izigame.me

I would not recommend The Forgotten City for $25. I could recommend it for maybe $15 or less, but honestly it suffers from too many major issues to recommend at the asking price unless you REALLY love the ancient roman aesthetic.
As for those problems, I'm going to sound a LOT more harsh than I want to be and I don't want to come across as if I hate the game, but my biggest issue is the scope was far too ambitious for what the team could reasonably produce. There's a lot of elements that are entirely tacked-on that I cannot imagine made producing the game easier and honestly either drag the game down slightly or at best feel like padding. The combat is bad, there is no more gentler way I can put this, it's really bad. There's no legitimate story reason to add it either, there's a singular section that attempts to explain it but in all honesty adds significant plot holes rather than genuinely explain the reasoning. It feels like it was added purely to appeal to people who point and laugh at games without it which makes no sense because those people will never play this game willingly to begin with.
As for the other issues, I appreciate the attempt at creating a detective narrative with offering the same dialogue options to every NPC to mask which are important and which aren't but it doesn't work. If this was the singular focus, creating a social deduction game piecing together different stories and figuring out the truth I'd have much better things to say here, because even if it failed I'd applaud the effort. However the game actually boils down to checking off enough flags to reach the next linear objective, which... pretty much every modern videogame does. This isn't a flaw, but it also isn't a new idea or unique to the genre. I ended up stumbling into most relevant plot characters day 1 simply by talking to everyone I came across and paying attention. Again this isn't a flaw, but it also isn't close to what the game promised in its description.
Honestly though overlooking all of that my biggest problem has to be the actual story itself. Mild spoilers so this is where you should stop reading if for some reason you're both invested in this extremely critical review but still want to actually play the game for yourself.
So many plot points feel created explicitly for shock value or to surprise the player. They do not feel like a genuine intriguing narrative in a world that feels cohesive, they feel like "Wouldn't it be crazy if X did Y?". There's one extremely egregious example that comes to mind but honestly multiple characters don't feel like they have earnest or understandable motivations, they're simply acting out a character archetype to fulfill a role. Like participating in a roman themed interactive stage play rather than talking to actual people. This idea is only reinforced by the fact that everyone generally stands around waiting for you to approach them before doing their major task of the day.
Again I'm sorry for being so harsh, I know the game has a very small dev team and I am generally positive towards the game but the price is simply too high for what it offers.