So About That PS5 ‘Forspoken’ Demo
Forspoken
Square Enix
After documenting Forspoken’s wildly strange PC requirements and general malaise about the demo, I hopped in to play the thing myself yesterday on PS5. It’s pretty short, unless you purposefully ditch the objectives and explore as much as you can, albeit the game will throw up invisible walls preventing you from doing so.
My impressions, even post-demo patch which was supposed to fix some things, are largely underwhelming. This Square Enix PS5 release feels like it’s going to be average at best, or at least in one aspect, outright unbearable.
We’ll just start with the worst thing, the dialogue. Even barely getting a glimpse at the actual story, I cannot state strongly enough how poor the writing already feels even when it’s just banter between the lead spellcaster played by Ella Balinska and her talking magic cuff who sounds like JARVIS from Iron Man. The idea here is that Balinksa’s character has been transported to this mystical fantasy realm from modern day New York City, and as such, has a 21st century personality and vocabulary. But this is Square Enix writing that concept, which leads to such lines like:
CUFF: “You’ve picked up some new consumables.”
BALINKSA: “I’ll try not to consume them all at once.”
What? Is that a joke? Between that, a lot of random swearing, and the fact that the cuff is programmed to jabber at you from the speaker on your controller, I would seriously consider playing this game on mute even after 45 minutes of this.
Forspoken
SE
Everything else is not as bad as the dialogue, but nothing is particular good either. I sort of enjoyed combat, as at least the visuals of the spell effects are cool. I like the idea of a game that requires you essentially to only use magic rather than being able to spec into melee or archery or whatever, and it seems like there will be a large amount of magic to wield here.
However, the combat system where you can only have two spells active at a time, and every time you want to switch you have a bring up a little quickwheel menu feels kind of exhausting. And while some encounters were fun, others did not seem particularly fleshed out, including the final boss the game presents to you, which was some sort of alligator creature that I found I could simply whack with a magic fire sword from the side while spamming cooldown support spells and it couldn’t really do anything to counter me and just sort of floundered around. Elden Ring, this is not.
It may be too early to fully judge the open world here. I liked ground-based traversal with “magic parkour” making me feel like I could get places pretty quickly. I unlocked a magic jump that felt a lot clunkier, however, as I tried to scale cliff faces with awkward hops and boosts, but perhaps you can upgrade it to suck less over time. In general, however, the world feels a bit lifeless, and the map was more or less just a dozen enemy clusters each standing around a singular chest waiting to be unlocked once you killed them all. I’m curious how things get deeper and more interesting from here, or if they do.
There are sparks of magic here, pun intended, but I can’t say this demo got my hyped for the full release, which is out in just a few days, meaning the idea of the demo sort of failed at baseline. I’m just not sure how this is gonna go here.
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