The Forgotten City: We Can't Be Moral Alone (pt 1) (Patreon)

Hey folks, this is part 1! part 2 will be added in the next few days:

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 going 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 civilizationcivilisation 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, 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 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.