2026 has seen an unexpected indie success, due to the fact that it’s an extremely unexpected team up. On one hand, you have Grey Alien Games, long time grinders of the solitaire genre, most known by you HG101 readers as the creators of Shadowhand. On the other, we have Night Signal Entertainment, a newcomer created by a former actor for the Evermore theme park that made some waves with Home Safety Hotline, combining a mixed media approach and analog horror techniques to make a unique and tongue in cheek horror experience. This is not a combination of talents you’d ever expect, and yet it happen, and quickly cleared 10,000 copies sold in just 48 hours.
What’s so unique about this is that the end result, Forbidden Solitaire, is basically a near perfect mash up of each studio’s given talents. Grey Alien Games created the core, studio founder Jake Birkett as the game’s producer, another solid solitaire experience from a very experienced team. The dressing around it, however, comes from Night Signal Entertainment, creating additional mixed media, audio clips, and directed scenes that mimic and parody TV and media of the 90s. They also use very familiar meta story telling techniques players of their last game will instantly recognize, down to everything taking place via a computer desktop.
The game takes place in 2019, where a young man named Will Roberta has found a copy of Forbidden Solitaire, a game that was quickly banned upon its original release for graphic content, despite it being, to use the words of one concerned citizen in a news clip, “f**cking solitaire.” As he plays it to see what the big deal was, his sister keeps chiming in with background details she’s digging up – including less reported and far more serious controversies surrounding it. And then the game glitches start, and things start getting very analog horror.
As a horror experience, Forbidden Solitaire isn’t anything new. It’s doing similar tricks that we’ve seen from the likes of Pony Island and other meta gaming experiences. Thankfully, it’s not trying to be a proper horror experience. Just like Home Safety Hotline, there’s a goofy side to it, an element of whimsy that comes from looking at the past and poking fun at it, creating charming and amusing slices of the 90s that make the game feel almost like a full blown parody of the meta game genre – only for it to use that whimsy to pull out the rug here and there and throw out an idea that seems genuinely unnerving. It’s doing a tightrope balancing act with the tone and pulls it off in the three to four hour run time confidently, knowing what to take seriously, what to goof on, and knowing how to knock around your expectations and sell a moment.
As a game, it’s a very familiar time to anyone familiar with Shadowhand, Ancient Enemy, or the Regency Solitaire series. The game is set up in a collection of linear levels, with the main type of levels being puzzle ones. For these, just clear the field of cards, selecting cards one less or more to your current one, using jokers and magic skills when necessary. The former can be picked up as you play, the latter charge with a mana pool that grows as you play and make combos. Some gimmicks come up to shake things up, and several are unique to this game, like exploding maggots on cards, or spotlight levels that require you not bring too much attention to your card pick ups.
The battles are especially unique, though. They’re built on the foundation of Shadowhand, but the RPG equipment system has been scrapped. Instead, you buy gems from an eyeball in the wall that you carve into your hand in hideous fashion in order to get passive abilities, as you would in any other, completely normal solitaire game. To spice things up, enemies get their own set of attacks, including ones that don’t damage you but instead litter the field of cards with hazards you have to deal with. Their damaging attacks also get variety with not only damage output but additional effects, and they even get moves that can heal or set up defenses. You need to check their side of the screen to see what they’ll do once you end your turn and react accordingly, along with making combos and clearing the field. It ends up becoming quite hectic towards the end, matched by your absurd level of passives and power.
Dressing all this up is a very fun retro aesthetic, using early CG animations and stills in visual novel sections between levels. The prose of these scenes is dripping with flavor of a dark fantasy adventure, backed by solid sound design and music that creates a grim mood, while not straying away too far from what was technically possible in the mid-90s. They even manage to use these graphics for genuine horror at moments, using the uncanny nature of the limited tech to create some grotesque creatures and really selling some nasty body horror through the extra layer of abstraction. The fact this occasionally gets interrupted by minimalist desktop windows when your sister pops in to give updates just adds to the atmosphere and story being told around the game within the game.
Special note must be made to the game’s sense of history for the video game medium and the industry around it. The story being told will feel very familiar for a lot of you, if not just for the crunch angle, but also for the Peter Molyneux styled studio head central to the events playing out, and the exploration of outrage at violence in games. As things escalate, even with the pretty out there mystery at the core, this foundation based around the realities of game development, how the world reacted to the medium’s growth, and the questionable figures central to the industry we deal with now is very much appreciated.
This is a pretty short game, so you want a more substantial solitaire experience, Grey Alien Games have plenty of other titles they’ve both developed and published to look at (the Jewel Match Solitaire series comes especially recommended), but this one is very unique and well worth the short time investment to experience. With a recent update allowing for level replay, there’s more bang for your buck, asking at a reasonable $16 US as of writing. Go in blind if you’re interested, and get ready for a fun and spooky time.
