The novelty of The Forgotten City's timeloop design wears off quite quickly.
When it does, you're left with an over the top, pretentious storyline that uses time travelling nonsense and mythology as a cover up for its own dullness. Puzzles are easy to solve by just picking all dialogue choices. Narration is done almost exclusively through exposition heavy dialogues rather than environnemental storytelling.

I don't think this is a good game, or any good attempt at how writing should be handled in a video game.

This is one of the best games I've played in a long time. Short, sweet, and thought provoking... An incredibly creative work. The love and attention put into it is extremely evident. The Forgotten City was definitely a breath of fresh air. I'm looking forward to any future projects from these developers.

Been on a time loop game kick lately, and I gotta say I think this was the least enjoyable to me.

The core of the problem is that this game is trying against to be very "gamey", and not in a way that is consciously working for its best interests. Mechanics like the varied start options, the combat system, and even the way quests are constructed often feel like they're being done more out of service to the conventions of a genre the game isn't that interested in.

The dialogue writing is on the whole just fine, with occasional lapses into being eye-rollingly contrived. Rather like a bethesda RPG in that regard, which likely has something to do with the fact that this game started out as a Skyrim mod. What saves the writing somewhat is that the quest stories are pretty interesting, though their gamified presentation with waypoints and objectives feels like it's removing any potential puzzle aspects.

The combat is dull and feels like something they included as a hedge against the type that would complain about "walking simulators". Every time the game threw the weird zombielike creatures at me I groaned in disappointment that I'd have to deal with more of them. I would have enjoyed this game more if it had leaned into the "walking simulator" style.

One thing that struck me was how little I cared about any of the characters. It felt like I was interacting with archetypes rather than people. The ending has a (mild spoiler) sequence where you reunite with the people from the town and I stumbled through it more out of curiosity rather than genuine interest in the lives of the townsfolk. Compare this to another time loop game, In Stars and Time, in which I never stopped caring about its cast even by the end of twice as long runtime.

It's hard to write this review because I feel like this game just left such little of an impression on me that I don't have much to hook onto. The game was so averse to challenging its players in any way aside from uninteresting combat scenarios. Even the moral questions it tries to raise are handled with all the skill of a high schooler who just finished a unit on philosophy. Maybe grab it on sale if the concept really intrigues you, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.