My teenage years were spent in the 1990s – a time of shell suits, Furbies and taking care of my little digital chum in my Tamagotchi. It was also the era of the PC evolving into what we have today. Gaming was becoming a much more present pastime on PC, and, of course, the internet made its presence known with the possibility of online multiplayer with Unreal Tournament and Quake III.
Floppy discs were also fading out – with shiny CD-ROMs replacing them. Able to hold much more data and with the promise of accessing the information much more quickly, it wasn’t long before it was the format of choice. Encyclopaedias, educational material, and interactive atlases were all the rage, but it was the games that really benefited, as they gave us the chance to play games with full-motion video.
With my history lesson finished, this is where Forbidden Solitaire steps in. Based on these mid-90s, low-poly, CD-ROM games that were just starting to explore what was possible, this particular fictional relic from the past has been banned from sale thanks to mysterious deaths and controversies surrounding it.
The game is set in 2019. Will finds a random copy of Forbidden Solitaire in their local charity (thrift) shop and rushes home to tell their sister over instant messaging and to boot up the game to see what all the fuss was about from back in the day. Shown from Will’s viewpoint, we start the game looking at their PC desktop. It’s up to you to boot up the game, and once you do, you are greeted with a glorious DOS boot-up screen, perfectly timed machine whirring and some of the most sublime cheesy graphics you could ask for.
Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment have done an incredible job with the visuals of the game. They have managed to perfectly capture this time in video games, down to the minute detail. I let out a cheer seeing character models with barely any detail flash across the screen in all their glory, and this kind of serious cheese carries through the game, mashing against the horror in a way that never felt jarring.
The main gameplay revolves around an old-school text adventure game partnered with these surreal visuals. Forbidden Solitaire starts at the door of a medieval fortress. As you start to explore, you will eventually come to a time where playing solitaire is the only way you can advance, either from moving an obstacle in your way, to revealing secrets or to defeating many of the horrors that live in this forsaken place.
If you’ve ever played a solitaire game, then you will know the drill. Hit randomly placed cards, some face up and some face down, in numerical order to clear the board and progress. Thankfully, it’s a bit more evolved here, as you’ll play standard solitaire when exploring the fortress, but things change up drastically when you have to battle one of the many strange creatures that you will come across on your journey.
In these battles, for every card you send to your deck pile, you will add one point of damage to your total. Once that turn is ended, those points get taken from your opponent’s health. Joker cards play a pivotal role in your success by giving you the ability to pull the battle in your favour. Some examples of these are shuffling all the cards, doubling your damage to my favourite, and cloning a selected joker card. If you play the right jokers at the right time, sometimes stacking them in one move, you could deal some serious damage. There are also other cards that are randomly placed on the board that can deal direct damage, give you points of armour or help to increase your mana total, which allows you to strike up to four cards with lightning bolts when you hit a total of 40 mana points.
Also on offer to aid you are jewel stones that you can buy from the merchant before every battle. Implanted straight into the back of your hand, fingers and nails, these will give you many perks, including raising your health, powering up the mana strike and so on. You can also buy new joker cards through the merchant. Throughout my playthrough, I almost always had the cash (which you earn just from playing solitaire) for whatever jewel or joker that was on offer, but on the times that I didn’t, it did not take me long to raise the cash to purchase it on the next opportunity.
Of course your opponents will throw everything they have to defeat you. Different enemies will have different abilities, but they mostly strike you directly with a weapon or inflict a hazard onto certain cards with the aim to either stop you from using those cards, damage your health by selecting them or just make it harder for you to choose certain cards. A highlight was trying to sneak past a gruesome creature by selecting cards that were outside of its vision cone.
While all of this is happening, you’re constantly interrupted by Emily, Will’s sister, sending you instant messages as she starts to dig into the history of the game and its inspirations. Emily will send superbly cheesy-acted videos, detailed pictures and articles, breaking you out of the game and sending you back to the ‘real world’. Always a clever hook, these work well in reminding you that you are playing a game within a game.
There’s also another narrative happening at the same time, based solely on Shannon, someone who works for a struggling game studio with the aim of telling you how Forbidden Solitaire ended up on game shelves. These are just voice-acted with subtitles on screen as you play, popping up randomly and including conversations between Shannon and her boss detailing the failings of the studio and how Forbidden Solitaire could save the company.
Out of the two narratives, this one didn’t quite gel with me as much as Will’s and Emily’s. Although it was interesting to learn more about Forbidden Solitaire, it was never explained how I was hearing these conversations. Were they part of the game? Were they being broadcast somehow as Will played the game? I would have liked some more context on this, as, as it stands, it felt a little out of place.
I would have also liked to have known Will a little more too. I never felt properly connected to him as I played. There were no interactions from him, nor did he ever speak with only limited messages to Emily. This fed into the action, as I never felt the urgency or peril to protect him through the game’s horrors that it threw at me.
I would also have liked to see an accessibility option to address the game’s text. As it stands, it fits the low-poly, CD-ROM filter, but with this and with the chosen font, I feel like many will struggle to read the text or get turned off altogether, which would be a shame. A simple plain text option would really make this more appealing to more people.
But ending on a positive note, one of the game’s strongest elements is in its atmosphere, which is aided by the wonderful writing and sound. The writing throughout painted such a deeply woven narrative, giving depth to the situations you faced and to the environments you ended up in. The sound design was also surreal, creepy and raised the vibes perfectly to make you feel like you were in some kind of fever dream. The voice acting between Shannon and her boss was also nicely acted out.
