Forbidden Solitaire

★★★★⯪

Forbidden Solitaire presents itself as an over-the-top gory horror dungeon crawl from the 1990s where the mechanic is playing card games to fight monsters. But it’s framed as a flashback: you’ve found an old CD-ROM of a forgotten (and rumored to be cursed) video game. As you play through it, your sister sends you messages about how she’s found old news articles, video clips, and more revealing a rash of creepy deaths (all with missing eyes) connected to the game, including its lead developer’s suicide.

It nails the esthetic of 1990s pixellated gore, fitting right in with the Catacomb Abyss-to-Doom look with a side of The 7th Guest. (That reminds me, I need to dig out that soundtrack again.)

The playing mechanic is fairly simple: each encounter is a new solitaire layout, monsters can lock or alter cards for the worse, and you can use joker cards for various effects like healing, clearing extra cards, reshuffling and so on. It’s easy to pick up the house rules, and fun to play through.

The framing story is suitably creepy, building tension as you learn more of the backstory and piece together what’s really going on with some of the apparent glitches in the dungeon game. Your sister’s texts start out amused (hey, check out this weird thing about the game), but get more and more freaked out as she uncovers more of the lore and you aren’t replying…until you reach the end of the dungeon game and face the real boss battle.

It took about 5 hours to play through over the course of a week.

And I made it out with my eyes intact.