Started playing
The Forgotten City. Apparently it started off as a skyrim mod and has been reworked into a standalone game. Basically, you wake up by the side of the Tiber River in Italy and a woman asks you to find her friend in the nearby ruins. When you do so you find yourself trapped in an underground roman city full of creepy gold statues and find a time portal to the past, arriving in the Roman Empire during the Reign of Nero. The city is much less ruined and people are living there but still filled with gold statues, and you soon find out that the everyone there is trapped in the city, unable to leave. There's also a special condition called The Golden Rule that posits that if ANYONE in the city breaks the law, everyone will die and be turned into gold statues(it's implied this has happened numerous times before, since the city is centuries old but the current two dozen inhabitants have only been there for a few years at best). When the law is broken and the golden rule is invoked, a portal is open that flings you back in time to when you first get there to try again and your goal to prevent the rule from being invoked which presumably will send you back to present day.
It plays out as a mystery of figuring out what causes the golden rule to be invoked and how to stop it, but also figuring out to exploit the time loop to figure out what's going on and how to get what you what. It's made clear pretty quick a lot of these people arrived the same way you did, though only you seem to be from the future(you can tell certain people you are, which leads to a variety of reactions, especially trying describe "memes" to someone and they're response is "Oh, so they're like Egyptian Hieroglyphs?") . A lot of people don't really get along with each other, forced to tolerate because of the golden rule and more disturbing, some people were more or less pressed into roles because reasons. The city's closet thing to a doctor is a lady who knows some very basic medicine and before her was a midwife who was a little bit better at medicine but neither of them could be considered trained doctors by any stretch and the one woman flat out says she's not cut out for the job, she fell into it because nobody else really is either.
The fact it's unclear just what triggers the golden rule is also one of the mysteries. For example, One character is a christian(though quiet about it,since christians are being persecuted because of the great fire of Rome and officially considered a creepy cult by most) and considers suicide a sin, but when someone kills themselves it doesn't trigger the rule, so clearly self harm isn't considered an issue by whatever enforces the rule.
It's interesting and from what I can tell it's mostly about talking to people and trying to figure out how to stop problems before they occur, and you don't have to redo all the dialogue options with each character on every loop(early on you can pretty much tell someone who first greets you "I know about the rule. I'm good. You don't need to give me the tour again", which confuses him a bit but it saves you time). I've never played skyrim but I can totally see some of the skyrim jank still in there, such as every time you talk to someone and the weird Bethesda face thing going on. Early on you can walk along a path and be stopped by invisible walls keeping you on the path so you can go jump into the nearby river.
I did need something a little more chill after Katana Zero and Hyper Light Drifter and this seemed to be fairly relaxed for the moment(other then the constant threat of death hanging over everyone in the city). It's apparently fairly short so a nice little change of pace.
