The Forbidden Arts

My honest reaction after sitting with The Forbidden Arts for a few hours is that Stingbot Games clearly cared about the world they built, and that care shows in the places you least expect it. The colorful, hand-crafted art style pops with warmth - environments shift from jungle canopies to icy mountain tops, and Phoenix himself has tiny details like a scarf fluttering in the breeze that tell you someone at this studio sweated the small stuff. The acoustic guitar-laced soundtrack is an unconventional choice for a platformer, but there is something genuinely pleasant about it in the quieter exploration stretches, even if it wears out its welcome during longer dungeon runs. The structure is its most interesting idea: you alternate between a fully 3D overworld, where you roam between regions, talk to NPCs, and collect gold chunks that unlock challenge rooms, and traditional 2D side-scrolling dungeons where the real platforming happens. The 2D segments ask you to wall-jump, climb vines, dodge falling rocks, flip levers to roll boulders, and activate invisible switches in sequence. Some of those puzzles have a satisfying old-school logic to them. Boss fights deserve a mention too - they actually evolve their attack patterns mid-fight rather than repeating the same phase three times, which keeps those encounters alive longer than you might expect. Here is where I have to be honest with you, though. The pyromancy combat - the headline mechanic - lands with a thud. Filling your fire gauge by standing near a flame source, then lobbing fireballs at enemies, feels disconnected and unresponsive in practice. Enemy hitboxes are inconsistent, the overworld feels sparse and underpopulated, and the script leans on familiar fantasy archetypes without the writing to back them up. Wall-jumping with a controller is fiddly enough that some players have flagged it in community posts. The Steam user review pool is tiny and sits at a mixed rating, and critic aggregate scores cluster in the low-to-mid range. None of that is catastrophic for a small solo-friendly indie, but it is worth knowing before you commit. Who actually enjoys this? Younger players or anyone who grew up on 16-bit and early 3D action-adventure games and will forgive mechanical roughness in exchange for a breezy six-to-eight hour run through a colorful world. The difficulty spikes, so patience with precise platforming is a genuine prerequisite. If you need tight combat or a compelling story to stay invested, this will frustrate before it rewards. But if you are the kind of player who appreciates the ambition of a small team trying to build something with scope and heart, there is enough here to make the runtime worthwhile.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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