Beyond the Forbidden Forest is the 1986 sequel to 1983’s classic 8-bit survival horror game, Forbidden Forest. It was again devised and programmed by Paul Norman, and published by Cosmi Corporation in North America and US Gold in Europe.

This sequel uses a technique called “OmniDimension 4D“, which is basically marketing bollocks for “being able to walk into the screen, as well as left and right“, which was not possible in the first game.

The gameplay in Beyond the Forbidden Forest is very similar to the first game. You’re an archer – this time with unlimited regular arrows – who must shoot waves of hostile creatures in order to earn a stock of golden arrows, with which you can then use to kill the final boss, the returning “Demogorgon“, who has only one weak point.

In this game you’re up against giant worms, scorpions, mosquitos, swarms of bats, a multi-headed hydra, and various other gruesome monsters. You’re supposed to shoot a certain quota per round, and also to avoid being killed or eaten by them. If anything hostile touches you, or shoots you with a projectile, you’ll lose a life and half the stock of your golden arrows.

Unlike in the previous game, this time you have to hold down the fire button to adjust the height of your shots, and an indicator at the side of the screen once again gives you an idea of where your arrows are going. This change unfortunately makes firing at enemies frustratingly difficult and it takes some practise to the get the hang of. Invariably, though, if you do hit a target you’ll probably do it by accident…

Even worse is that, every time you’re killed (which is often), you have to sit through an interminably long sequence (either a resurrection animation or a game over screen) that you cannot skip by, and this – to me – is a bit of game-killer.

While Beyond the Forbidden Forest is more varied than its predecessor, and does have a creepy atmosphere, it is hamstrung by these un-skippable cut scenes. Also: when you begin a game, for some reason you have to press the Commodore key (the Tab key in WinVICE) to make monsters appear, which isn’t said on-screen and which I discovered by accident. If you don’t do this you’ll be walking around an empty forest until you become bored and switch the computer/emulator off…

Beyond the Forbidden Forest is a frustrating experience. While I wanted to like it, I just could not get on with the control system, and quickly became cheesed-off with the waiting times between lives. This game really could do with a ROM hack, to fix the many problems with it!

More: Beyond the Forbidden Forest on Moby Games
More: Beyond the Forbidden Forest on CSDb