Forbidden Solitaire is my new favourite solitaire game. That’s it, job done. Bye.
I find that increasingly specific Venn diagrams of genres and aesthetics are where some of the best games exist, and Forbidden Solitaire fits the bill. We play as a character in the present day, finding a copy of a mid-90’s game that was controversial at the time called Forbidden Solitaire. We load it up and start playing. As we play, we get messages from our family member, who is initially excited that you found the rarity, but upon researching its rarity, discovers that the studio behind it was involved in all kinds of occult craziness. That means we play the retro game whilst having text conversations and being sent newspaper cuttings and campy video footage of TV segments and interviews. It all comes together in an increasingly warped way, with a satisfying ending depending on a few final in-game choices you make.
Playing Forbidden Solitaire is like diving back to 256-colour CDROM games from the PC era. The game’s linear story is told through Myst-like screen stills of blocky, gruesome monsters and a lot of red blood. There’s no player choice, but every few screens you’ll be pulled into one of two types of solitaire game. The first is when you need to complete an environmental challenge, and this involves clearing the playing area of cards. It’s traditional solitaire, so you’ll have a card with a number/royal rank on and you’ll need to move up or down one rank to clear the playing area. Your hand is full of cards for when you get stuck, and if you clear the playing area before your hand runs out, you’ll win. The second type of game follows the same principles but places you in a battle against a monster. Here, each card removed from the playing area acts as attack damage, so long chains are immediately rewarded. Monsters will have pre-programmed moves on a loop to either attack you back, drain your mana, or steal your jokers. They can also curse, poison, or infest the playing cards with all kinds of nasties that alter the card’s value or state. Often, that means damage to you. When in battle, you’ll also see skull and shield cards for causing extra damage or protecting yourself for a single turn. It feels very RPG-like.
The battles are superbly balanced because, alongside generating mana to unleash a manastorm that blasts cards off the screen, you’ll unlock around 30 jokers to use. You can hold three or four of them at once, and they all do interesting things. ‘Nudge’ lets you bump up the value of a playable card by one rank. Another has a raven fly in and claw away two random cards. Another sacrifices mana for health. Others let you line up the same suits or create a flush so you can build long combos. When paired up with a joker that allows you to refresh your playing cards at your will, you can chain up some wicked combos. I appreciated how you could layer jokers back to back for big, powerful chains of moves. There’s even a joker to clone existing ones, helpful for late-stage bosses who can one-hit kill you if you don’t have a 99 shield handy. The monsters’ curse cards in interesting ways, too. Maggots will cause damage to the player. Vines will capture cards and require breaking with nearby moves. There are also glitched jokers that may give your bonus to your opponent as well! It’s all well done, and with a scoring system that allows you to buy gems that make each move more powerful over time, all the gameplay mechanics are expertly crafted and integrated into each other.
If you are not a fan of horror games, there is a setting to turn off jump scares. Instead, they fade in, which I appreciated, as I still got the full story and experience. My playthrough took five hours, and since my video review yesterday, the developer has already added a New Game + mode that lets you toggle specific levels on or off, or attempt the game with finite lives. Each level is procedurally generated in terms of where the cards are sorted, but the card layouts and bosses are structured. That means luck plays a role, but a much smaller role than player skill. My only minor quibble is that the FMV additions are quite sparse, considering a lot of the marketing heavily emphasised this element. What’s here is great. I just thought there would be a little bit more of it.
Forbidden Solitaire is my favourite solitaire game because all the bells and whistles added on top make complete sense and are fully integrated and layered into the fundamental design of solitaire. All too often, games try to improve on a tried and tested formula but fail to make the new additions worthwhile or as compelling as the base idea. Grey Alien Games has made an exception to this rule. This is my favourite version of solitaire yet.
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