Photograph: Square EnixĪnd then the game takes over again and simply demands that you pay attention to the next lengthy chunk of plot. When all of this lines up, and those moments aren’t infrequent, you feel quite glad to have been sucked into Athia. The flow of her attacks meshes well with her “magic parkour” ability, which allows her to sprint and somersault through the whole game world on gilded kicks. Frey is capable of some potent supernatural moves, from telekinetic rock-hurling to summoning great magical vines that whip groups of enemies into oblivion. A year after Elden Ring, Forspoken feels outmoded.Īnd that’s a shame, because if the player’s combat options were expanded earlier on they’d find the cool combos and most satisfying finishers for themselves and probably have much more fun doing so than aiming a magic peashooter at gangs of wolves. They’ll figure everything out because they want to, not because they’ve sat through eight hours of menus. Elden Ring showed us how to teach players an open-world game’s rules: let them loose in it, and fill it with encounters they can experiment with. Luminous Productions seems to be trying to lessen that learning curve, but turning the whole game into a tutorial isn’t the answer. Open-world games can be daunting and their many systems take time to learn. The combat system, too, is drip-fed at such a stingy pace that by the time you’ve finally unlocked all the available abilities, there’s not much left to do but walk to the last boss encounter and cue the credits. And even when she’s out of cutscenes and back in the world, she’s often frozen in place for a while longer so that she and Cuff can hold a conversation, while the player wanders her off somewhere inopportune. The opening two hours are spent handing Frey off from one cutscene to the next with precious more than a brief walk in between. And yet, it’s oddly reluctant to let go of the reins and let you play around in all that space. Worse, a clan of magic-wielding matriarchs known as the Tanta are running amok and they’re absolutely livid that Frey’s interloping all over their domain.įorspoken tells you all of this in the process of unfurling itself as an open-world action-RPG with a vast space to explore and all sorts of upgrade paths. It’s a world with some depth, and one that’s seen better days – a mysterious force known as the Break has left villages eerily abandoned and turned previously friendly, hardworking serfs into hostile undead. And with a writing team including Uncharted’s Amy Hennig and Rogue One co-writer Gary Whitta, expectations are pitched high.īut Forspoken is much more concerned with telling you about its world and dragging you through a meat-and-potatoes storyline than it is with being meta. It’s a great fish-out-of-water setup that allows for witty observations about video game fantasy worlds and the bizarre tropes within them that we generally don’t bat an eyelash at. So when Frey puts on a bracelet in an abandoned tenement for reasons best not examined too closely and she’s transported into the quasi-medieval world of Athia, you think to yourself: here we go. She’s not your typical crystal-bothering Final Fantasy type. Forspoken has the same potential: its protagonist Frey is accustomed to the harsh realities of surviving in the scruffier corners of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and her problems gravitate around harbouring debts to petty criminals and remembering to feed her cat. If the recent Jumanji film reboots have taught us nothing else – and they haven’t – they have demonstrated how much fun there is to be had with dropping characters from our familiar world into outlandish fantasy settings.
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