Forbidden Merge: Strategy and Resource Management

Forbidden Merge is a pixel-art strategy game that asks players to complete an ancient ritual inside a tree stump to expel evil from the woods. Juggling grid space and combining resources is the only way to survive the incoming threats.

Created by developers NedoKontent and pasq, this in-development title centers heavily on tier-based combinations. You take two identical entities and mash them together to get the next level up. That part is familiar for the genre. But you can also click on any higher-tier resource to split it back down. This matters because the action takes place on a confined grid. Space runs out extremely fast.

A typical run takes roughly forty minutes to beat. That assumes you don’t soft-lock yourself by hoarding items inefficiently.

The main challenge comes from the monster units. They spawn directly onto your tiles—sometimes right where you need to place a critical item. If ignored, they just sit there taking up valuable real estate. Players often realize too late that putting off combat to focus on building simply makes the enemies harder to kill later. It pays to deal with threats early. Grind down their health while they are still weak instead of letting them merge into higher tiers.

Generating souls is the primary way to clear out these creatures. You have to gather enough to execute kills faster than the forest generates new enemies. Some units interact in less obvious ways to give you an edge in combat. You can feed certain items to a mushroom to increase its strength, while healing herbs act exactly as you’d expect. The game hides various crafting recipes inside the unit tooltips. Checking the descriptions on your units is basically required to progress. The pixel art pulls more weight than you’d expect, giving distinct visual cues to the water, stone, and plant elements on the board.

As always, remember to have fun!