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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