Forspoken’s story has a sassy cuff, big writers, and oddly stiff faces

During tonight’s PlayStation livestream, we got a longer look at Square Enix’s Forspoken. It’s a third-person, open world action game in which you can go free running across a fantasy world, but the new trailer focuses on combat and on protagonist

Here’s the trailer:

What a beautiful world! What exciting traversal! What sparkly combat! And what stiff, static faces. Luminous have previously made a big deal about their cast and their motion capture, and the faces themselves do look lovely and detailed. But then they don’t seem to move.

I like everything else about how the game looks, though. Forspoken stars Frey, a down-on-her-luck woman living in New York City. She dreams of escaping to somewhere with cleaner air, when she is suddently transported through a portal to the world of Athia. Here she’s joined by a sassy talking bracelet, gains a bunch of magical abilities, and gets in trouble with dragons.

The dialogue isn’t great, but the vocal performance by Ella Balinska is, and there is a surprising paucity of sucked-into-fantasy-land stories within games. I’m also hopeful that the writing will be better in the game proper, given the PlayStation blog reports that the writing team includes Uncharted scribe Amy Hennig.

Forspoken will launch in spring 2022 via Steam, the Windows Store and the Epic Games Store.