And yes, it’s fine for a game to simply be okay. I play way too many games and I like to be challenged and surprised and it’s increasingly difficult to find games that will do that, which is why I valued WotR so highly. I’ll never slate a game for showing restraint and setting its sights a little lower, though, if only because I’m more likely to not play it all if that’s the case.

It’s surprising how small it is. You mention they didn’t do much with time and I can’t imagine how much restraint they needed. It’s very obvious they wanted the game to be very easy to understand, everything is overexplained and devs don’t require you to know who are Sisyphus or Seneca. You mention Pathologic 2 and I’d say it’s a version of Pathologic 2 that doesn’t want players to suffer. So they’ve made this cool storytelling engine but the game itself is very small. And a lot of it is a single action segment that felt like a leftover from Skyrim. Strange they’ve left this thing in instead of doing more complicated time-related things.

Anyway, have to respect the restraint. I see many games praised for the ambition even if the execution is poor (like the previous game you’ve reviewed) and I’m tired of good ideas executed badly. The Forgotten City still has some parts that don’t quite work (the game doesn’t take into account a lot of combinations of events and NPCs do not react to things you’d expect them to react to) and I think it would work better as a much smaller game. Would it lost much if it only had a little voice-over and play like a top-down adventure game? Would certainly not take as much time to develop.