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--- I’ll start this off saying that that I don’t
like tearing into someone else’s hard work—it’s not how I generally operate on this channel,
and it doesn’t bring me any joy to do so. And if you stick around, you’ll see that what I’m about
to go into at the start here isn’t necessarily the entire picture. I have to say though… it took me
hours to not hate my time with Forspoken. I’m not talking casual disinterest here,
I’m talking about Square Enix’s latest… thing being so confusingly, compellingly
awful up front at least that, indeed, I couldn’t put the controller down. For one,
it simply took me that long to figure out what this game was actually going for – the languid
pacing of its opening chapters giving away very little as to what type of experience Forspoken is.
As much as my limited exposure to the title beforehand seemed to suggest a game focused on
movement I guess, what unfurled in those opening hours instead felt closer to the slowest game
of Serious Sam you’ve ever played, frequently interrupted by some weird alternate version of
Life is Strange Before the Storm meets David Cage. The resulting narrative, for several, several
hours, is every bit as grating as that concept sounds. The incessant banter you’re treated to
between protagonist and down-on-her-luck New York resident Frey, and the aptly-named Cuff
guiding her through this fantastical world she’s accidentally stumbled into, is what I can only
describe as, and I don’t use this term lightly, repellent—a collision of the two worst Redditors
you can think of, seemingly written with all the sincerity of a 2000s webcomic; the phrase
“well that was a thing that happened” given form. Now look, I’m aware that my tolerance for snark
might differ from others’, given my personal distaste towards the back and forths found
in Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, but if that thought crossed your mind for
even a second—that hey, he didn’t like a similar thing in this game that I liked,
so maybe I’ll actually enjoy it here… trust me, the levels of smarm here make the Guardians,
by comparison, seem like the most earnest group of happy time fun friends imaginable.
Every interaction (or hell, every non-interaction) generates some quip from Frey about how “urgh…
this healing potion tastes like fried crapola!” or “urgh is that a dragon?” or “urgh where can I get
a knish in this goddamn dump?” with your trusty cuff responding “urgh, I don’t even know what a
knish is,”; every single joke in those opening chapters (jokes that repeat constantly, by the
way) amounting to “anachronistic colloquialism? What could that possibly mean?” If you’re not into
that kind of thing, it is truly relentless. The thing is, the performance of the central
characters isn’t awful by any means—I actually found the actors did remarkably well with what
they were given—it’s just that early on, the writers seem to have precisely zero idea what
to do with this protagonist. With the misery of her living situation in our world I guess,
combined with her appreciation of the works of Lewis Carroll, it feels like the writers are
setting the scene for a main character whose wandering thoughts paint her as the hero of
her own adventure movie in her head—looking towards fantasy for any kind of escape from
the hardships of her normal life. It’s a pretty desperate loneliness on display here—with Frey
going from sarcastically regaling her cat with grandiose visions of faraway lands,
of being needed by everyone, to breaking down in a pretty raw way, in front of said cat.
It's just that, when she’s finally granted that escape from the drudgery, the day to
day struggle she is so eager to leave behind, there’s none of the excitement of witnessing
this whole new world with all its possibilities unravelling before her. But hey, this world is
also terrifying in its own way… which is why it’s surprising that there’s also very little shock or
fear of what she’s gotten herself into—the writers vacillating so wildly between portraying Frey as
a fish-out-of-water vs a cocky-but-competent, all-knowing wunderkind, that the result lands
awkwardly in the middle—two characters constantly butting heads with one another, whose sole
personality trait, for hours, consisting of smug indifference; irritation at the wonders in front
of our hero. She’s totally over it, man. Turns out that sentiment is totally
infectious—sending a cavalcade of thoughts spiralling through my head of “why is this
happening now,” “why did she do that, why didn’t she just use her powers there,” “wow
someone clearly thought that line was more of a zinger than it actually ended up,” and light,
light spoiler for the first twenty minutes I guess, skip to this timecode if you want
to avoid it for some reason, but “why can’t Frey just pick up the big bag of money in the middle of
a fire then go slowly look for her cat? Why can’t she do both? You gave me the option to pick it up,
right there! Just pick up the bag of money ya dafty! This could all have been
avoided! There’s no reason for this to exi-“ Smug indifference and irritation—a far cry from
the wonder the devs probably envisioned players experiencing when they were designing this world.
What’s more, you find a similar lack of coherent identity in the gameplay, with the staggering
volume of mechanical and systemic stuff thrown at you, initially coming across like a kid who’s
just mixed all the paint colours together—where, far from a vibrant canvas upon which everything
comes together and works in consort, you’re left with little but a goopy, grey mush.
At its core is a set of movement and shooting mechanics (with some melee thrown in for good
measure) that seek to incentivise speed, fluidity and creativity, as you launch yourself along its,
frankly, gargantuan open world (seriously, even with the speed you’re afforded, it would take
you a substantial amount of time to see all of it) using the power of the aforementioned snarky cuff.
But even before we get to the issues with those mechanics themselves—in terms of how fidgety Frey
can be to actually control, how trying to enter a doorway will send her flying off into the sky
upon the slightest hint of contact with an errant pebble, all hampered further by a,
shall we say, uncooperative camera—for a game so focused on flowing traversal,
you sure do spend a long time doing anything but that; being railroaded through what feel
like endless walk and talks, what you could loosely call stealth sections, and side quests
where you slowly chase cats and feed sheep while running aimlessly around the hub city of Cipal.
And when you do get loosed upon the outside world, it isn’t as simple as just running and
shooting—you’ve got to learn about managing attack spells in combat; support spells in
combat; the wide variety of resources to collect and manage; crafting materials;
collecting and upgrading cloaks and necklaces in order to boost the effectiveness of your powers;
the various incarnations of the Break, the ominous force corrupting the people and wildlife of Athia,
and learning how it affects your combat and traversal; upgrading your magic via a total
style-over-function readability nightmare of an interface; upgrading your magic again via
poorly-explained gameplay tasks; the nail polish system which, while potentially a genuinely novel
idea with which to convey some of the world’s unique character (and this is a world, mind,
with reams upon reams of lore—a lot of time was spent on this side of things)… immediately
becomes an afterthought when it comes to gameplay. Because that’s the thing here—none of it matters.
It’s just tutorial after tutorial, feature after feature heaped upon you that all amounts to pure
fluff. With so much stuff to keep an eye on at any given time during combat especially, it can be
hard to know if you’re actually playing Forspoken right, in the way it’s intended—but I can safely
say, in the 14 or so hours it took me to beat the game, I barely needed a fraction of what
Forspoken gave me in order to get by—the effects of painting your nails, the gear upgrades were
almost completely unnoticeable; I legitimately never had to craft a single thing other than
increased pouch capacity—I can’t fathom the function of most of these resources, where they
would even fit in amongst this systemic melange. All you really need to do is run and occasionally
shoot. Run past the enemies in the wild because they really don’t provide enough
XP or items to make farming them worthwhile, and occasionally shoot the ones you can’t get past.
Run and shoot. Run and shoot. Run… and shoot. Huh, I haven’t had to stop for a while now.
I haven’t heard Frey or Cuff comment on how the other is an idiot or how bored Frey is of these
otherworldly sights. This, this part of the game it’s taken forever to get to… maybe isn’t so bad.
Like I say, it took me a long time to not hate Forspoken. In other words,
despite everything I’ve talked about up to this point, all those very real problems… I
don’t hate Forspoken, at least not anymore. To be clear, don’t take this as me suddenly
turning around to give a glowing recommendation. When this game is bad, and it is for a long time,
it’s really bad. But that realisation of how vanishingly little of the stuff
thrown at you actually matters, is, in its own way, liberating—once the game truly opens up,
gets out of its own way, removes the shackles, you can sink into something
resembling a rhythm from time to time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awkward,
stilted rhythm to be sure—dictated as it is, in combat anyway, by Frey’s insistence on showing
off her acrobatic skills, in the same way Geralt might balletically swing his sword in The Witcher,
and it’s hindered by the aforementioned wild camera sometimes making it near-impossible to
tell what’s actually going on among the sparks, combined with one of the least dependable
lock-ons a game has ever presented me with. But again… it doesn’t really matter. On the
default normal difficulty, and outside of the mechanical quirks, the game is kind of
a breeze. As Frey’s powers develop with the plot, the moveset available to you increases,
giving you more fireworks with which to dazzlingly, mindlessly spam the
hordes of enemies you’re zipping around. And look, I wouldn’t normally do this,
but Forspoken isn’t the kind of game where enduring mechanical self-flagellation is
going to reap some kind of FromSoft-esque spiritual contentment—you know, the combat
itself isn’t anywhere near robust enough for that kind of focused self-improvement. That is to say,
far from just being an accessibility concern, the remarkably granular suite of balancing options
Forspoken has to offer really is your friend here—if for whatever reason you’re picking this
game up, don’t be afraid to go in and fine tune your experience to better fit your playstyle.
Auto-collecting items so you’re not having to grind to a halt and hammer on triangle to pick
up some largely pointless plants; auto-switching between support spells during cooldown so it’s one
less bad menu to interact with, allowing you to focus on attacking and dodging—this isn’t
a case of picking the easy mode or trivialising things (it’s all rather trivial to begin with).
These options just let me remove some of the frustrations, made the game flow more effectively,
so I could get back to rocketing across the occasionally impressive vistas,
picking up the Crackdown-esque mana orbs used to upgrade spells, and in
those moments, the game can be downright fun. But most importantly, these options allow you
to limit the back-and-forths between Frey and Cuff—it’s like they know. And suddenly… quiet.
Sweet, merciful quiet with which I can engage, reflect on what it is I’m doing—what Frey’s doing.
And with her dialogue not being so incessant… it meant I was more willing to focus on the substance
of what she’s actually saying; culminating at a point when she casually delivers a line during
exploration (which I won’t spoil outside of saying it’s about pancakes) where I don’t
know if it’s just a case of feeling so starved of relatable, likeable dialogue for that long,
any genuine attempt to have players connect with this character, but this one exchange hit me like
a ton of bricks; so free as it was of any failed sarcasm or self-satisfied edginess aimed at Frey’s
current predicament or the people surrounding her. It’s there you realise, clearer than at any point
in the preceding hours and chapters—Frey’s characterisation might be awful for the vast
majority of the time, but there is a character there—one with an arc that, with a bit more care,
with a bit more subtlety, could resonate with people far more than I expect she’s going to.
Let’s just say there are legitimate reasons why Frey has built up such a tough, albeit
insufferable shell, and while I can’t tell if this is deliberate or not on the part of the writers,
given how inconsistently this arc is still treated, especially in its later chapters,
Forspoken really plays the long game in gradually breaking down that shell, shard
by excruciating shard, to the point that, after a while… dare I say… I felt for her situation.
The sheer amount of time it takes to get to that point where she’s not quite as irritated,
as smug or as indifferent as she is for so much of Forspoken’s runtime, rendering a few of the
game’s big plot revelations (predictable as they might be) as surprisingly impactful,
given how pointed they are, how deeply they dig at Frey’s obvious issues with trust and abandonment,
and playing on her latent feelings of guilt and shame. I’d never go as far as to call her likeable
by any means, but she really goes through it, man—she gets hit from every angle with this stuff.
Look, at the end of the day, if I had to give Forspoken a score, it would probably be a 3/5.
But that is one of the most loaded 3/5s you can possibly imagine—not the average or the mediocre
or the middle of the road 3/5 (Forspoken is anything but those adjectives) but rather
a game that is as surprisingly neat as it is captivatingly terrible. And funnily enough, the
game that comes to mind in that regard is Final Fantasy XV, another Square Enix joint, and one
that functions remarkably similarly to this title. It’s got a whole host of extraneous RPG features I
categorically couldn’t care less about; it’s got floaty, trivial combat that that I also described
as Witcher-like; it has a gargantuan open world; and importantly, it has a story with insane
structural issues and characters spouting awkward, stilted dialogue that should have me wincing… and
yet I have a lot of really fond memories of my time with Final Fantasy XV—I genuinely think
about that game all the time. I warmed to the characters, the bond they shared, despite their
odd presentation and daft plot motivations. I guess what I’m saying is that games don’t
need to be perfect to have an impact on people, far from it; sometimes those odd and janky and
messy games—even if their constituent parts might be considered “bad” by conventional
metrics—can nonetheless be the ones that truly burrow their way into your brain.
Now I’m not saying that as a means of recommending Forspoken to you—I don’t
think this is going to have nearly the same impact on me as Final Fantasy XV did (I mean,
like I say, at least that game had a central bond you could gravitate towards, that held the whole
thing together, which is a far cry from anything that Forspoken has to offer in that regard).
But say you’re really excited for Forspoken, you’ve got it pre-ordered for whatever reason
(don’t pre-order games), but who’s to say this couldn’t be that exact kind of experience for
you. 14 hours and over 2500 words later, I can’t tell whether I like Forspoken or not, it’s that
much of a mess… and in an industry where so many titles fail to get me feeling much of anything,
that Forspoken could leave me so stumped both as to its wild failings as well as the few surprising
successes that manage to peek through the debris… well, there is a part of me that can appreciate
that fact at the very least. ---
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