I think it is apt that this game comes from a development studio called "Modern Storyteller." It is certainly a modern retelling of ancient Rome for the "modern audience," full of trite like how hard and unfair it was to be a woman of this time period despite how males were forced into military and killed in battle before they were even 12 years old, and some weird inclusion of homosexuality where one NPC is a bully to a gay guy because he himself is insecure about his own sexuality. In ancient Rome. Where, during the era this game takes place in, homosexual relations were not entirely discouraged because Rome had not really adopted to Christian teachings yet. And regarding Christian teachings, the game often speaks negatively about that religion, which is perhaps accurate given Rome's opinions on Christians at the time, but we can't trust that the developers didn't just use that as an excuse to demonize the religion while pretending that the other cultures and religions that the game aims to portray are way more tolerable or kind.
As you play through the game, you'll notice it's essentially a pyramid chart in how the map was designed, where you travel downward, quite literally, from the top layer of Rome and its mythology. Christian warriors are assaulting the region, and in a way, it's an interesting design choice for the message of how culture subsumes one another until one is prominently at the top of that pyramid, having pushed everything else downward. Beneath the Roman soil exists the bottom part of a larger iceberg of religions and cultures which is perhaps meant to imply that Rome is now the superior ideology that conquered the others until Christianity arrived to slowly begin inking into society to now do the same to Rome where their theistic belief system begins to slowly erode.
Where the game had some real potential for good storytelling, though, quickly becomes even sillier beyond some of the overdone woke tropes it incorporates as explained above. The game requires you to resolve a few different mysteries through exploiting a time loop system akin to that of other games like [i]The Outer Wilds[/i]. One major mystery is regarding the "golden rule" of the town, which is essentially the ten commandments of common sense and human decency condensed into one singular law, where violating this law is punishable by death. Not just for yourself or the law breaker, but also for every other person in the town, and so you have a town of people who are too scared to do anything that might cause their untimely death. This could have been a clever meta-commentary on the human inevitability towards imperfection, but the game executes upon it terribly, as it's all a farce and a very lame science fantasy trope towards the end. It ultimately concludes the game as an allegory for domestic abuse and suppression and the mystery's resolution is anti-climactic and boring in how it is handled.
This isn't the only red herring of the game, though, and a major question is left unanswered. The game's tutorial sequence has your character waking up alongside of a river, Tibet of Italy, as a strange woman stalks over you and introduces herself as Karen. It prompts the game's 'character customization' screen which is just basic gender select between "body types" on a coin that is in your pocket where both male and female portraits look very manly, anyway, that the representation doesn't matter as you look like a man regardless. That's right: ancient society referred to men and women by "body type 1 & 2" or "A & B" is basically what this game wants to claim. The credit sequence to the game states they hired a consulting agency to help with ancient history but clearly these consultants didn't inform them that people were referred to as "male" or "female" for thousands of years before we started coddling mentally ill people.
But I digress, after exhausting the dialogue options where there are some odd inconsistencies in her responses depending on which background you choose for your character, you have to agree to go chasing after some dude who was interested in searching for Roman artifacts (why do you care?) where you, also conveniently, washed up fifty feet from an undiscovered cave in the 21st century with Roman architecture inside . . . with a trapdoor that leads down what is essentially a long water slide. From here, I immediately deduced the true identity of Karen, her relation to the river you wake up nearby, the amnesia of your character, the coin you had in your pocket . . . it's very obvious and predictable symbolism given that Roman mythology does shares heavily with Greek mythology. And you know it's the 21st century because of the bad dialogue (even when exploring their depiction of ancient Rome, it's very modernized) but also because the developers couldn't help but to insert lame fourth-wall breaking humor about the name, Karen, where she admits to being ashamed by it because of the meme associated with the name.
There's obviously mythological and powerful entities in existence here but they don't exercise any mythical ability nor intervene in the events of the game and you never find out whether or not Karen is in cahoots, her identity also being revealed by an NPC you can interact with in the ancient Roman town.
The game later on tries to be more self-aware but is just virtue signaling and snide as it tries to make a joke about how republicans handled the COVID-19 pandemic when you're talking to an NPC. As if barring all children from going outside, making friends, and attending school didn't shunt their mental growth, education, and communication skills when we look at how the other political party decided to handle it.
The game tries to go for mystique and moral ambiguity, but hardly ever discusses the complexities of morality, and much of its initial mystique was ruined far too early, either with astute observations or with certain dialogue options that were available too early, or just by choosing the 'soldier' background and immediately shooting the first NPC you see, and then shooting the next NPC who you see running towards you where the game ends and you've technically beaten it within five minutes. This is problematic, as making an ending so easily discoverable by having a "shoot first" playstyle means that you've discovered an integral NPC tied to the game's plot, although this is still canonically considered a 'bad ending,' but it ruins part of the mystery. You also conveniently arrive just in time during an election to vote for the town's next mayor or whatever the ancient Romans called it. Despite being the newest arrival to this town where people have seemingly lived for years longer than you, you get to vote day-one without needing to first become recognized as an official citizen, and none of the NPCs express any sort of issue with that which is highly unrealistic.
There's just this rush that the game deploys to guiding players to its secret. You are excited to do some detective work until you talk to an NPC and they just outright admit, "oh, I found some ancient magical text that I somehow understood and so I performed a ritual." It's overall very anti-climactic and trips over itself as it tries to outdo the actual clever aspects of the game's story instead of simply just stopping there and filling in the rest. Not only this, but you meet many other NPCs within the first thirty minutes or so who all have a similar backstory to your own character once you ask about it. Some are happy to stay while others wish to leave but are trapped there like yourself, and I was happy to just be done with the game, mostly confused about how it is regarded as highly rated as it is.
Kudos to the developers for turning a Skyrim mod into a standalone game, though. But much like the engine it was originally created on, animations and facial expressions are stiff, movement is stiff, and it still looks like and plays as a Skyrim mod.
