Forbidden Solitaire: The Fake 90s Cursed CD-ROM Nailing 96% Positive Reviews
An indie horror game built around a fictional “cursed” 1995 CD-ROM has turned into one of 2026’s genuine word-of-mouth hits, and its central conceit — a lost, controversial piece of software rediscovered decades later — is landing at a moment when real game preservation is more than just a nostalgia trip. Forbidden Solitaire, released on Steam and GOG on April 30 by Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment, has racked up overwhelmingly positive reviews, with Steam recording it as “Overwhelmingly Positive” at 97% of 349 recent reviews and 96% of 1,850 all-time user reviews as of publication.
A Banned 1995 CD-ROM That Never Actually Existed
The game’s premise leans hard into a very specific strand of 1990s PC nostalgia. According to its own storefront description, players bring home a strange yet familiar 1995 CD-ROM game from a thrift store, vaguely remembering ads for it and some kind of controversy, but never having played it — until now. Wikipedia’s entry on the game, cross-checked against the developers’ own listings, notes that the central storyline focuses on the discovery of a controversial PC game from the 1990s, banned amid fears it contained Satanic themes that negatively impacted players.
Mechanically, the game splits into two solitaire modes layered under that horror framing. As Higher Plain Games’ review describes it, there’s no player choice beyond the cards, but every few screens you’re pulled into one of two solitaire types — an environmental challenge where you clear the playing area, or a battle where each removed card acts as attack damage against a monster. TV Tropes’ breakdown of the plot adds that the player character, Will Roberta, exchanges messages throughout with his sister Emily as he digs deeper into a PC game released in 1995 that attracted controversy for its graphic visuals and macabre story, while the pair uncover darker secrets in the game and its history.
Two Very Different Indie Studios, One Shared Playbook
Forbidden Solitaire pairs Grey Alien Games, the UK studio behind the Regency Solitaire series, with Night Signal Entertainment, maker of the cult analog-horror hit Home Safety Hotline. In an interview with independent outlet Aftermath, the partnership traces back a decade: Night Signal’s Nick Lives has said the studio’s whole business model was built around avoiding one big flop, explaining “one of the reasons we didn’t break out of our solitaire stuff was, we had an audience that was gonna buy that stuff regularly each time, and it was never gonna make us rich, but it would keep us going.”
That approach came out of hard experience. Aftermath’s reporting notes that Nick Lives and David Johnsen’s two-man operation emerged from the collapse of an earlier, larger studio, Deli Interactive, after a five-year passion project flopped immediately, with Lives admitting “I think it’s one of the lowest-performing games that we’ve made. We were in trouble very fast.” Pitching Grey Alien on a joint solitaire-horror project became the more sustainable path forward, and per Aftermath, the collaboration has “easily exceeded their very modest goals, enough to seriously consider a sequel,” both studios said.
A Metascore of 85 and a Content Warning That Isn’t Marketing Fluff
Critical reception has backed up the player numbers. Aggregator GG.deals reports a Metascore of 85 from critics’ reviews, alongside an OpenCritic “Strong” rating with an 83 Top Critic Average and 86% of critics recommending the game. Steam’s own quote block cites endorsements from PC Gamer, Polygon and a five-star write-up from The Guardian’s Keith Stuart, whose review ran under the headline “Forbidden Solitaire review – cards flip into delirious trip back to 90s horror.”
The game isn’t shy about its darker material either. Its own storefront flags frequent violence, blood and gore, depictions of suicide and strong language, with a full content warning document available under the game’s guides section. That warning sits alongside a surprisingly playful post-launch life: Steam’s community hub shows the developers pushed a free, 50-plus-page digital art book called “Forbidden Solitaire: The Making Of,” packed with behind-the-scenes detail on building a horror game with a few props, the internet and nostalgia, unlockable once players finish the story.
Why a Fake Lost CD-ROM Resonates With Real Archivists
Forbidden Solitaire‘s fiction — a physical disc rescued from a thrift store, its history reconstructed piece by piece — mirrors work that real preservation groups have been doing for decades, just without the supernatural stakes. World of Spectrum, the long-running archive for Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum computer, states its own goal is “to create a full historical archive for the ZX Spectrum, its hardware, software, magazines, books and the industry that created it all, as a completely free museum,” having spent tens of thousands of hours cataloguing entries it wants to keep doing forever. Sister project Spectrum Computing runs on a similar ethos, describing itself as “dedicated to maintaining a freely accessible archive of software created for the Sinclair range of computers,” operating without commercial intent.
That real preservation infrastructure exists precisely because so much 1980s and 1990s software has already been lost to decaying tapes, dead publishers and unsupported formats — the exact anxiety Forbidden Solitaire turns into horror-game texture. For Australian and New Zealand players who grew up importing Spectrum, Amiga or early CD-ROM titles, or who still keep an old machine in the garage, the game’s premise of a disc nobody quite remembers properly will likely land closer to memoir than metaphor.
New Game+ Landed Fast, and a Sequel Is on the Table
Grey Alien and Night Signal haven’t treated launch as the finish line. Steam’s community update log confirms the team shipped a New Game+ mode in a V1.02 patch not long after release, letting players who have already beaten the game replay any level and adjust various settings from the title screen, with a harder NG+ difficulty flagged as a planned follow-up. Higher Plain Games’ review, published the day after the update, noted that its five-hour playthrough was capped off by the developer already adding a New Game+ mode that lets you toggle specific levels on or off, or attempt the game with finite lives, just a day after its video review went live.
With Aftermath reporting that both studios are weighing a sequel off the back of the collaboration’s success, Forbidden Solitaire looks less like a one-off curiosity and more like the start of a recurring franchise built on exactly the kind of scrappy, format-blending experimentation that made its fictional cursed CD-ROM feel so believable in the first place.
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