Forspoken (PC)

Forspoken is a Square Enix open-world action-RPG developed by Luminous Productions, released in January 2023. You play as Frey Holland, a young woman from New York who gets yanked through a magical cuff into Athia, a continent where a corruption called the Break has turned most of the land hostile and its rulers feral. On paper that is a solid premise: fish-out-of-water protagonist, dying fantasy world, creeping environmental horror. In practice, the execution is a lesson in squandered potential. The one area where Forspoken genuinely earns its keep is movement and combat magic. Frey's parkour system, called "magic parkour," lets you chain dashes, wall-runs, and leaps across the landscape at impressive speed, and once you unlock later spell trees it starts to feel rhythmically satisfying in a way that few action-RPGs manage. The spell variety is real: there are four distinct magic styles tied to different boss encounters, each with its own offensive, support, and traversal spells. Switching between them mid-fight while maintaining momentum is the closest Forspoken gets to a coherent design vision. If you are the kind of player who will spend an hour in a combat sandbox optimising cast rotations, there are about fifteen solid hours buried in here. The writing, though, is a persistent drag. The banter between Frey and her magical cuff companion Cuff was divisive from preview footage and the full game does not rehabilitate it. Much of the dialogue reads like a first draft that was never stress-tested against actual human ears. Frey's arc has emotional bones worth caring about - abandoned kid, chronic distrust, sudden power - but the script undercuts those beats with quips that land flat or feel tonally mismatched. For someone who cares about narrative payoff, this stings. Disco Elysium this is not, and BG3 it will never threaten. The worldbuilding around Athia and its corrupted Tantas (the boss rulers) has more texture than the surface dialogue suggests, but you have to work to find it in readable lore entries rather than cutscenes. Open-world design is the other structural problem. Athia is large and visually striking in places, but the map is packed with repetitive activities: clearing enemy clusters, collecting crafting materials, hitting optional dungeons that recycle the same rooms. If you enjoy thoroughgoing completionism this will feel like content. If you hate filler, you will start fast-travelling past ninety percent of it by hour ten. The PC port itself arrived with performance complaints at launch, including shader compilation stutters on some configurations, so check recent community reports before committing if you are on mid-range hardware. Who is Forspoken actually for? Action players who prioritise movement feel and spell-set experimentation over story cohesion can find genuine enjoyment here, especially at a reduced price. RPG players expecting meaningful choice, branching narrative, or writing that rewards re-reads should lower expectations significantly or look elsewhere. The bones of something interesting are present - a protagonist with a genuinely rough backstory, a magic system with real build variance, a world that suggests depth it rarely delivers. Square Enix had something here. It just needed another year and a script editor.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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