Created by Paul Norman for Cosmi Corporation, Forbidden Forest is a legendary survival horror game from 1983 in which you play an archer trying to avoid attacks from a variety of hostile creatures inside a sprawling forest.

The aim is to shoot arrows at anything moving in the forest, and to hopefully hit whatever it is that’s coming for you, before it gets you.

When you’ve shot the required quota of enemies the stage ends and the archer does a strange little dance, before continuing on to the next stage and another wave of different attackers.

Eventually you’ll have to face the evil ‘Demogorgon‘, which is a huge bull-like boss that towers above the forest as lightning flashes around it. The Demogorgon only has one weak spot, which you have to discover for yourself, and also shoot it within a limited period of time, to defeat it.

Two things that are important to note: firstly, the archer only has a limited number of arrows in total, so you can run out (basically condemning yourself to death); and the archer must ‘re-load’ another arrow after firing one, which can be tricky as he cannot move during this two or three second procedure. So not only do you have to be careful with your arrow use, but you also have to choose the moment to re-load carefully.

Graphically, Forbidden Forest hasn’t aged particularly well, but it does have some some nice touches that are worth pointing out, like the parallax scrolling of the backgrounds as you move left and right; the twinkling stars, and the cycle of day and night, which really adds to the spooky atmosphere.

Playing Forbidden Forest now is a mixed bag. On the one hand it is clunky and frustrating (at least until you get the hang of it), but on the other hand it is still quite absorbing, and also still very atmospheric.

Forbidden Forest was published in Europe by US Gold and is still held in high regard by those who played it back in the ’80s. A sequel, Beyond the Forbidden Forest, was created by Norman and published by Cosmi/US Gold in 1986, and is considered to be superior to this game. A remake of Forbidden Forest was also released for Windows in 2003.

More: Forbidden Forest on Wikipedia
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