Narrative lateral design in The Forgotten City (featuring Socratic debates)
The Forgotten City is a moody Adventure-sized immersive mystery.
A woman named Karen fishes you out of a river. Beside her campfire, she wants you to find someone, perhaps a friend.
You follow the forest trail into crumbling ruins. Inside, you travel back in time, to a place modeled after ancient Rome and Greece.
Its inhabitants may not "sin" or commit wrongdoings. One such act will trial all to death. You must find a way to return to the present - and you may do it by "sinning" or being patient, exploring and befriending the people.
To be immortal is to sin
One lesson you may get from The Forgotten City (TFC) is "sinning" can be beneficial.
In TFC you go back in time to "sin", if you wish. "Sinning" can be driven by temptation and be a functional mechanic - it keeps the story rolling when you're stuck.
The game makes illicit acts enticing, sometimes explicitly but more because narrative design thrives from experimentation. A clever play on human nature's propensity toward shiny objects.
Patience, exploration and investigation are more fun, though. Stealing or attacking a certain character can move the plot faster, but will take away the joy of discovery, patience, helping people, bringing justice to the guilty, deduction.
TFC builds on the tradition of classic Adventure games, but improves it with lateral design:
Many goals have more than one solution.
Dialogue, running, attacking are all viable to progress at different points.
Time-travel means virtually everyone will complete the story with ease. Though less important, I appreciate how the best ending requires the most patience.
The game is shy of encouraging "failure" - for example, by making stealing "illegal" - but is a prime example of the power of games in using choose-your-own-adventure branching time-bending lateral design.
Sin and its virtues
Should everyone in a city suffer capital punishment for one person's sins?
Probably not, regardless of the gravity of the sin. The Forgotten City begins with this premise and the reasoning will be explained at the end.
TFC teaches illicit acts may be beneficial - at least in terms of narrative design, avoiding death and sheer novelty: a stolen item or piece of info gleaned through lying may help solve a problem.
TFC does impose consequences for faulty behavior - stealing, trespassing, attacking people - but through time-travel the results may be useful.
The game may seem to make the point the end justifies the evil, but the concession works as gameplay mechanic.
In this ancient city, you can lie, steal, attack people, but the end is not nigh unless you die.
You can escape death by sprinting and going back in time, then use the acquired information or item to progress.
The gameplay mechanic becomes part of the philosophical premise - is it justified to condemn others to death knowing - or hoping - you'll save them later?
Enticing and accessible
The kicker with The Forgotten City is in posing pedestrian conundrums - should others be punished for one's sins, what constitutes a sin, how far should one go to prevent mass murder and one's own death - and packing them in an accessible Adventure.
There's no revelatory answer to questions beyond what players decide on their own. But that's because trying to impose answers in a game would be futile for something so volatile as human psychology and behavior.
TFC does try and does it in the best manner possible: the game can be "won" precisely by arguing against the idea of Utopia. More because of admitting how Utopia - at least in practice - requires a form of authoritarianism.
The city of debates
As befit the premise, we find the opportunity for debate with several characters.
We don't find revelations about human nature or about creating utopia, but debates - including Socratic ones - rarely offer revelations because of human propensity to entertain our feelings.
Knowing this but using lateral design, the writing makes some debates useful to progress, sometimes just intellectual exercises, all enticing.
They don't overstay their welcome and their flavor ads the necessary persuasion element to TFC's open-ended design.
A pity the Archeologist background is useless - most quests avoid it and ancient text is often translated without it.
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We aren't told how utopia works in the world of the "god" which oversees this ancient city. A discussion of utopia would've been interesting, but that's beyond the initial premise.
To be fair, discussing how other entities have achieved utopia - a society described by the "god" as devoid of conflict - would have been useful as argumentation.
But we do get a glimpse of the answer - the all-seeing "god" of the city has a leader of his own. We can assume these "gods" have achieved utopia precisely through a form of strong leadership, perhaps authority bordering on dictatorship.
We can use this line of reasoning to debate against the experiment and to achieve the best ending.
Which is perhaps the proper moral argument: the people of the city will return to the imperfect mortal world where the human experiment continues without "divine" oversight.
Gilded zombies
The game does stumble a bit with its enemies and brief action scenes.
Action parts which require sprinting may be tedious when zombies box you in.
The game offers a convenient weapon for dealing with enemies, but reducing their number and making them easier to avoid would fix the action tedium.
Game design lessons
Narrative lateral design
Some goals in TFC may be solved in multiple ways in the same playthrough.
One session's failure is not permanent - the story continues and some goals are easier to fix with new information.
Open-ended difficulty
As important as lateral design, it's a pleasure to "fail" and be allowed to progress.
The ultimate failure, game-design wise, is dying. Everything else is an opportunity to learn (sometimes while the people of the city are dying).
Debates
The joy of gaining a bit of wisdom, while changing no one's mind. TFC doesn't owe such intellectual pleasures, being an Adventure first, but it could teach RPGs the joy of Socratic debates.