Forspoken

Forsaken, forestalled, for real!

- Jess Kinghorn

Playing Luminous Productions’ open world tale of a young woman torn from New York and thrown into the magical land of Athia, we keep wanting to write fanfic. 

Take that Tanta boss fight and make it protagonist Frey’s introduction to Athia, actually hint at that heel turn way earlier, throw in more meaningful glances between Frey and her one Athian ally, Auden – now kiss. Uh… all of that is to say, it’s an experience that demands a significant rewrite.

It commits almost every storytelling sin you could think of: endless lore formatted horribly and squirrelled away in your codex; long corridors of exposition; a twist we saw coming an Athian mile off that is then over-explained via walking simulator – the list is long even before we get to the winking dialogue.

To be crystal-clear, neither leading lady Ella Balinska, her right hand co-lead Jonathan Cake, nor any other single performer is the problem here. Each one is doing their best with the material they’ve been given, though unfortunately they’ve not been given much to work with.

If this were a film, you could easily point at the cuts between shots from the original production and the ones from reshoots. For instance, in more incidental cutscenes – the ones where fresh enemies stiffly lumber into frame, or NPCs exposit at you while not so subtly turned away from the camera, or scenes lack key foley sound effects for some reason – the direction often has all the grace of a PS3 game’s.