Despite its graphic splendour, Forspoken flies under the radar for many players. Yet the action RPG still has many aces up its sleeve with complex and powerful magic or fast-paced parkour.
Forspoken awakens a fantasy in me that I had almost forgotten. As a child, I could spend days imagining I was the heroine of a vast story full of unique creatures and dangers. The bathing lake suddenly becomes a deep ocean full of monsters that my crew has to swim through after a shipwreck, or the stalactite cave as part of the Austrian holiday to build a dragon that I have to conquer with my magic power. Or does he turn out to be an ally?
As you get older, much more real problems quickly occupy your mind. But the longing for some magic in life has never quite left me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who still secretly wishes for the spaceship landing in her garden, the letter from Hogwarts or the magic portal in her wardrobe.
Forspoken embraces precisely this idea. In the action role-playing game, Frey, an ordinary girl from present-day New York, ends up in a medieval fantasy world that is being eaten away by a dark force. Good thing she has a newfound magical power at her side that hurls fiery spears, causes vines to grow from the ground or lightning to strike down from the sky.
What have we seen? We didn’t get to play Forspoken ourselves yet. The developer showed us a 30-minute presentation, which included about 15 minutes of new gameplay in addition to info about the game. We also had an interview with Co-Director Takefumi Terada and Creative Producer Raio Mitsuno, who answered our questions about the game.
When things do get dicey, she climbs, hops and glides through the open world thanks to the lightning-fast parkour in such a way that it feels like she’s flying across the scorching hot deserts, dense forests or green meadows, past cautionary castle ruins and ominously different crystal structures.
You can already tell that the movement and battle systems are really sparking and the idea behind the open world is also igniting – at least if the former Final Fantasy developers from Luminous Productions can overcome a major hurdle.
Table of Contents
What is Forspoken about?
You already know roughly who Frey is. However, Forspoken is supposed to go into much more depth: In the normal world, the young woman has only her cat Homer (like the father of the family, not the poet) around her, slips into crime and uses her quick-witted humour as a shield, while inside she despairs further and further. The magical realm of Athia, to which she is transported by portal, is supposed to give her a previously unknown sense of home and family. At the same time, however, Frey has to fight hard for her place there – her special powers mean that some of the inhabitants call her a demon.
The excellent Horizon Zero Dawn has already proven that a self-discovery trip can work as an open-world story. Frey should feel similarly lost in the new world as the players and can discover it in the same way, which in itself creates a connection. What’s more, she doesn’t have to carry the story alone: the enchanted bangle Cuff is always by her side, which, according to creative producer Raio Mitsuno, makes for a special dynamic:
Frey and Cuff’s interaction is one of my favourite things about Forspoken. The best way to describe it is an unholy alliance. They’re in it together and they’re glued to each other. They’re not always friends, they have to get through everything together, sometimes they bicker, but then they build each other back up and motivate each other to keep going. It’s a nice dynamic between them, even if we can’t go into detail about exactly how Cuff helps the player and Frey. But it’s not just a story element, it’s also a playful one.
Their little cabbles in the first gameplay scenes definitely make you want more. Whether the story works depends a lot on how well and credibly these characters are written and directed. The overarching plot sounds comparatively generic: an evil force called The Break is eating away at the land, killing all life or turning people and animals into beasts. The inhabitants have therefore fled to the last remaining town.
Only Frey seems immune and faces the fight against the monsters and Tanta Syla, one of the rulers of the land, who has apparently become a renegade mage. You can already admire her nasty grin in the latest gameplay trailer:
A dead open world – that has a lot to say?
But the biggest challenge for Forspoken will be the game world. Once again, it looks incredibly good! Because a very realistic-looking lighting meets a dirty medieval town overrun by refugees, open fields or crumbling ruins where dragons dwell. The enemy designs, however, vary greatly: the uniform mash of zombies and shadow warriors is boring just to watch, but enormous bosses like a kind of translucent sea anemone bone giraffe called Jabberweck, send pleasant shivers down my spine.
The monster is the focus of a Breakstorm, an apparently random event that envelops the environment in bluish mist and unleashes deadly waves of monsters on Frey. Such events are meant to give players something to do away from the missions in the open world, which otherwise serves more as a backdrop for the action, as co-director Takefumi Terada explains:
The game has a very strong story focus. You follow the stages of the story and they play out the way they were scripted. But we wanted to design the open world in such a way that the player can also experience something off the beaten track. There are large areas to explore and events when you get to certain places. You can expect a compelling story, but also the open world and events there surrounding it.
You’re not just supposed to stumble from one battle arena to the next, though. According to the developer, it also involves unearthing the secrets of previous civilisations and cultures that the rift has wiped out. Frey finds documents along the way, but also stories told about the environment that tell her more about the tragic fate of Athia. Resources are also waiting for you. You use them in the camps scattered everywhere to craft items or heal Frey there.
This is similar to what we already know from Horizon Zero Dawn – especially when it comes to puzzling together the past. Here, however, Forspoken has to pose interesting questions and provide answers to compensate for the dead game world. Because of the break, according to the developer, you will find neither animals nor people outside the city. This risks making the world feel empty and more like a big theme park full of tasks for Frey than a real place where someone once lived. Only when the Open World has enough to say will it be more than a pretty background noise.
Forspoken has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to the game world, though: The developers promise me that they also want to make full use of New York as a setting. But they can’t reveal more than that yet. Maybe Frey will end up having to save our world from attacking monsters and swing from skyscraper to skyscraper like Spidey? The idea that two worlds collide here already fascinated me after the first trailer.
What is the technical condition?
During the presentation, the open world is bursting with details and crisp textures down to every tree bark or stone grain. From time to time, this causes the video to jerk, which may also be due to the transmission. Therefore, not much can be said about the technical state of the game.
Since the game world and features are not yet fully implemented, according to the developers, the team will have to step on the gas if Forspoken is really to be released on 24 May 2022. The developers didn’t want to tell us anything about the PC specs yet, but there will be ray tracing with some effects, about which more info will follow.
Ultimate mage fantasy: How to fight?
Forspoken’s magic immediately had me itching for more. Frey draws on four different types of magic, which summon traps, projectiles, shields or melee and ranged attacks and can be cycled through at any time, but also bring cooldowns. You hurl explosive rocks, fire a whole rain of arrows, lock enemies in magic orbs or dodge with lightning speed, while flashes of bright red, blue, green or purple light hiss and snarl across the screen from Frey’s hands, bringing whole hordes of monsters to their knees.
As a player, however, you should not only feel incredibly powerful. The developers promise that there are real role-playing systems in Forspoken. You first have to level up Frey and master her abilities in order to then choose your own fighting style, as Takefumi Terada confirms:
We can’t go into too many small details about the game system and its specifics at the moment, but the team has worked on many role-playing games and carries that DNA. So we’ve put a lot of emphasis on making sure that there’s a solid RPG system that players can dig into and then have a lot of fun with.
You don’t just build your personal mage by unlocking and using certain spells via mana. You can also find necklaces and capes in the game world and equip them to gain useful perks and stat boosts. Special nail polish patterns (no joke!) add even more power to your magical attacks. This sounds a bit silly on paper, but it suits a teenage girl from New York and promises even more playful depth to your build. In addition to your spells, you can also strengthen your health, healing or stamina.
The parkour makes Assassin’s Creed look old
The more the open game world of Assassin’s Creed expands, the more the once important parkour takes a back seat – the flat moors and hills of England in AC Valhalla don’t exactly invite you to climb, so a fast horse is more use.
In this open-world game, you don’t need a mount: heroine Frey pulls herself up on branches or walls with a magic grappling hook. Not only does this look elegant, but she also overcomes precipices or rocky outcrops at breakneck speed. Frey hardly has to touch the ground and can also catapult himself behind opponents in fights.
To fully master the parkour, you first have to practise and collect a few levels. But then you should be able to use it almost everywhere, as Takefumi Terada explains:
The game is divided into two types of areas, you have city areas and the open areas where you explore. You can’t use all types of parkour in the city, but if you leave it, you’re allowed to use it pretty much anywhere in the open areas, whatever the terrain.
That a free-roaming feel can take Open Worlds to a whole new level has already been proven by Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Marvel’s Spider-Man. And despite the horse, that’s exactly what I missed a bit in Elden Ring, which otherwise emulates BotW.
What the game world loses in liveliness or varied tasks, it could thus make up for with a strong story, deep, action-packed battles and the joy of simply traversing environments.
Editor’s Verdict
As a big fan of Horizon Zero Dawn, I’m particularly pleased with the parallels to Guerrilla Games’ open-world game. A strong heroine searches for her place in an inhospitable world, learns cool skills and gradually learns more about a catastrophe that has shaken the country. For this to work, of course, the story has to pull me in accordingly and Frey has to be as charismatic as Aloy. After the first trailers, the chances of that are not bad at all – especially her little squabbles with Cuff, who sounds like an annoyed butler with his British accent, I could listen to forever.
I’m also immediately drawn in by the magic. Whether it’s fire, flashes of light, vines or boulders, everything looks incredibly stylish and unleashes an impressive storm of effects. Even when Frey is just jumping and gliding through the game world, her cape flies behind her and her white trainers make golden trails. If this is as much fun as it seems, Forspoken doesn’t have to hide from machine hunting with bow and arrow in terms of gameplay either.
Only the open world itself still makes me sceptical. The environments seem realistic and detailed, but also a bit sterile, because there are no villages, animals or other life apart from the monsters. Battle platforms, ruins or barren plains in the gameplay material so far are more reminiscent of arenas than natural environments. I hope that the developers will cleverly use environmental storytelling and hide many small stories in the world that will at least bring the past to life to some extent.
