Forbidden Solitaire

I’ve been playing a few more short games now and then, and Forbidden Solitaire was one of them! This was a game that I thought the aesthetic of and idea looked quite unique so I was pretty excited to pick it up and try. It wasn’t too long of a game, around 4 hours or so, and I enjoyed it a lot!

My favourite part of the game is probably how perfectly they nailed that 90s aesthetic of retro games. Everything from the way the game booted up, the retro esque FMVs, the environments, music, UI, you could easily convince someone this was a real game from that time period. I think they did an absolutely stellar job at nailing it, and I also really liked the real recordings they used too! The story was simple and straightforward but in a good way. I think the actors did a really good job conveying everything, and their deliveries were fantastic!

I also really liked them including a behind the scenes document, I thought it was pretty nifty! There were some interesting tidbits that I thought were interesting to learn about, like how they had to make all the videos gifs to play in the solitaire engine they used.

Now, if I had to levy some complaints, and I acknowledge this is likely a combination of a skill and personal issue, but I found that some of the solitaire levels tended to be a littttle too variant for me to like, and there was probably a few too many solitaire levels for me personally.

I found that the frequency of solitaire levels a bit too much, especially when it felt like there was a level for essentially every action. I would’ve preferred it personally if they had kept the solitaire sections for the more “intensive” actions instead of just “oh you walked down the hall”. Granted, given that the game and one of the studio’s whole thing is based on solitaire, I think it’s understandable but this is just a me thing. It does sound funny that I would like there to be less game in my game, but given that I like VNs, it’s probably not too surprising.

Overall I found the actual game part to be usually fair, except for some enemies that I felt required you to have a combo setup (aka they had high armor). I found those enemies to be a little tedious to fight, especially when you had to make sure you had ways to either pierce their armor or build up a long combo chain to do any damage at all. The upgrades and joker system was pretty good though.

With all that said, I did really like the game! I think the length was the perfect length, if it went any longer I likely would’ve been a bit more tired of it. I’m not the biggest solitaire guy but I enjoyed what I played in this one at least!