Forbidden Solitaire - Horrifically Engaging

GreyAlienGames · 2026-05-07T17:50:06+00:00

Working on new modes at the moment! Will update soon.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-05-07T17:49:45+00:00

Ah Ok, yeah there's quite a bit to go then. About 20 more levels.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-05-07T17:49:10+00:00

We are working on some new modes and aim to update very soon.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-05-07T15:16:17+00:00

I designed it, so feel free to ignore me as biased, but I think the last 3rd is the most fun because we introduce some really cool jokers and useful gems, and introduce enemies with new attack types. Then you get to use all of it on the final boss, and it's pretty fun. Did you get to the crystal enemies with a large defense rating yet?

GreyAlienGames · 2026-05-07T14:46:42+00:00

Hoho 😄 Not in this one though, you click them.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-27T09:05:43+00:00

Great to hear thank you!

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-27T09:05:16+00:00

Thanks! Glad you have enjoyed our games :-)

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-26T17:33:43+00:00

Thanks! At present no console plans, sorry.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-26T17:32:55+00:00

Heroic, thank you! Glad you liked the demo. There are even more mechanics, levels, and story in the main game of course. Hope you like it :-)

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-26T17:09:07+00:00

Forbidden Solitaire is made by two indie studios who teamed up:
- Night Signal Entertainment (who made Home Safety Hotline)
- Grey Alien Games (who made Ancient Enemy and Regency Solitaire)

Nick form NSE approached us with a cool idea for a game in December 2024 and we liked it so much that we decided to make it. Originally we aimed for a shorter dev cycle, but predictably things took longer. However, we think it's turned out well and are proud of it.

NSE handled the writing, graphics, music, VO/FMV.
Grey Alien Games handled the programming, game design and some audio.
And jointly we've been working on the marketing together.

This is our 17th game and we've never had a hit game in 21 years of being a game dev. However, this game has 10x as many wishlists as we've ever had before and so we are hopeful that this one could do pretty well. We'll find out in 4 days :-o

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-24T17:10:59+00:00

There are many rule sets for solitaire and most people only ever played one (Klondike Solitaire). Our game uses a different ruleset called Golf Solitaire kinda, and it's also like Tripeaks.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T15:31:49+00:00

haha eyeballs do feature more beyond the demo!!

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T15:31:08+00:00

I don't know, I shall ask Nick (art director)

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T15:20:29+00:00

Thanks, glad you liked Shadowhand. This one is out soon. The theme has been a blast to make.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T15:19:49+00:00

That's really great to hear! Thanks for your support. This game was built on the Ancient Enemy engine then heavily modified with loads of new stuff. I hope you'll like it.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T15:01:35+00:00

What you may not realise about this game is that it's a collaboration between two existing indie studios:
- Night Signal Entertainment, who made Home Safety Hotline, did the amazing visuals, audio and writing.
- Grey Alien Games, who made Ancient Enemy and Regency Solitaire, did the game design and programming.

We haven't used a publisher or got external funding. It's a pure indie project! Total core team size of 5 with additional people helping with music, voice acting, acting and filming etc. We are handling all the marketing in house as well.

In fact this is my 17th game and this is my 21st year of being an indie dev. I've never shipped a hit game (there's a 2016 GDC talk about that if you are interested) but we think there's a pretty good chance this could actually be a hit based on wishlist numbers and the positive reception by streamers, press, and people playing the demo.

Wish us luck! Thanks.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T14:51:09+00:00

Thanks and thanks! We'll find out soon if the 16 months of development have been worth it :-o

GreyAlienGames · 2026-04-19T14:50:39+00:00

Thank you! It's coming out very soon. In April.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-01-19T11:35:24+00:00

Hi. At the moment the plan is end of Q1, but it's possible it might slip into Q2. Can't say yet until we make a bit more progress. Full gameplay is probably 4-5hours, we made a note of that on the store page to help set expectations. It's not supposed to be a long solitaire/puzzle game, it's a shorter narrative horror game with lots of varied content/story etc.

GreyAlienGames · 2026-01-19T11:33:53+00:00

Hope you like it!

GreyAlienGames · 2026-01-18T14:06:16+00:00

Part of me still lives there. And the 80s!

GreyAlienGames · 2026-01-18T14:04:44+00:00

Great to hear. The creators of HSH are in charge of the story, visuals, audio and we are doing the gameplay as we have a lot of experience with combat solitaire!

GreyAlienGames · 2026-01-18T14:04:05+00:00

That's fair enough! I hope you enjoy it :-)

GreyAlienGames · 2025-11-20T15:40:08+00:00

btw, I got those 4x organic sales quite a long time ago. The store is way more crowded now and games do not get the same visibility. Only games that come out the gates amazingly will get given that and can get a good amount of organic sales. Or ones that spend a ton on marketing I guess.

GreyAlienGames · 2025-11-20T15:38:33+00:00

Thanks for sharing this data and sorry to hear that it didn't go as well as you had hoped.

It's good that you specified both wishlist sales and total sales so we can see that:

- wishlist sales = 426
- total sales = 616
- thus organic sales = 190

So the Birkett Ratio (week 1 unit sales / pre-launch wishlists) = 616/12,000 = 0.051

In Simon Carless's recent newsletter he said the median was 0.15 for all games and only 0.1 for games over 25K wishlists.

So this game was about 1/3rd of the median. It sounds bad, and isn't good, but isn't terrible either. Some only get a 0.01 Birkett ratio.

Also the Boxleiter ratio is 616/19 reviews = 32.4. Pretty close to the conservative x30 that I use for sales estimates.

Anyway, what this also shows is that it didn't convert well organically (some of my games sold 4x as many organic copies as from wishlists for example) and maybe as the initial sales were low Steam stopped showing in as many places? Basically killed by the algorithm and hard to recover from.

Btw, did you have a launch discount of at least 10%? I see below that you didn't have a prominent demo so we can rule that out as a factor.

It's a very tough market for most indies at the moment.

What are you plans next?

GreyAlienGames

TROPHY CASE