Forbidden Solitaire
While the first-person pacing of the ageing role-player, Dungeon Master comes to mind in Forbidden Solitaire’s gory world of pixelated monsters and grimy chambers, the narrative concept of a cursed CD-ROM game echoing its evil throughout time is much more like Inscryption. Coupling these distant influences with the same card-driven gameplay powering Grey Alien Games’ own Shadowhand and Ancient Enemy, results in a familiar mix of genres, albeit one that clearly favours storytelling and atmospheric immersion over mechanical depth.
The story begins when players boot up the eponymous disc (unearthed from a flea market bargain bin, of course) to experience a first-person puzzle adventure which starts behaving strangely. It’s not long from there that your sister Emily begins messaging you research about the game you’re playing — a lost relic with links to mysterious deaths and the equally mysterious people who created it.
If you’ve played something like Shadowhand before, you’ll know exactly what mechanics to expect. Players navigate rooms in underground dungeons featuring horrible creatures and weird happenings. But whether it’s an encounter focusing on combat or something more mundane like searching for a hidden door, players solve them by completing a solitaire card puzzle. Various special powers and other bonuses help players overcome the luck factor such puzzles normally involve, but even then, Forbidden Solitaire is lightweight and saves whatever complexities it has for the story.
While the solitaire portions aren’t particularly fun in isolation, the achievements are a definite highlight. The various luck and knowledge-based challenges here do well to keep players engaged, as they figure out how to satisfy certain card combos and damage targets with their expanding suite of special spells and joker cards. The shop menu offers an illusion of choice, but it does create a decent sense of progression before the random card draws become gimmicked in the player’s favour.
I find this design awkward later into the game because while Forbidden Solitaire is sometimes overly easy, it also doesn’t need to be harder because of how luck-based it would risk feeling otherwise. Although, there are some late game encounters featuring dense card stacks which get annoying if the best jokers fail to appear quickly. A New Game+ option was also recently patched in to harden the campaign for returning players, so maybe I’m dead wrong and making everything harder is a valuable idea after all!
Ineffective as its jump scares may be, Forbidden Solitaire certainly does have a charming low-fi aesthetic. The audio log voice acting is good — the voice actress for Shannon puts in an especially good performance — because it infuses the story with a welcome sense of character. Before chapter 4, players are treated to intriguing twists plus some terrifying creeps who chase you around the dungeon. Other moments featuring a “protest” video and a faux documentary featurette hint at some genuinely fun stuff that mostly disappears following the opening chapters. Thus does the back half of the game feel weaker with its comparatively dull crystal enemies and gloomy environments. It’s around then that the story becomes an incoherent mess, so it’s fortunate the initial campaign only lasts about 6 hours.
The game does have a genuine sense of indie charm. Fans will love the making-of materials that completing the game bestows, as they’re full of quirky insider notes and behind the scenes stills of the (real) developers getting into the twisted spirit of things. And if you’re the sort of player whose easily won over by early computer game nostalgia, Forbidden Solitaire will be a much easier sell. But the tricks it pulls aren’t as original as they used to be, so Inscryption remains a much better pick if you’re looking for something similar albeit with loads more long-term depth and gameplay appeal.
Forbidden Solitaire on Steam »
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