out the oppressive dank dark silence of countless generations is legitimately monstrous.

There are two major obstacles in this exploration, and both of them are Khabash. The first time you meet Khabash he is happy to give you the Egyptian plaque, as soon as you tell him you want to return it to the Temple of Osiris. He’s standing over a big hole at the very deepest point of the Egyptian cave, and although he tells you he has the Sumerian plaque, he is adamant he won’t give you it.

So, interesting historical note, the Ancient Egyptians, as a culture were, like, wildly reactionary. The pharaohs' tombs were painted by royal artists using a metric grid system to maintain that by royal decree the art style would remain the same, as it in fact did, for nearly 6000 years. In Egyptian culture there was a powerful central myth of the absolute supremacy of their culture, their people, their faith and their land. It was believed that being buried too far from the Nile simply precluded you from the possibility of resurrection and eternal life.

To many Egyptians, Egyptian culture was absolute, supreme and eternal, only capable of degeneration and therefore in need of protection from it, so it’s pretty fun to play with that for Khabash, as he is absolutely fucking insensed that there were people living in the forgotten city before the Egyptians. He drops the Sumerian plaque down the hole, and on your way out after retrieving it he tries to kill you rather than letting what he sees as heresy go free.

It’s a shame we don’t hear more different perspectives from the Egyptians, since Khabash is the only living one we meet, but it is very deliberate. You can read literally one engraved tablet from the Sumerians only if you picked the archaeologist perk at the start, there is only one Egyptian, there are two Greeks, there are 20 Romans.

This part of the game truly creates a phenomenal depth to The Forgotten City that you didn’t feel before. The fresh argumentation, the world design and the pervasive feeling of quiet doom of the buried civilisations you are uncovering come together perfectly. In terms of elevation, in terms of game design, creating a sense of significance for the player: you’re on your way to tell god to his face that he’s wrong about the fundamental moral fabric of the universe, and it fucking feels like it.

Part V: The Man In The Room

If video games disappeared off the earth tomorrow, The Forgotten City would be a game I was really glad I had played, and not just for the charming character writing or the interesting plot or the fun puzzle mechanics, but for the conversation it made me have with myself about what I believe.

We like to poke fun at geeks and gamers (not to be confused with Geeks n Gamers) for being pedantic, anti-woke, lore obsessed wookieepedia editors who baulk at anything substantive and reject politics, philosophy, or any other kind of intellectual discussion. Ultimately though, if you’ve been around people who really love video games for a long time you know that they are broadly speaking curious and interested people who are always ready for a deep conversation about right and wrong.

The general community, interfacing a million different experiences of a billion different games infinitely, is poisoned by the fact that games are expensive and slow and hard to make, which means that usually it’s only very rich large companies that get to make them, and when profit is the drive in making art, it doesn’t incentivise making challenging, risky, unusual or profound pieces of art, but rather slight iterations on the existing popular titles adjusted according to focus group consensus. The Forgotten City isn’t like other games but it is beautiful and all-round beloved.

The real triumph of The Forgotten City is not in its technical performance, popularity, accolades or credentials, but in the fact that it started as a Skyrim mod and became a game of the year, taking the power of creation from big studios Prometheus-like into the community and being developed, iterated, worked over, created by people who love video games for people who love video games to show everyone how smart and rich and deep video games can be.

Okay let’s talk about it.

There’s a warning right on the front page of the entire game, and it says

“Dear Content Creators

As you’ll discover, this game is full of intrigue and plot twists. Please give your audience a spoiler warning before sharing content from beyond the White Hallway so that interested players can fully enjoy the experience for themselves if they wish to.

Sincerely,

The Modern Storyteller Team”

So here’s the deal, I’m gonna talk about it. It’s happening. There’s your warning. There is, however, still a best ending to be achieved after what I’m about to talk about, after all the philosophical arguments are resolved, and I’m leaving it out. If you want to know, you’ll have to go see.

You slot all the plaques into the obelisk and enter the temple. The Temple is Roman and wants to know the name of the god of the underworld. “Pluto” you answer. You proceed deeper in, and the Temple is Greek, and wants to know the name of the god of the underworld. “Hades” you answer. You proceed deeper in. Egyptian. Osiris. Sumerian. Nergals. It opens into a white hallway, and as you pass through the light you arrive in a futuristic hi-tech spaceship orbiting Earth. Yes, it was fucking space aliens. This game goes so unbelievably hard and I’m not even sorry.

The aliens in The Forgotten City are like the Federation from Star Trek, but like, hyper shitty. Okay trekkies, I know: The Federation are shitty, it’s a recurring plot point, but these guys are like if the Federation was hyper shitty. In Star Trek, they have the “prime directive”, which forbids them from making contact with civilisations that are yet to develop warp technology; in The Forgotten City, a culture can only “ascend” if it has passed a sufficient level of morality.

Osiris, Hades, Nergals, Pluto, hereafter referred to interchangeably, is willing to explain everything to you. Let’s start with the golden rule:

He says that in the process of testing human beings to see if they can live without sin for a year, he looked across human cultures and found that the unifying idea behind conceptions of sin was always this: treat people the way you would like to be treated. The golden rule is literally what Christians call “the golden rule” - do unto others.

You are all in a big social experiment. Osiris is the original prank YouTuber and you’re all on camera. The selection process for the forgotten city is the coins that you had on you. Hades dispersed a thousand coins at the start of his observation of humans, and whenever someone dies with one on them they’re added to the city, tested in cohorts of people, and according to him, according to this rule, no group of people have ever made it a full year without one of them treating others in a way that they wouldn’t want to be treated.

The situation is patently worse than that, however, as you are able to point out to him - people do bad shit all the time and it doesn’t count under his golden rule. Price-gouging, slavery, deceipt, but all of it according to Pluto is fine, because in each case the person doing it truly believed that if it were done to them, they would be perfectly happy with it. Take Desius - he believes that it is simply reasonable for a merchant to set whatever price he wants when a customer has no other option, and he believes that he would also find that if not pleasant, then at least fair. The same is true for Domitius going round town intimidating people into voting for Malleolus. He believes in the physical hierarchy of muscular bodies, he believes in “might makes right”.

Okay, so why are you here - besides dying with a coin, I mean.

Proserpina, Persephone, etc - everyone has to have four names now - is a mortal human Osiris is in love with who he has taken as essentially a prisoner. He wants to give her immortality and godlike status with him, she doesn’t want to go unless human beings can ascend, you and Al are the last people with magic coins ever to die, so she’s using magic to whisper to you through the statues, to try and guide you to help humanity pass the test.

From here there are two ways you can defeat Hades and get the best ending. Either you can convince him that it is normal and human to make mistakes, and furthermore that he isn’t infallible himself, and therefore he should simply let humans get on with it and just be human, or following Proserpina’s advice, you can use your bow to shoot her, take the crown from her head and dash back to the shrine, restarting the day over another time, and then present the crown from her head to Osiris, who will know that though he may kill you, you will take her with you.

Debate or blackmail a god to free humanity from their moral judgement. That’s pretty baller you have to admit.

Well, we’ve heard all the arguments.

What is this game about?

It’s worth noting the symbolism of money throughout the game. You step onto a big revolving coin to enter the forgotten city, you are turned to gold if you sin, you come to the whole experiment if you die while holding a special coin (Charon’s Obol) and the god in charge of it all is Pluto, the god of wealth. Yes Nick Pearce, I too have read Debt:The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.

At once, one might be struck by the obvious impression that the styling and aesthetics of The Forgotten City are reactionary - a roman magistrate tells you about the “civilising force of the empire”. You might even follow this thread deeper into the philosophy of the game: what is “forgotten” about the “forgotten city”? Perhaps the answer, in a classically reactionary sense, is philosophy - high-minded discussions of ethics, society, politics and economy - but does this assertion hold up? Is it in fact, morality that the game suggests that we, as a culture, have forgotten?

In a sense, yes: If the forgotten city is the underworld, a place where “the many shall suffer for the sins of the one”, then simply by naming it “the forgotten city” the game seems to make a statement that we have forgotten how to be moral.

However, if the player is really paying attention, the game takes great pains to refute this idea. Just as reactionaries make a claim that music & art are degenerating by pointing toward the works of the past that have already stood the test of time, so too do we know less and about every generation of citizens going backward, and our relative wealth of contemporary awareness can make us view modernity unfavourably.

As time erodes the little details of our lives, our descendants will only know about the things that are treated as the most important. Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt or Sumeria were no more philosophical civilisations than ours, but like more of us remember The Beatles than The Zombies, The Lettermen or The Cowsills, we have heard of Socrates, Virgil or Hypatia because their work was important to people.
Likewise, in the game, we know about Ulpius’ secret relationship with Sentilla, we know that Galerius visits Duli every day, but we barely know a thing about the previous roman generation, besides their graffiti still on the walls of the city, and Durotas the Younger’s scroll. We know even less about the Greeks of the forgotten city, save a few of their philosophical ideas and some of the names of their gods. Even less about the Egyptians - only that their ideas influenced the Greeks, and that they called Pluto, “Osiris” and Kharon, “Khetty”, and the only Egyptian character we get to meet is Khabash. Less still about the Sumerians - Only their names for the god of the underworld and the ferryman remain. The only information you have for the Sumerians are words you can’t read, ruins you don’t understand, and the frozen figures of terrified people fleeing for their lives.

In a sense, it is history’s golden arrows that make statues of us all. The sumerian ruins below just like Al’s golden corpse above, just as your repeated looping fuckups, stand as testament to the repeated failure of social imagination.

Quite the opposite of reactionary, The Forgotten City stands looking at the past and the present and says that nobody has yet achieved a moral society, if one can be achieved at all, and that it is human both to strive and to fail.

Perhaps we should look over the premise some more to understand it. Let’s talk about the epistemic injustice, the characters unable to understand the rules they are subject to.

Of course while they might not be able to use trial and error like you can, they can still get pretty far reasoning it out, as Diogenes demonstrates. His argument goes that anyone who denies others’ ability to tell right from wrong - either by doubting their capacity or overruling their agency - is an absolutist. Any such person believes they are infallible and is removing the most basic human ability to be human from others.

Think about it for a second: what even are morals, what is the ability to tell right from wrong? We’re all just apes suffering from depression and apophenia, incapable of not recognising patterns in the chaotic swirling data around us because of our terribly oversized big brains. Our feelings are essentially an algorithm our brains run to help us find food and shelter and make smart decisions, and somewhere along the way we developed a feeling for a sense of something we call “justice”. All our ethical theory develops out of this feeling - all of our ideas of morality follow on as a post-hoc rationalisation of that. Turns out facts care a lot about your feelings - checkmate atheists.

That’s why Plato’s The Republic centres on Socrates asking the deceptively complicated question “what is justice?” Everyone he meets wants to give him a pretty simple and straightforward answer to begin with, just like we think we have simple and straightforward answers at the start of this game, but the longer the conversation goes on the more we see that the question can only be answered by getting really deep down into the roots of human society and both how and why we strive to live equitably.

Counterintuitively, I actually prefer winning by force over convincing Osiris, and let me explain why.

Firstly, I actually find the line of reasoning to be a little weak that you use to defeat Osiris. I don’t have many out-and-out bad things to say about this game, and even when I do the game makes me engage in a very interesting conversation just to explain them, and I’m okay with that, but yeah, this feels flawed to me.

You have to show Osiris that he is capable of mistakes, just like people, and that perhaps engaging with the capacity for humans to be moral has made him too into a fallible creature. Furthermore, you point out, if we are to use the golden rule to determine sin then he isn’t free of sin himself. Hades will laugh at you as he feels it simply doesn’t apply to him, he is superior to humans, so you say then how would he like a hypothetical superior to treat him. This is solid rhetoric, but I don’t really think it holds up as an actual argument in the specific context of debating with a god. After all, the notion of a god philosophically exists to put a cap on the hierarchy of the whole known universe. By definition nothing could be greater, and furthermore Nergals doesn’t need to think this way. Not just because he’s superior to humans but because he’s alien to us, literally. He represents an external imposition of human morality reflexively onto humans, the way a state imposes laws on people, and the logical place to defeat his reasoning is in the difference between small scale human morality for interacting with one another, where the golden rule holds up fairly well, and the large scale shape of society, where the golden rule evidently creates a horrifying dystopia.

All of that is besides the point anyway, because it is significant that Pluto is an absolutist, and so I don’t think he deserves to be met with a sound argument anyway. The argument the game affords you, as with the brute force solution, is essentially “don’t come back to earth ya big jabroni you mess wid one of us you mess wid all of us” and personally I think that’s delivered better as a slap in the face than as a philosophical argument.

The socratic dialogue with Diogenes is a practice for the final confrontation with Osiris, but what’s really clever about it is that this isn’t just a mini-boss and then a boss fight, where you beat the bosses in similar ways. You don’t beat Diogenes and then beat Nergals the same way, in fact you don’t beat Diogenes at all: you can either have an engaged contemplation of ethics with Diogenes or he kicks your ass and refuses to give you the key to the catacombs.

I really can’t stress how awesome it is that the game forces you to reconsider your ethics or it won’t let you progress. You have to have a discussion of ethics in order to beat the game, and then, if you’re really paying attention to the philosophical conversation the game is having, you actually apply what you learned from Diogenes in order to beat Hades.

What do I mean by that?

Diogenes won’t give you the key if you refuse to admit your ethics could be even slightly fallible. He won’t give any quarter to absolutists. He says “If you really believe that then you are absolutist!” Or that’s what the recorded voice line says - the written line says “If you really believe that then you are an absolutist just like whichever god implemented the golden rule.”

He’s giving you a clue! If I were to put on my media analysis tinfoil hat for a second, I might point out how this subtle difference is like how Proserpina whispers to you through the statues. But that would be ridiculous. They didn’t do that. No, that would be ridiculous, right?

Either way, this is how you beat Pluto. You have to realise that he’s wrong, and the most striking clue that he’s wrong is that he thinks he can’t ever be wrong. He’s an absolutist, so he can’t be reasoned with, so the only thing you can do is take power away from him.

The game’s thesis on power is that if someone convinced of their own infallibility has power, it is your ethical obligation to take it from them. “Is it good because gods like it, or do gods like it because it is good?” The game’s answer is if this is the morality that the gods favour, the gods are unjust. The gods are immoral, and the only way that anyone can ever be moral is to attack and dethrone god. Don’t police your neighbours, don’t just stop them doing bad things, don’t just replace your politicians if the system itself is broken. If the system is unjust, you have to change the rules and remake the system. Modern Storyteller? More like Big Communism Builder.

Osiris’ reasoning is blunt and simplistic and absolutist because he isn’t a mortal man, he’s a god, and gods, or space aliens posing as gods, or any infinitely powerful character can only be a living embodiment of the system itself.

In Seeing Like A State by James C Scott, the author undertakes a lengthy exploration of the ways that states understand human life, and in particular the concept of legibility. A state needs to measure and weigh people like a logger needs to measure a forest, but people are complex and beautiful and their infinitesimal actions and interactions and beliefs and hopes and dreams can never be described in words or numbers, just like a forest is a rich and complex environment full of infinitely more than wood, but the logger needs a number of planks to make the forest legible. In doing this, both real world things are processed by a system of simplistic rules and calculations.

Morality is neither possible to impose top down nor to allow to define by an individualistic and highly subjective rule of thumb. Our subjective sense of justice only exists in response to interactions with others, meaning that morality only exists in an intersubjective context, ethics and the concept of right and wrong can only exist between people.

One solitary human being is not moral, and the game takes incredible pains to show us that. The myth of sisyphus becomes monstrous when sisyphus bears responsibilities to others. No set system of rules could be defined for human beings to be ethical without being infinitely long and complicated or else completely wordless, because only a wordless sense of justice or else an exhaustive account of all possible morality could really capture what it is we’re looking for. Even our most seemingly common sense conception of empathy - do unto others as you would have done unto you - falls painfully short.

To strive to know how to always do the right thing is itself sisyphean, and we will keep pushing that boulder because it is human both to strive and to fail.

Ultimately it may be that it is a fool’s task and all that exists is the other people in front of us, the prevention of harm and the issuance of care, but in the uncertainty of rupture and change, through aeons, through generations, as we try strive and fail and strive again to live equitably, we can be certain of this much:

We can’t be moral alone.