Forbidden Lore

Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.

There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.

Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.

Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).

But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:

"Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk."

So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?

Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.

Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: (Spoiler - click to show) I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.

I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.