A gorgeous world with little to do
Forspoken is kind of like that overhyped party where you show up expecting the time of your life, only to find that the snacks are stale, the music is off-key, the host keeps bragging about their “cool new powers”, and somebody took a piss in the punch bowl. I remember this game being teased during the early months of the Playstation 5’s release, heavily promoting the ambitious open-world and the impressive use of the Unreal-5 engine on the new system’s hardware. As we now know, the game was all beauty and no substance. Forspoken was developed by the now deceased Luminous Productions- Yes, the game sold so badly it killed the company within months. Everyone has already dogpiled on this game for how poorly it did financially as well as how awful the dialogue is, but was it really that bad? It was recently added to the free PS Plus library so I decided lace up my magic shoes and leap in out of curiosity.
Here’s the thing. Upon release, this game was roasted well-done and served on a platter of disappointment. I fully expected to despise the main character right out of the gate. And to no surprise whatsoever, yes, Frey Holland is an insufferable harpy. She’ll occasionally have a moment or two with her generic sarcastic British companion, Cuff, that demonstrates that the two could’ve had more witty chemistry had the writers actually given a shit. I know it’s easy for everyone to crap on the shitty Gen-Z dialogue “DID I JUST DO THAT?!”, “I CAN MOVE SHIT WITH MY FREAKING MIND!”, and yeah, it’s pretty fucking bad, but aside from the memes, it wasn’t so consistently intolerable that I needed to crawl under my couch in cringe. It reminded me of Captain Marvel; I know Brie Larson isn’t a bad actress, but they don’t give her a good script to work with and instead reduce her to snide quips and condescending one-liners. The worst part about Frey is how unsympathetic I was with her backstory. In the New York City prologue, she starts off being summoned to court due to repeated theft. Right from the jump, she acts like a total douchebag and due to her unlikable nature, I was rooting for the judge to throw the book at her. Am I supposed to feel bad for her because she has a cute fluffy cat? Frey loses the large bag of cash that she stole in the most pathetic fucking way I’ve ever seen and ends up getting transported into another world through some mystical portal. Even amongst all this mysticism and wonder, she remains an irritating pain in my ass. Not a promising first impression for a character in a big open-world game that you’re going to presumably spend significant time with. Imagine if Arthur Morgan in the beginning of RDR2 was introduced like- “Ugh, seriously, another bounty hunt? Another train robbery, Dutch? Boringgggggg! I have so many better things to be doing. This is not what I signed up for!”
After an hour or two of the game holding you hostage by having control yanked away through incessant tutorial screens, you enter the world of (hang on while I look this up. I just finished the game this morning and it already escapes me…), Athia!- that’s right. The world is split into 4 major sections containing a bunch of monotonous copy/pasted side objectives. I only did a handful of these early on before deciding to bolt through the main story because life is too short and I didn’t know how much longer I could stomach another one of Frey’s snarky ass remarks. Athia is a big sprawling ghost-town of a map. I’m serious. There’s almost no one in it! There’s like one dragon, some uninspired creatures and the only other humans to find are all crystal zombies overtaken by the magical who-gives-a-shit curse. Yes, it is very pretty to look at but any triple-A game with this kind of budget is going to have all the sleekest cosmetics. Athia is ruled by 4 magical queens that each occupy a region and have all gone mad for some reason. The parkour traversal is actually pretty neat when you can convince Frey to make use of her legs properly. There is one, I repeat, ONE city in the entire game. Cipal. And it sucks ass. There’s a rich upper city and a poor lower one. Both painfully lacking in creative architecture and boring to explore, and the game hijacks your magical shoes when you’re in the city’s perimeter anyway. It’s fucking bullshit. When you’re outside Cipal, running around is kinda fun for a short while, but it’s pretty limiting. The world isn’t very interesting to explore as there’s little incentive to do anything aside from focusing on the main plot. The few traversal upgrades you get, like cool water surfing, you hardly ever get to use and feels like a cheap gimmick because there’s only like 2 spots in the whole game with a lake or larger body of water to make use of it.
Unlike the rest of the game, the actual gameplay isn’t awful. I suppose it does its job but also nothing to write home about. There’s still some aspects about it that are gleefully lame- like you paint your nails to boost her character stats (fuck’s sake). There’s different types of magic you gain through progression of the main story. You get Frey’s standard magic which is just her shooting a gun or rocks or something out of her hand. Then as you progress; you get fire magic, water magic, electric magic… a real trailblazer in creativity… You obtain some spells like a water vortex, fire spears, lighting strikes or tangling enemies in vines. It might sound cool at first but a lot of them are weak sauce. Some of the spells feel like you’re just tossing water balloons at the enemy, so I ended up upgrading my fire-sword for close quarters damage and using that most of the time. You can finish off the flying enemies with the burst-shot, which can be fully upgraded for max-damage very early on. This game doesn’t utilize the adaptive triggers well either. The constant R2-L2 button-mashing paired with the PS5’s adaptive-trigger tech feels like you’re trying to start a fucking lawnmower every time you engage in combat. I know you can probably disable this but for a game that was bragging about how it was going to be a system-seller, I expect better.
There’s a lot of big ideas in the narrative but it’s all so terribly executed. Frey is plopped into this alternate world from the real one and it’s supposed to be about her trying to discover her place in it. Yet, all she does is whine and bitch about being there while taking cheap jabs at New Jersey (We don’t like you either). Her incessant complaining goes on for HOURS. Every plot twist is telegraphed from miles away and some of them are laughably moronic. There wasn’t a single character in this game that I gave a pan-roasted fuck about. The Tantas (Mad queens) were all too blurred in personality and the lack of Frey’s conviction made me not bother to distinguish. Actually, there was one of them that stood out with the power to bend the perception of reality… You get this pretty sweet segment where you’re running around the chaotic New York City streets, chasing the elusive Tanta and fighting enemies with your magic while buildings and streets bend and twist into her warped reality. It felt like something straight out of Doctor Strange. Unfortunately, it was a fleeting moment and a glimpse into what could have been- Why couldn’t the rest of the game be like this?! The overall plot probably sounded grand on paper, but in practice, it’s just a lot of running around empty wastelands while enduring Frey and Cuff’s shitty back-and-forth quips. The pacing is like a treadmill on the lowest setting. I would sometimes forget what I was supposed to be doing after I fast traveled. It’s not much of a gripping tale when Frey is more interested in cracking sarcastic jokes instead of solving anything. Speaking of which, the game could’ve easily been Rated-T if Frey didn’t swear like a pirate that’s been locked out of his rum cabinet. But again, I’m from Jersey so I hardly noticed.
In summary, Forspoken is not worth it. I played through it so you don’t have to. I don’t care how much you like rescuing cats or painting your nails, this game is not very good. I made the wrong assumption going into this game that maybe it failed because it was more woke garbage slop. Honestly, I sensed very little of that. It turns out the game was all glitter and no gold. It fails to capture my gaze because it tries to do so much yet doesn’t nail down anything. A game that looks like it should’ve been amazing ends up feeling like it’s just ticking boxes of fantasy tropes and not trying anything different. It’s a gorgeous yet empty adventure that leaves you wondering if the magic was ever really there.
Ugh do I have to write a closure?,
Mikhail