Behind the wisecracks, Forspoken is a messy, interesting action-RPG
A while back, Square Enix released a new ad for Forspoken, the open-world action game due for release on Jan. 24 next year. Games Twitter took one look at the ad and decided it was the most irritating thing that it had ever seen. The dialogue in the short trailer, delivered by the heroine Frey (Ella Balinska) — a young New Yorker transposed to a magical realm — was streetwise and quippy in a grating, corporatized way. With its uptalk, and its clumsy, sanitized slang (“freaking,” “jacked-up”), it made a meal of crashing the game’s exuberant fantasy setting into some marketing department’s idea of youthful insouciance and irony, a formula lazily copied from old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It did not play well.
Although social media’s hatred of video game wisecracking has since moved on to High on Life, this unfortunate bit of marketing has now become the entire narrative about Forspoken. So a chance to sit down and play a demo of the game for 90 minutes — an opportunity I had recently at Square Enix’s offices in London — is a chance to compare what the game actually is with what it is trying, so painfully hard, to be.
Well, up to a point. The caveat is that this was a bespoke demo designed to show off Forspoken’s gameplay and systems, and it was completely shorn of story. There were a few objectives to tick off, but no story missions, no cutscenes, and nothing in the way of context for the action. It was rather like fooling around in an open-world game between quests, exploring the map, grinding enemies, and finding points of interest. This is the obverse of how most developers choose to show off their games (i.e., with their showiest, most scripted, and most contained missions). Whether or not it was prompted as
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