In January of 1991 a younger me was browsing the fourth issue of Commodore Format, a monthly publication about everything new in the world of Commodore 64. We had picked up the machine quite late in its life, and I’d eventually discover that it was first introduced to the world in the early 80s, at a time when the idea of magazines with covermounted demos and games seemed absurd. Right now, however, I didn’t know any better – I didn’t know that the C64 was old enough for people to be giving games away as covermounts. All I was concerned with in 1991 was the latest batch of freebies, which included the Cosmi-published Paul Norman game “Beyond the Forbidden Forest”.
Clunky yet ambitious
It’s hard to define exactly what it was about the game that gave it such a creepy atmosphere, but it remains one of my earliest and most vivid memories of a new kind of gaming experience; one where you were in a hostile environment with limited resources – where you didn’t know when one of the forest’s creatures would spring out at you. It was one of the most ambitious games I had seen at the time – the forest scaled your character as you moved in and out of the forest, creating an impressive illusion of depth. Trees scrolled in front and behind your character and the creatures, amplifying the sensation of being in this dense woodland. In order to handle combat in this complex world, Beyond The Forbidden Forest allowed you to fire arrows by holding down the joystick’s fire button and releasing it once a pair of grey bars in the border had risen or lowered to the correct elevation. It was almost ambitious to the point of being clunky and cumbersome, because when you’re being chased by an angry scorpion you don’t want to spend too much time fussing with the “depth” of the character in the forest or the elevation of your arrows. However, this almost feels intentional – if you’re actually in the middle of a forest and being hunted by a huge dragonfly or that scorpion, you’re not going to calmly draw your bow and eliminate them; you’re going to panic, mess up your aim, and try to run away.
Ultimately, your goal in Beyond the Forbidden Forest was to collect golden arrows and gain entry to some kind of underground lair, but I’m not sure if I ever made it that far. The combination of awkward controls and a sense of isolation made it an impressively unnerving experience, and the presentation during combat only made things creepier. A new music track would play when you ran into a monster, immediately removing any false sense of security you may have had moments before. Some of the enemies’ awkward animations just made things worse when you had to see a scorpion juddering towards you. Then, of course, there was the “death” music – piercing bleeps that repeated again and again as your character was being torn apart, like some eight-bit equivalent of the music in the shower scene of “Psycho”. Okay, maybe that’s a bit too far.
Beyond the Forbidden Forest and other games
What became of Forbidden Forest after this? A quick bit of searching reveals that there was actually a Windows sequel released in 2003 (something I only discovered whilst I was putting this article together), and the internet archive ( archive.org ) appears to have a playable browser version of the original available to try. Of the games I’ve covered on this site during previous Halloweens, this remains one of the most unsettling ones. It’s more atmospheric than Nightmare in the Dark, and the sense of danger is more frequent than in P3. Whilst the name Forbidden Forest has been lost to time, a lot of modern games still carry the familiar themes that are found here – a large, hostile environment with intimidating enemy encounters and an elaborate control system that required mastery. It might not be the first name that comes to mind when you’re browsing gaming articles during Halloween, but even some of your Makaimuras and Castlevanias would struggle to match its unique atmosphere…