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Tech

'​Forbidden Forest' Is the Best Early Survival Horror Game You've Never Played

You’re in the woods, alone, with a moon high up, dabbing the night’s sky and slowly crawling along the stars.
Image: YouTube

You're in the woods, alone, with a moon high up, dabbing the night's sky and slowly crawling along the stars. You have your bow and a limit of arrows. You will face giant insects, spiders, amphibians, dragons, skeletons, demons, and the undead. Your survival from dusk till dawn is scored by a hymn of ominous tones and dread. This isn't Bloodborne, Silent Hill or Resident Evil. Forbidden Forest predates them by decades.

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It also has a little dance your archer does when you win, but that's besides the point.

Before releasing Forbidden Forest in 1983, Paul Norman was a studio musician, which explains why the music is so overwhelming and dizzying compared to many other simplistic, or even grating, Commodore 64 tunes. Norman originally developed the game for a small studio called Synchro, which began to go out of business by the time he designed the fourth monster. Ignoring the fire sale going on around him, Norman continued to work on the game as if nothing was wrong. When members of another company, Cosmi, came by to purchase the remaining furniture, they saw Norman working on Forbidden Forest and decided to buy him too.

"When I previewed Forest at the first meeting, there was an audible gasp when the little archer started running," said Norman to fansite C64. "My simple trick of moving two sprite trees a little slower in the background to simulate 3D seemed to be effective. They also liked the blood splatter. These elements seemed natural and necessary to me so I was surprised to hear that such things were state-of-the-art at the time."

Don't let those spiders get you! Image: YouTube

The game is one of the earliest horror games released, being just edged out by Atari's Haunted House and Malcom Evans' 3D Monster Maze in 1982. But Forbidden Forest has a lot of elements that those two games don't really carry: atmosphere, weight, and influence. Even if Japanese 8-bit fright night Sweet Home and the legendary Lovecraftian Alone in the Dark are often cited to be the origins of the survival horror genre, it's stunning to see what sort of basic ideas are established in a game that dropped years before them.

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For a game that's based around the premise of "shoot the spooky monsters with an arrow," it gives you a lot to think about at any moment. Depending on the difficulty you choose, you won't only have limited arrows, but the need to aim their vertical range and keep, or more accurately find, distance between yourself and the armies of the damned.

One of the biggest challenges in Forbidden Forest isn't strictly landing your arrows. This will ring very true of modern survival horror fans, but the time you have to give yourself to reload is a calculated trial in itself. There is a feeling you have to develop for different enemies on when you have a window to reach for another arrow, often watching as a large spider becomes incredibly close to your vulnerable, pixelated form.

Each enemy has its own thing. Spiders crawl from the fringes of your vision. Bees zip around erratically. Frogs fall from the skies in legions like a plague, or just a scene from Magnolia. Dragons go for fly-by fire strikes and a pale grim reaper chooses to order its deathly minions to flank you.

The game is also incredibly cinematic for the time. The environment is more detailed compared to most Commodore 64 titles, which were usually pretty pragmatic with what needed to be represented. There are fall trees and wells. A full moon whose craters resemble a glowing skull watching over you. When you die, you die dramatically. The deaths are long, and bloody, watching your archer fail and suffer, not unlike watching Leon Kennedy get a slow chainsaw to the shoulder.

"When I started up Forbidden Forest," said Norman in that same interview, "I at first let the archer stand there and get killed by a spider. (Cosmi) Foreman Bill burst out with a shocked laugh when he saw the blood splatter. Score one."

A great horror game is one of the most sublime things to play, with a smothering atmosphere that keeps you in a heightened state, fear, dread, adrenaline. The modern one may utilize contemporary hardware to process the most vivid nightmares and snarling beasts, but you'd be stunned to see what can be done with a few pixels, some arrows, and the paranoia of being smooshed by a frog.