If I were presented with the opportunity to purchase and place into my disk drive a very obviously cursed CD from 1995 I would simply not do so. This is, of course, what sets me apart from the protagonist of Forbidden Solitaire, a person who would put a cursed disk into their computer and pay the requisite karmic price. (What we have in common is that our PCs still have a disk drive.)
Forbidden Solitaire bills itself as a “card-slashing horror game” set in a “90’s FMV-inspired digital hellscape of dungeons and death” and yeah, that means you’ll be playing lots of Solitaire. Which is a good combo because it’s by Grey Alien Games, developer of some quite fun solitaire-based games—like Ancient Enemy and Regency Solitaire—as well as spooky call center horror game Home Safety Hotline. Two things they’re already good at, combined.
“It’s 2019. You brought home a strange yet familiar 1995 CD-ROM game from the thrift store. You vaguely remember seeing ads for this game, and some kind of controversy, but you never got the chance to play it. Until now,” reads the developer’s description.
The trailer really gets the compression and 256-color-mode of mid-90s FMV on your computer. This was exactly what you’d expect in a Command and Conquer cutscene, for example, and it makes the whole thing have the appeal of a “long-forgotten” game around which some controversy formed and then quickly boiled away. Hopefully the game includes more of that metagame moral panic story in addition to the secret truth behind it. The secret truth being in this case, I guess, that the game is going to murder you.
Grey Alien Games says a run of Forbidden Solitaire will take 120–180 minutes, over which you’ll purchase upgrades from the “friendly eye that watches you from the walls” and unlock “a variety of game-changing Jokers” like this is some kind of horror Balatro. You can find Forbidden Solitaire on Steam, where it’s “coming soon”—though you’re already encouraged to “uninstall the game before it’s too late.”
