Forspoken (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): January 24, 2023
- Release Date (EU): January 24, 2023
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Developer: Luminous Productions
- Genres: Action, Role-play
- Also For: Computer
Game Features:
Forspoken is the latest offering from Square Enix that pushes the PS5 hardware (unbelievably) into its third year of maturity. Set in the fantasy world of Athia you, Frey Holland, are tasked with finding a way home while becoming familiar with your harsh new surroundings and battling ferocious beasts.
The Story begins in New York, with Frey busted for doing petty crimes and the Judge, seemingly offering you an olive branch and giving you a chance to redeem yourself and turn your little orphan life around. Once you leave the court, you begin the cycle of learning the controls, and mechanics of the game, but it becomes immediately apparent that the game is incredibly.. generic...
My first gripe stemmed from the graphic settings, it was not smooth and crisp, instead, it was juddery in motion, so I opted for ray-tracing settings with motion blur, to get what I felt was the best framerate-to-quality ratio when twirling my camera around to take in the surroundings. You start on the streets of New York with Christmas lights streaming across the trees lining the avenues. It looks great when static, but in motion, not so much. it has to be said that the loading times are speedy, which is some silver lining, especially when loading back into your save game.
With what appears to be a Miles Morales-styled city surrounding you, as a day-one PS5 adopter: you also instantly expect more granular detail, more wow factor, better lighting, and less muddy repetition. When I say repetition I mean the flagrant laziness of using the same models or texture repeatedly. I stumbled around the streets, and peered into a shop, outside I found a Christmas tree with the full accoutrement surrounding it, presents, baubles, and tinsel, it's great.. but just 50 meters down the road there is a giant version of that exact same Christmas tree model, in the exact same configuration, and the exact same colours, just blown up 400% in scale to be the main event everyone is looking at in town.
Ok the odd repetition, sure, its a small area, perhaps its a fluke, a one-off, a rarity: but then I turn around and look down the street, to see not two or three, but five of the exact same car, in the same colour in the same stretch of road. New York taxis in patterns and abundance make sense, but five identical grey pickup trucks make zero sense and really destroy any sense of incremental worldly individuality that is being crafted at this moment. Some could argue that the NY scenery is only used for the brief 20-minute introductory section and then the rest of the game is essentially Athia, but this section sadly feels like you're in the Wish.com version of the Matrix game demo.
Frey's troubles then amp up with her being assaulted by the ominous "Mr Giggan's" street thugs that she is trying to avoid in order to stay on the straight and narrow, however, Lisa and Chrissy are out for blood due to Frey not delivering on the stolen car she apparently agreed to obtain for them. I enjoyed this interaction, I liked the character's expressions, the clothing, hair and the motion at play with Frey getting a beating and being held at gunpoint, but then the game progresses and begins with its parkour agenda.
A slew of running and dodging, hiding and vaulting ensues, and you eventually make your way home, which is very very humble, and just when you think you can relax with a copy of Alice in Wonderland and your pet cat you wake up to your home bellowing with flame and a message from the thugs letting you know that they just found out where you live and you're in real trouble now.
Frey ditches her cat on the Judge from earlier, and in a life-affirming moment of utter despair decides to climb a tower and re-consider her life which is now in tatters. Whilst up on the tower she spots something glinting in a warehouse, you do a little more parkour and sneak into the building to snarf the swag: only the swag is sentient, and it sends you through a portal into another world.
It's heavy drama, and it's really dark, but during this moment of wormhole-bending fantasy something crossed my mind: did Frey actually die in the house fire? Are any of the proceeding actions real or are they just figments of her smoke-addled brain chemistry while she is actually perishing in her burnt-out flat? Seems suss to me given the obvious Alice in Wonderland reference and the proceeding fantasy settings and themes. Is it just Frey's ascent to "Heaven"?
No, I'm clearly overthinking, but there are definitely other nods to Lewis Carol's classic, but I'll let you decide for yourself on those.
Controlling the game is pretty standard, with most of the usual stick/button fodder you would expect but with the bespoke actions of the Circle button initiating and extending your parkour flow of locomotion, the Triangle button performing general interactions, R1 and R2 controlling magical attacks, L1 and L2 controlling supportive attacks, and combinations of L2 and R2 performing Surge Magic or magical abilities you have currently selected.
There are four types of magic in Forspoken, denoted by differing colours depending on their elemental ilk. Frey seems to have very earthy spells that incorporate rocks, minerals and plants, and in total Frey has access to 20 passive/attack/support/movement spells of her own to unlock, with various levels of ability to attain. Beyond this, you can learn 16 water-based spells from Prav, 17 fire-based ones from Silas, and an additional 18 lightning-based spells from Olas, so there is quite a lot to dial in, with limitless combinations to incapacitate elemental foes quickly, but it will take a heck of a lot of XP to unlock them all!
All of these can also be enhanced through Health, Stamina, Defense and Healing by obtaining better cloaks, upgrading pouches and adorning other jewellery via the crafting tables scattered around the world. You can also change out your nail paint to more ferocious designs that provide various buffs and nerfs, per hand, by discovering them. And yeah; I said nail paint, I meant nail polish, but it's out there now.
Battling enemies is a little like in a souls game where you move around, find some smaller fodder enemies to hammer and eventually find a bigger, badder, boss enemy to sink your teeth into. In all, there are over 35 "miniboss" enemies to tackle, several "Breakbeasts" and the four supreme bosses, the Tantas, to defeat, each with varying degrees of difficulty, but none will truly tax you too much.
The opening scenes in Athia allow you to learn finishing moves, and general tactics to rid the environment of the corrupted fauna. I managed to take down a pack of befouled bears relatively easily by dodging and blasting, and eventually finished the final haunted brown one with a filthy WWE-style elbow drop. Following this, you'll encounter your first real miniboss: the dragon. This also serves as a tutorial mission within which you can learn to dodge, find blindspots and engage in more powerful attacks, levelling up your mana and building a better repertoire of attacks and spells.
One other example is the lesser Deinosuchus which resides in the Labyrinth East Dungeon. Though it's menacingly water-born, it really didn't take much thinking, or doing, to blast it to high heaven with the triggers and simple combinations of magic spells. I felt like it should have been more involved and forced me to think more, but it was a matter of grinding it down, dodging and blasting, and rather disappointingly: it really didn't take long at all.
Your general traversal around the environments is pretty slick, with flowing animations that lead from one "push off" to rolling across a surface or sticking a "superhero landing". Initially in the opening sequences that serve to teach you how to "parkour" I was concerned that the flow of action felt like gravity was an afterthought and that you had way too much hang time, and I think I was correct in this assumption that something feels REALLY off at first. However, progressing through the game and handling Frey's range of movement, taking into consideration her supplemental magical abilities and her expanding parkour prowess makes that feel just about right in the mythical environments around Cipal.
The landscapes and lush grassy meadows surrounding Cipals main hub are incredibly picturesque and yet retain that overwhelmingly goofy colour palette and lighting. Foliage is almost tactile as it bends and sways beneath you, and architecture and geological geometry that is visible from miles away gradually comes into view nicely and give you the feeling of adventuring along the way to get somewhere. It's also because the speed at which you travel means it takes you a while to get anywhere.
Atmospheric effects such as wind, mist and the overbearing "malignant miasma" serve to make the scenery all the more enigmatic and dramatic. I have to say that the facial animations combined with the hair technology and the wind simulation lead to some pretty amazing moments where Frey is walking through the barren townships with stormy, blustery, weather conditions and her hair and the lighting pay off to create such a theatrical look. Conversely, when bowling around the scenery at pace, there tend to be a few framerate issues surrounding particular areas of the maps that have a slight stutter and a little laggy feel to them. As mentioned at the beginning I had to shift the graphic settings to ray trace in order to get a nice balance of motion smoothness and visual quality, but trying out the other graphic modes in the larger areas made me want to go back to the trusty ray tracing image quality. Perhaps if I had a 120hz TV I could benefit from 40fps instead of 30fps, but for now, these are the tools I'm working with.
The general environments look nice in terms of detail and design, but unfortunately, there have been some pretty poor choices when it comes to illuminating the game. The Luminous engine simply blooms the heck out of every surface, bathing it in light that is unforgiving to your retinas, and honestly reminds me of an even starker, more blown-out version of Mirrors Edge's stylistically minimalist aesthetic from the PS3, I mean, what happened to light bounce, shadows on interiors are either missing, or just plain wrong, and heck even details like door-frames and the dingy areas that should appear darkest are lit with some inexplicably odd blue glow.
Other areas see the entire dungeon or area of interest bathed in one colour light, which overpowers the scenery detail and there simply aren't any light sources that would be causing that area to be lit that colour, but I suppose it does serve to visually remind you where you are, so in future, you can say ah "I need to be in that red area again to get X item or see X person". As a bewitched fantasy game, I suppose the developers have simply played with ideas and formulated that this looks good to them, personally, I found it a bit distracting and visually too much in some areas. The labyrinths for example are coloured, and it detracts from the ambience in my opinion.
Some "theatrical quality" also lost me a little in a few places, and probably only because I expected a bit more from a "next-gen" title. One such series of moments that completely broke my immersion when I first set foot in Athia was that Cuff (the aforementioned sentient swag that Frey "obtained" from that warehouse) has strong Jarvis from Ironman vibes, and when talking and listening to the vambrace, you simply cannot walk and talk at the same time.
Why is beyond me, perhaps it's to pace the opening sequences out so that the player is forced to listen and absorb whatever the hell it was babbling on about, or perhaps it's an oversight left in there from a previous concept? Either way, I just wanted to get on and explore while I listened in, after all, I have years of experience with doing exactly that in almost every other game I have played in the past. Standing around talking/listening to Cuff occurs too often throughout and only breaks any momentum you are building by forcing you to stand on the spot and select each option to listen to.
Another Cuff-related baffling moment is when Frey shows Cuff her phone at the beginning, she actually doesn't produce an object from her pocket. Instead, she stands there with one arm out, and an awkward moment ensues where Cuff appears to be interacting with her phone, but nothing is actually happening. I know it's petty, and I know it's minor, but I would think that by now that's totally achievable in an in-game animation; to portray the thing that it's actively telling you it's doing.
While Forspoken isn't at all a terrible game, not by any chalk, there is nothing here that will truly bowl you over or leave you feeling satiated. The dialogue while immersive and interesting is drawn out and has weird long moments of dead air where the scene could have been edited down by a good few seconds after the last words have been uttered. Stealth sections you have to endure in escaping your initial incarceration are entirely cringeworthy, and the overly frequent exchanges between Frey and Cuff are, to be honest: annoying at best (though this can be altered in the accessibility settings).
This game feels unfinished in places too, where even doing little pointless sidequests to farm mana, you effectively get an excruciatingly short full-screen alert saying "Sheep fed" or "cat found" or something utterly-mind-numbingly mundane that could have been a simple pop-up notification in the corner to let you know it's done and dusted, and you can now move on and explore more.
Forspoken just needed more time to dial down the lighting choices, bake those good ideas to perfection and shrug off those cringy, unpolished ideas that somehow still made it in. The character design, textiles and materials on characters' clothing along with their artefacts are insanely detailed and incredibly high-definition, but the background detail in some places seems rudimentary and bafflingly low poly with bland textures, poor detailing and awful-looking emitter effects to boot.
This game is 100% worth a play but not for the nearly sixty sheets asking price, wait until it's discounted or available on PS-Plus and then definitely check it out for yourself.
Verdict
- Great sense of discovery and progression
- The characters and their hair and garments look incredibly detailed
- Elemental particle effects look superb
- Great voice acting for the most part
- You can turn down Frey/Cuff's interruption frequency in accessibility settings!
- It's definitely open for a sequel.
- Bland repetitive models and textures
- Adaptive trigger effects don't feel great
- Awkward dead-air moments
- "Stealth" sections are cringe
- Horrible lighting throughout