In my opinion, the first two hours of Forspoken ranks among the worst triple A games offered in years. What a statement to start an analysis with which I will end up recommending Luminous Productions’ controversial PS5 exclusive. And believe me, this is just the beginning.
Forspoken has been moved several times and has been criticized by the gaming community for its absurd marketing and humorous dialogue. And if even a demo didn’t get rid of the bad press and negative word of mouth, what’s left? For a while it almost seemed like a script that Forspoken was going to go bad.
And it’s not bad. at least it isn’t tan bad, especially if you play it. But the core experience of the game is surrounded by a maelstrom of disparate elements struggling to create the crucial connective tissue that holds an RPG experience like this together. For a game that’s essentially all about running, it seems to get lost in its own way on numerous occasions.
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At Forspoken, we are Frey Holland, and when we’re introduced to her early in the game, she’s little more than a criminal. A pickpocket trying to make ends meet trying to escape New York with her only companion in the world, her cat. When this plan fails, he considers taking his own life. But just before she surrenders completely to despair, she is transported to herself athia by Shares, a magical bracelet that appears to contain the soul of a being from another world. Athia is in trouble, ravaged by a mysterious force called “The Rupture” that corrupts and destroys everything she touches. Humanity’s last bastion is the city of Cipal, and it is from here that Frey must attack and rescue Athia, saving himself in the process.
Well, with the synopsis out of the way, I can tell you that the New York portion of Forspoken is absolutely awful. Long, uneven, half-hearted, and poorly conceived, it feels like it was cobbled together in a matter of months, without polish, narrative cohesion, or any mechanical or structural meaning. It’s true that it prepares us for Athia, but it can be done the worst possible first impression of the game. What were they thinking?
Forspoken continues to waste the player’s time even after they’ve built most of their narrative, forcing them to go through countless tutorials and tedious tasks. Worse, they take up a lot of space during those crucial opening times, but don’t adequately explain the various elements of the game and how they fit together into a cohesive whole. Little did I know that I could expend stamina past five hours.
Imagine my surprise when you or Frey finally get to run wild, explore Athia, defeat groups of different types of enemies, and use magical parkour skills to climb and advance. The game consists of elements that we would today call run-of-the-mill open-world elements, such as like. It doesn’t do anything fancy, but it pits you against some pretty interesting enemies that you can destroy with an impressive and ever-growing variety of spells, each one different from the previous one.
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By leveling up through XP and collecting mana nodes in the open world, you will gradually acquire and upgrade a wide range of offensive and defensive spells, which are used by selecting L1 and R1 and casting them with L2 and R2. They can work together, and a given spell can have multiple uses depending on how you pull the trigger. While the complex combat often requires switching spells and pausing combat, the amount of customization and personality each encounter offers is fantastic. Not only that, the simple but effective ranking system keeps you on the verge of incrementally improving.
then there is the parkour. Although it is not explained very well at first (as usual), Hold down the circle button Traversing the open world and using it in conjunction with an enemy blockade in combat is a great way to feel nimble no matter what type of encounter you’re in. While the camera can get unwieldy with lots of enemies on-screen, combat focuses on parkour moves and works beautifully when animation, strategy, and polish come together in a polished experience.
Playing Forspoken is fantastic, it’s polished, it’s refined and it’s well executed. It’s the Eye of the Storm where it all comes together as a cohesive whole, making it all the more frustrating when you’re forced to leave the quiet center and delve into the undergrowth of Forspoken’s ancillary systems. In reality, the script isn’t much of a problem, and despite some dialogue that’s too fast, Frey turns out to be a more rounded character than first feared, just like the main antagonists who so many that inhabit each of the areas of the game. However, there is a major problem with pacing during “scripted” scenes, as the narrative is often broken by oversimplified and short segments, isolated scenes, and unreliable fade-to-black effects that constantly take away from the drama the characters are creating . Athia is an interesting place, make no mistake, but the game lags from crucial explanations and sticks a stick in the spokes of its own wheel.
As I mentioned, there are repetitive open-world activities, but most of them require combat where the game really shines, and through some great boss fights, a challenging variety of enemies, and even some platforming issues, they mostly pop up when when the game stops moving at high speed. As control is snatched away from you, you realize how brown everything looks despite some environmental variations introduced in later phase zones, and how ugly it looks too. In other words, Forspoken is by no means a pretty game, and if you need 60 frames per second in your life (which I highly recommend given the great possibilities it offers), you’ll find pixelated character models, facial animations that aren’t ideal and somewhat simplified choreography. Again, this is greatly improved when you’re moving, when you’re exploring, when you’re fighting, and most of the time Forspoken wants you to, which really softens the blow of the overall visual aspect of the game being so loose.
Maybe you don’t like Forspoken anymore after reading all this, or it doesn’t catch your attention. Maybe you’ve played the demo, seen a lot of gameplay, and it seems to you that it’s poorly made and poorly put together. I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong; The scenes are mostly forgotten, almost awful, the story is acceptable, especially as Frey and Cuff end up being a duo that works fairly well and does little to innovate structurally. Again, the hurricane’s massive outer ring appropriately dulls Forspoken’s core experience, and there are no excuses here: that could and should have been better.
On the contrary, Luminous Productions is fortunate to have built such an incredibly satisfying gameplay loop with amazing spells, badass parkour, and a solid variety of enemies. This is what you do most of the time during the game, and that’s why your body is asking you to play the most. There’s bound to be a huge discrepancy between media reviews for Forspoken, and you’re also likely to see some weighty figures poking fun at the gimmicky scenes and uneven execution (again, all fully deserved and expected by the time you’re gone through dozens of hours in Athia, like me). But rather than get carried away by this accumulation of ideas, I think it’s necessary to reiterate: playing Forspoken is fun, it’s entertaining. This makes it difficult, and some may find the final score too generous or too harsh, depending on how one assesses the game’s core elements. That’s all that counts for me Forspoken is mostly funbut it’s a shame that the rest of the game elements try to spoil this fun at every turn.
