Hughes came off the bench in the second-half, after Palace had just taken the lead against Forest through Ebere Eze's penalty.
And although the Champions League-chasing Reds fought back to claim a point, the Eagles were highly unlucky not to claim the win - Hughes driving them on from midfield and going to very close to a spectacular winner towards the end.
"If you're not hitting the target you're not going to score," Hughes reflected. "But I think the performance on the whole was really good this stage in the season.
"I think it says a lot about us as a group, us as a club, our standards, where we've set them, that we've still come to games like this full-throttle and wanting to win it.
"I think the performance tonight showed a lot. When you go back to the Arsenal game a couple of weeks ago, when we had Villa three days later, the performance there was still at the top level.
"So I think that says a lot about the character of the team. We want to win every single game, no matter what it is, whether it's the Premier League game at the end of the season, or an FA Cup final. We want to go into it with the same mentality.
"49 is our record points total. We've got the game to do it and you can see by the performances that we really want to make history in that sense.
"So there's still a lot to play for [in the Premier League]."