Forbidden Solitaire: The Year's Best-Rated FMV Horror Is a Card Game

Here is a number that should interest anyone who makes interactive film. Forbidden Solitaire, released on April 30, 2026, has 2,320 Steam reviews and 97 percent of them are positive, which puts it in Steam’s “Overwhelmingly Positive” band. Very few games that players tag as FMV ever get there. And this one is, mechanically, a game of solitaire.

The premise

The fiction is the hook. It is 2019, and you have brought home a strange CD-ROM from a thrift store: a 1995 card game you half remember from magazine adverts, and from “some kind of controversy”. You install it. The rest of the game is what that disc does to you.

It comes from a precise pairing. Night Signal Entertainment, the team behind Home Safety Hotline, handles the story, visuals and music. Grey Alien Games, veterans of Shadowhand and Regency Solitaire, builds the cards. One side knows how to fake a haunted piece of 1990s software. The other knows how to make clearing a tableau feel good for ten hours.

Why players call it FMV

Steam’s community ranks FMV among the game’s top tags, and the developers describe it as a “90’s FMV-inspired digital hellscape”. That wording is honest. You are not steering a filmed story through branching choices. The live action lives in the frame around the cards: the low-resolution video, the compressed faces, the feeling that somebody was filmed for this disc and that something went wrong on the shoot.

That is the lesson. For players under forty, early-90s video compression has become a horror texture in its own right, the way VHS tracking lines did a decade ago. Forbidden Solitaire uses FMV the way a found-footage film uses a camcorder, as proof that what you are seeing was real once.

What it says about the genre

Two things. First, FMV is now an aesthetic as well as a format, and the aesthetic travels into genres that have nothing to do with interactive movies. A card game can borrow it and be loved for it.

Second, the games with the healthiest ratings in our FMV Directory tend to pair filmed material with a mechanic that stands on its own. Her Story had the search box. Immortality had the match cut. This has solitaire with blood on it. Productions that spend everything on the shoot and leave the player with a binary choice every four minutes are competing with Netflix. Games like this are competing with nobody.

Forbidden Solitaire is out now on Steam for Windows.