Forspoken review: The open-world adventure that finally gets good

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Forspoken, of all things, it is a Christmas game. It begins a few days before the holiday, which, as it happens, is protagonist Fry Holland’s birthday, a fact you learn when the game forces you to review the arrest log printed in the first scene, where Fry is parked in New York. City court charged with grand theft and resisting arrest.

In the same scene, he learns that Fry, like the baby Jesus, was born mysterious. Only in her case, it wasn’t the Elders who found her in Bethlehem, but the firefighters of the Holland Tunnel. (hence its name). After leaving the courtroom, Fry is beaten up by two women (one with leopard print, the other with camouflage) before returning to her barren apartment, where she has written her plan to leave New York on a piece of cardboard taped to the wall. Besides her cardboard decor, Fry has a few books (most notably a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” and a leather-bound paperback of something called “Law & Order”) and a wall shelf dedicated to her beloved “kicks.” Her entire apartment instantly burns down, prompting her to contemplate her life while leaning on the edge of the Crossroads Hotel as the clock approaches midnight on Christmas Day. Suddenly, she notices a magic bracelet that is about to change her life.

From the start, Forspoken’s tone seems unintentionally silly. The game, developed by Luminous Productions and published by Square Enix, opens in present-day New York City, a depiction that, even to a non-New Yorker like myself, feels less like New York and more like what AI used to be. The Law & Order reboot was fueled by The Room and will be produced by Tommy Wiseau. (At one point, when asked what she missed about New York, Fry brings up Central Park and Nice, the latter of which plays a surprisingly important role in the game’s plot.)

Image: Luminous Productions/Square Enix via Polygon

Soon, though, you’re ushered away to Athens, the game’s true setting: a medieval fantasy world shrouded in corruption that threatens to destroy life itself. There, you find yourself strapped at your wrist with a Cuff, a sensitive bracelet that hates you. Then, the dialogue from the infamous trailer is spoken, and you’re off to the races.

Forspoken hours are the worst ever. It took me 16 hours to complete the game, getting a fair amount of sidekicks into this open-world RPG, being careful not to run too fast towards the end of the game, though the temptation is there. The first seven hours of those 16 (about half the game’s runtime, I feel the need to emphasize) were hampered by a lengthy tutorial, one-note combat, insistence on “magic parkour” interruptions with lore entries, terrible dialogue, sheep-petting minigames, minigames that follow the cats, and a spoken word show detailing the intricacies of meat production in Sibel, the empty, ugly town of Forsbuken.

For a game that constantly references Alice in Wonderland, one of the biggest disappointments is how bland Athena is, not just visually, but conceptually. Rich and poor divided between the castle and the slums? check. The mysterious blight that can stem from poultices made from special roots? Also check. An old man who had gone mad, but he might actually hold the key to solving all of this? Definitely. And on and on.

It’s a blessing, then – a true Christmas miracle – that once you get your second set of magical abilities, the game can actually be fun. Forspoken combat is its central strength, and despite the usual issues with lock-on and camera control, it’s satisfying to switch between several combinations of magic on the fly, mowing down enemies on the ground with vines before making a circular sweep of a fire sword and watching wormholes splash across the screen as it soars My combat rating.

Image: Luminous Productions/Square Enix via Polygon

Traveling is also a decent pleasure. Frey has an infamous enemy ability that gets modified further throughout the game, allowing you to whip across the landscape in a matter of moments. Alas, you’re always rushing towards visually identical dungeons (interior lighting changes from red to green as you progress), visually identical resting areas called Pilgrim’s Refuges (no difference in lighting), and cat-approaching minigames (different from cat-following minigames). ) ). Frey and Cuff banter as you explore and quickly begin to repeat themselves over the first few hours of the game, to the point where you’ll be able to recite those memorable loot-picking lines, by heart, by the time the credits roll.

For a game that constantly references Alice in Wonderland, one of the biggest disappointments is how bland Athena is.

The combat becomes more fun with each Tanta you kill, as she absorbs the power of these magical queens. By the time you get to your fourth set of magical abilities, the game feels like it’s finally opening up, with the full array of powers available to you, a sentiment that’s immediately undermined by the fact that it’s already ending. There was certainly some side content left to explore once I struggled my way to my true strength, but as far as the rest of the story goes, it more or less amounted to a series of mini-bosses, some of which I’d already seen. If I hadn’t already been so disappointed with the game, I definitely would have been at the end of it.

Image: Luminous Productions/Square Enix via Polygon

Before I wrap up, let’s reserve a word for Frey, the black protagonist who joins a growing trend in the media to place black people in worlds where race doesn’t matter. Except that the game adamantly insists that Fry is a New Yorker, ambiguous birth or not, who has spent her entire life up to this point growing up in our fantasy-free world, where black isn’t powerless. Sadly, Fry’s identity is poorly written and awkwardly published, as the story relies not only on stereotyped narratives, but trauma as a plot device.

An early plot point involves Fry carrying off the significant body of a black girl from Athena with whom he had bonded, an image that doesn’t carry the same weight in our world in the racially amorphous world of Athea – and so does Fry. At first, Fry was spurred into action, vowing to avenge the child’s death, leading me to believe, optimistically, that the game was thinking of Fry’s identity as more than the sum of her repeated insistences on her love of “kicks” and one time she said, “Well bet.” Unfortunately, like everything in Forspoken, Death quickly degenerates into satirical fodder, as Frey jokingly calls the child-killer a “child-killer herself,” which brings us back to square one: a two-dimensional adopted child with a rap sheet who swears a lot you’d think That “fucking” reward.

Photo: Luminous Productions/Square Enix

Forspoken’s final hours feature an odd difficulty curve, as I find myself completely destroying a few bosses before full dialogue can even begin, only to then encounter the great evil who, among other things, does a one-hit kill cleverly disguised as a scene. Fry prevails, of course, but for a character who spends most of the game loudly announcing that she doesn’t want to be a hero and doesn’t want to be a hero, I found her late-game centerpiece as the Savior hard to believe. However, the world that was plagued by blight needed to be saved. If the cuff fits, or some such adage.

Personally, I found myself most convinced by the game’s alternate ending, where you can return to New York without saving the world. A laughable cutscene accompanies the selection before the full credits roll, but it feels like a more honest conclusion to a character who, like me, was ready to work with Athena.

Forspoken will be released on January 24th on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code provided by Square Enix. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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