The Forgotten City on Steam
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The Forgotten City is a narrative-driven time loop adventure in ancient Rome. Discover the ruins of an ancient underground city, travel 2000 years into the past, and unravel the mystery of who destroyed it by cleverly exploiting the power to wind back time. The fate of the city is in your hands.

If you want to jump in blind, and if you're going to play this game I recommend doing that, my spoiler-free review is that it mostly hits home, though a couple of stories fall short, and that it's tremendously easy so don't expect to have a hard time.

The Ending

What the fuck. Not in a good way either. I haven't been this disappointed by a game's ending since fucking Mass Effect 3. The ending to this game is seriously on a level alongside season 8 of game of thrones. The ending of this game was so fucking terrible it compelled me to post like Sisyphus was compelled to push the rock.

From the moment I opened the Ancient Sumerian door and a fucking spaceship hallway appeared behind it, it was as if all life had been drained from my body. My mouth hung agape, and if you scanned my brain you would have found a flatline. I wish I could go back, to just before I had opened the temple and never finish the game. But we can't return to the cave once we've seen the surface.

You meet Pluto, and he tells you that he's an alien and that the aliens accidentally created religion when they revealed themselves to the ancient Sumerians. He tells you that the Golden Rule is a bet that he's having with Jupiter about whether or not a human city can go an entire year without sin.

You engage him in a shallow debate about morality (which is a rehash of the debate with the Greek philosopher from before except it goes on for longer) and convince him that even his race is fallible, and because it turns out he really is an idiot it seems that despite living for thousands of years it never occurred to him that his premise was based on circular logic. He yields to your superior logic and reason (which is actually your ability to suss out the correct answer on a bunch of multiple choice questions with 2 options) and goes back to his home planet.

Then you get the Big Dumb Ending where you're at a museum exhibit and all of the people from the city have been Isekai'd into the modern world with enough cash to become European petit-bouge, except for the bad people who have all conveniently gotten themselves killed or screwed over. And all of the statues are normal again too - though I wonder if the ones that had been skinned alive were restored or not.

God I'm so fucking disappointed. The game was so enjoyable and the writing was so compelling - all of the plot twists, the meta elements, the little character arcs were so goddamn cool. For it to end on such a brown note just kills me.

Ugh.