The Forgotten City

 The Forgotten City is a timeloop.. adventure.. game? Starting life out as a Skyrim mod it's a little hard to identify an exact genre for it. While I haven't played the original mod yet, the game is littered with sparsely used mechanics exactly the way a mod might be constructed, used because the original game provided them for nearly free. The premise is that you find yourself thrown back in time to a small underground settlement in Rome, where the inhabitants are under a curse by the gods: if anyone sins, everyone is turned into golden statues. Fortunately you're also stuck in a time loop that lets you repeat the same day as many times as it takes to prevent anyone from breaking it. The ambiguities and loopholes of such a law are the main focus of the story, and I was pretty much hooked by it out the gate. If listening to NPCs talk about the philosophical problems of morality sounds like a good time, then this is the game for you.

That premise might make it sound like a mystery game- figuring out how people are going to sin and stopping them, in practice the game doesn't require much active sleuthing from you. As long as you exhaust everyone's dialog trees, and explore the right corners of the city you will pretty much inevitably solve every mystery. Occasionally dialog choices will have consequences of making characters refuse to speak to you or outright attack, but you can simply repeat the timeloop or load a quicksave to correct. In general it has the most streamlined timeloop mechanics I've ever seen: you keep all items and money between loops- so you only have to find any given key item once, a friendly character at the start of the game can be used to repeat any quests on your behalf beyond that, while characters do have some simple daily routines stalking them isn't really required for anything (even the one time-critical event in the game can be pushed up if you ask, and quest pointers direct you to the few characters that move around), and every NPC in the game even responds positively to you telling them to shut up you already did this conversation. It's basically what it would look like if a high budget studio approached the timeloop concept, and as a result it has a smooth flow to it that lets you appreciate the narrative implications of a timeloop without dealing with the inconveniences of it.

It's also rather open. I'm pretty sure you can reach most of the endings (though probably not the best) by simply murdering everyone in the game, stealing their key items, and then dashing back to the portal for another loop. Even outside of murder I ended up solving a couple character's quests by simply exploring the city, so I have no clue what their stories even are. That sounds cool on paper, but the reality is that exploration and murder are both extremely easy to pull off and are therefore pretty unsatisfying ways to solve quests. While talking your way through things is also pretty easy, it's still the meatiest thing since it has a story to it- I kind of just felt like I missed out by solving things in these alternative ways (though I suppose hatching the perfect speed run or one loop run would end up being an interesting puzzle on its own, something the game acknowledges with having achievements for them). 

In short, while the game has a buffet of mechanics the reality is that the main thing is just listening to conversations and watching the mysteries unfold. So it's a damn good thing that the story is actually a lot of fun if you're into characters pontificating about morality and uncovering mysteries about the setting. I found myself compelled the whole way through, even if you can see a number of the revelations coming a mile away and some of the philosophical conclusions are a little iffy. And while I gripe about how shallow the individual elements are, I think they provide wonderful pacing breaks between the conversational meat of the game- I'm generally very hit or miss with adventure games due to the tendency towards repetition. Would I recommend playing The Forgotten City? So long as you're ok with the price tag for an ~8hr game and the premise appeals to you, absolutely. Strongly recommended.

(Also, like. I love historical settings in games, but practically nothing uses them except bad games like Assassin's Creed. So really heavy bonus points for letting me explore Roman culture in a good game for once, even if parts of it feel a little bit like someone cramming every bit of pop trivia they found on the internet into every nook and cranny and explained it with a text box like a tour guide).