Forspoken - Review

Better than you think it is.

Console: PlayStation 5

What hasn't been said about Forspoken? Made by Square Enix's now defunct Luminous Production studio, it was released around a year ago to quite a lot of chatter. Not the good kind though, I'm sad to say. The game was marketed as a technical showcase of the PS5 hardware and Square Enix's very own Luminous engine. 

Things turned out differently. After multiple delays and a middling demo, the final product came out to a mixed response and lacklustre sales. The game was not as graphically or technically impressive as was advertised. The open world felt empty and boring, and many found the playable character Frey and her talking bracelet unlikeable and annoying. 

Even so, I myself couldn't stop thinking about the game. I played the demo and while I thought it was all a bit confusing, there was something there that, on a fundamental level, clicked with me. It's why when I found it at a steep discount a few months ago I bought it. To experience the full game for myself. 

Now that I have, I can say that I agree with the more positive re-evaluation the title has gotten recently. It's not a great game, but it's not a particularly bad one either. It's a decent, if not very, very flawed title. Let's dive in. 

Frey Holland is a young woman down on her luck. Found abandoned under a tunnel as a child, she hopped from one foster family to another. As an adult, she has resorted to a life of crime to buy the food she needs for herself and her cat Homer and dreams of leaving New York to seek a better life. 

After a run-in with the law and a gang setting the abandoned place she lives in ablaze, Frey is at the end of her rope. Visiting the tunnel she was found in, contemplating ending her life, her attention is drawn to a strange bangle on the windowsill. After touching it, Frey is promptly transported to the medieval, magical world of Athia. A world that has been ravaged by a mysterious phenomenon known as 'The Break' that mutates every life form it touches, forcing the people to stay with the city walls, and whips up massive storms. All as a result of the Tanta's, powerful witches that once protected Athia, going mad and turning on the people. 

It's now up to Frey and the talking sentient bracelet she names 'Cuff' to save Athia from doom should Frey have any hope of returning to New York and her beloved Homer. 

As the graphics and performance of Forspoken were such a focus during the marketing, I want to break from my usual review structure by bringing this section to the front. The title is perfectly fine in both aspects, even great in some areas, but far from the technical showcase it was propped up to be. 

The particle effects, the amount of them and how they behave, are the best I've experienced yes but the game seriously struggles with its performance in its advertised graphical mode. This game is one of the few in which I easily and clearly notice a difference between graphics and performance mode. The former is noticeably choppier. If the camera moves, you notice that the motions are far from smooth and the frame rate drops are plentiful when things get busy on screen. 

The graphic vs performance mode. I hope you can see the difference in lighting and foliage well enough. And no, I don't know what's up with that tree either. 

With this game's gameplay in mind, I highly recommend playing in performance mode. It doesn't look as good, but the visual quality is still very solid. What you could expect from a standard early PS5 title and the higher FPS is a genuine asset in combat, which relies on good timing and reflexes. Missing your window due to a drop in frame rate can be a serious party breaker. 

Now, back to the narrative, an important aspect of this narrative-driven single-player title. It has received much criticism because of its characters and dialogue, and rightfully so. Making characters like these, the foul mouth and abrasive and dry-wit cynical one, likeable is a tightrope walk. One that this game fails to walk. Frey's journey of self-discovery, of peeling back all the layers and damage that led this gifted and emphatic person to become such a jaded individual. For her to find her way again. 

I can see the shades of this journey, and I very much appreciated the contemplative moments like the little breakdown Frey went through after killing her first Tanta about the morality behind that action, but those moments just aren't here frequently or deepened enough to work. Because of this, Frey is a character that works better on paper than in practice. 

 

The dialogue doesn't help matters much. It feels unnatural, cringey and often stilted. Dialogue that doesn't feel like something a human being would really say in many situations. The amount of dialogue can also be a problem. Like Cuff dry wit or not, the fact of the matter is that he speaks too often and says the same thing too many times. Definitely turn Cuff's dialogue frequency down a notch, if only to prevent this much repetition. 

However, I did warm up to Forspoken's narrative. I did eventually grow attached to Frey and Cuff across my journey, in large parts thanks to the shades of good I saw in her, the strong performances of their actours and the 'can't live with them, can't live without them' dynamic the two grew into. I enjoyed my time spent with the side characters, few they might be. Moreover, I got into the kind of dreary, yet mystifying atmosphere the game is set in with its interesting and sometimes imaginative creature design. The more than fine musical score also played a large role in getting into 'the zone' so to speak. 

Lastly, I found the central mystery to be increasingly engaging and while, thanks to its repetitive structure, the narrative can be predictable and 'stop-and-go', it had genuine surprises and emotional bits that motivated me to keep moving forward and experience the big finale. A finale against a big bad that I didn't see coming and was quite enjoyable to play through. 

While flawed and a lot more foul mouthed than I'm comfortable with, at the end of the day, I do enjoy Frey as a character and the protagonist here.

Gameplay-wise, the elephant in the room is the title's open-world design. Where your Fortnites are the hot trend to chase in the multiplayer department, for single-player adventures its open-world titles. With Forspoken, it does very much feel that the game was made an open-world game because Square Enix wanted to have a piece of the open-world pie. It has all the trappings of one but it also feels like the reason for this is because the developers just checked boxes on a list. 

There are a ton of activities to do and while I can't really fault the variety, they are basic and flood your map. There are just so many of them that they overwhelm you and overstay their welcome. The open world is big but feels oh so empty with its lack of people, memorable setpieces and reused assets. With just how much empty space there is, I feel that it would've been better to cut the map in half and put that development time and effort into other departments the game would be stronger because of that.

There is other stuff that I could mention but what it really boils down to is that all of it feels very cookie-cutter. I still had some fun moments and I did like some activities enough I always checked them out when I ran across them, like the labyrinths, but the world of Forspoken lost its lustre and grew tiresome very quickly. 

Now on to the departments, Forspoken shines in: the combat and traversal. Combat is fast-paced, tests your reflexes, and comes with some very good-looking animations and particle effects. Over the course of the game, Frey gets access to a variety of elemental-based spells from beating the Tantas and spending the mana to unlock more of their skill trees. This means that the deeper you get in the game, the more moves and abilities you get to play with. From Frey's standard earth magic focused on mid-range projectiles to Tanta Sila's fire magic which is all about swords and spears. 

Once you get used to the flow of the combat it becomes a lot of stylish fun. A bit of a button masher and sadly lacking ways to chain attacks of different magic types together, but fun nonetheless. And don't forget plentiful: with the different playstyles of each Tanta, you can switch up your approach whenever you like or find one that really suits you and really learn its ins and outs. 

Even better than the combat is the traversal, AKA the magical parkour. Frey can positively race across the map like she's The Flash, jumping and climbing over nearly everything. The more magic you get, the more traversal options you unlock, like skimming over large bodies of water, which makes journeying across Athia that much more fun since just running around in the world and exploring it is exciting. It doesn't take too long to get from point A to point B with all of this parkour, keeping a good pace going. 

Once you get to the good stuff, that is. Forspoken loves to trickle out its new combat and traversal options, be it because it takes a while to fight the next Tanta or because you have to find these skills in magical pools hidden in the world. Because of this. it takes too long for the title to find its flow and become really fun. By the time this happens, many players might've already dropped the game. Something that, looking around online, has happened a lot. 

A look at the combat, and the spiffy particle effects fo the fire, in action. 

Another well-handled aspect is the approachable and broad crafting system. If you don't like a skill you've unlocked, you can 'unlearn' it and get the mana you spend on it back to use on another skill. There are tons of different cloaks and jewellery that give you a variety of bonuses, such as extra health and health regeneration after defeating an enemy, that you can transmog to any piece of gear you find so your function doesn't have to go over looks. 

A big problem that also needs to be addressed is that the game's standard settings, and the user experience, are pretty poor. Weird button layout, settings that hinder the game and this weird fisheye effect in the menus that makes text difficult to read and a map that's outright terrible. 

For the controls: there are too many actions and too few buttons on the controller to place them all. You can switch out controller inputs, but I annoyingly can't get my preferred control scheme ('investigate' on the R3) because that upsets the combat controls and gives me a serious disadvantage in the combat. I recommend going online and finding some of the most recommended settings, turn those on and see how it treats you. You can then keep on tweaking the experience until you find what you like. 

To the developer's credit though: in the patches of the first few weeks some of the most used tweaks were implemented as the standard. Also worth noting: after some adjusting and tweaking, I did experience some narrative and gameplay dissonance because all my tweaking made some sections easier than what was probably intended. More an interesting note than a real criticism though. 

Something I'm disappointed I didn´t see much talk about is how all these gameplay and controller settings make this game very accessible to all kinds of players. All the gameplay and control customization you can do means you can, to a much further degree than you'd think, make this game accessible to all kinds of folks. From giving you more reaction time to auto-aim to making certain actions a toggle. 

Conclusion

When it's all said and done, Forspoken is not a great game, but by no means a terrible one either. Just a flawed title that takes too long to get to the good stuff, to its own detriment and isn't the technical showcase that was promised. The story is nothing to write home about, with bad dialogue and difficult-to-like characters even if it does reveal some much-appreciated shades of depth as well. Its open world is very empty but the strong combat and parkour kept me engaging regardless.

For me, the good here was just enough for me to stick with the game until the end and enjoy the game for the flawed experience that it is.