It’s called The Forgotten City, and if any of the following cultural products strongly appeal to you then you should stop reading this and just go play it without any additional context: The Legend of Zelda (Majora’s Mask, specifically), Lost, the immersive theatrical event Sleep No More, the sort of vague pre-teen conception of “mythology,” or gossip.

Recently, though, thanks to a full-throated recommendation from my favorite video game podcast, I completely fell in love with a game that is the definition of small: barely 10 hours long, made by a team of only a handful of developers, and originally conceived as an add-on to a much, much larger game. I’ve mostly found it comforting to play gigantic games - JRPGs (Japanese role-playing games) that can take hundreds of hours to complete - or open-world adventures where you can wander a fictional countryside and venture beyond the walls of your one-bedroom apartment for an hour or five. I’d played them steadily since I was a kid, occasionally becoming obsessed with this franchise or that throughout my 20s, but it wasn’t until I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody to do it with that this lightly pulsating rhythm beneath my day-to-day existence became a full-blown roar. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which I’ve become addicted to video games during the pandemic.

Skyrim the forgotten city