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Last night, as tie-in promotion with the Game Awards broadcast, Square Enix released a sizeable demo for their upcoming game Forspoken on PS5.
It lets you jump right into a special chunk of action pulled from the middle of the game and tweaked specifically for this demo. As such, progress does not carry over to next month’s full release. You play as Frey, a modern-day woman who gets sucked into a weird magical fantasy world and learns to cast powerful spells with the help of a talking bracelet thing.
The demo features a large parcel of open world to sprint and parkour around in, along with five tasks to complete that feel more like small side activities than representative samples of the game’s main content. Still, you can fully test out the combat, traversal, and menu systems. You can easily expect to play the demo for at least a full hour even if you try to rush through the content.
After making my way through this sampler, the game I’m reminded of most is Dynasty Warriors 9, of all things. Both games feature vast open worlds full of brawling-intensive combat encounters that you just sort of happen upon. The world in Forspoken echoes the somewhat lifeless-but-pretty scenery of DW9 too, and the combat encounters have more enemies in them than I was expecting.
