The performances throughout can actually be quite good, even when the writing leans heavily into telling rather than showing – but none of it is ever very fun to listen to thanks to long, awkward pauses between lines and occasional crowd noise or background music that’s so loud it drowns out everything being said.īetween visits to Cipal, you’re generally given a target on your map and free rein to get as distracted as you’d like along the way. I don’t think the Cipal sections would have bothered me if conversations and cutscenes didn’t have such a stilted, strangely low-budget feel to them.

This dynamic never really changes, even as Frey slowly goes through the motions of her predictable hero’s journey, and it is always exhausting.įorspoken is essentially split into two parts: talking to townsfolk and doing mundane side quests like feeding sheep or chasing cats in Cipal, and making your way to some specific point of interest on its absurdly large map to further the story. Frey is surprisingly vocal about her disdain for most of the tasks Forspoken asks you to complete, and Cuff constantly belittles her for no good reason in a manner that I think is supposed to come off as friendly ribbing but instead feels like awkwardly watching a couple argue at a dinner party. That means the snippy banter between Cuff and Frey come off as obnoxious rather than endearing. The most egregious example of this is the chemistry between Frey and Cuff, which frames most of the campaign as a sort of buddy cop movie but spends almost no time showing these two unlikely partners grow closer after their introduction.Īctual bonding apparently happens off-screen, and this story – which is mostly told through exposition dumps between large stretches of open-world exploration – felt fairly rushed across the 15 hours it took me to beat the campaign as a result. That’s not so offensive on its own, but the real crime is how poorly the writing establishes any of its characters and the relationships between them – it’s like it constantly assumed I must already be invested in these people in a way it never actually made me. Forspoken’s world and story are about as bland as they come, equal parts predictable and forgettable.

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