Forspoken had a bit of a rocky start with some initial trailers that drew negative attention away from the game’s excellent parkour due to some awkward dialogue. However, the game deserves more praise than it received, especially when it comes to its unique, magical movement.
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Frey’s Unforgettable Journey Through Athia
Frey gets transported to a fantasy world shortly after the story begins, and once tutorials end, the land of Athia is yours to explore. The map is much larger than you’d expect, and Frey has nothing but shoes on her feet and a bit of magic to help her get from place to place. The wide-open areas aren’t exactly littered with buildings or closely built structures to latch onto, which rules out any kind of Spider-Man-like movement system. Instead, developer Luminous Productions decided to go for fancy footwork with stylistic flourishes.
The Magic of Movement
It may sound simple, but, essentially, Frey just sprints and hops across the giant map. These little marathons only get better as the game progresses, as she gains access to speed boosts, quadruple jumps, wall-scaling techniques, a flaming grappling hook, and even a magical surfboard made of water and ice.
Frey’s magic is split into four elements, starting with Earth, which introduces her base set of movement skills–Shimmy, Flow, and Leap–that the rest are then built from. Shimmy kicks off the ground to allow quick, well-timed hops, Flow is a continuous sprint with auto parkour to run around or over obstacles, and Leap scales sheer walls. Each new elemental skill tree brings a notable addition to your arsenal of traversal abilities to improve upon those three main starting points.
Fire adds a speed boost and a flaming whip that Frey uses to zip across gaps and swing through the air. Water provides a super jump, a magical surfboard, and a gravity-defying float to survive drops from high places. And, finally, the electricity skill tree unlocks a quadruple jump and short-range teleportation.
A Beautiful Blend of Flair and Speed
Any movement system in an open-world game that makes you think twice about fast traveling deserves a real shout-out. Forspoken’s open-world traversal may not be on par with Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2, but it still strikes a balance between flair and fluidity that is second to none, even above the other big-name parkour contender, Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Running, leaping, and surfing through Athia never got old, no matter how many hours I spent speeding around the somewhat sparse landscape. It’s a shame that the fantasy setting doesn’t feel more full of life, because Luminous Productions’ movement system deserves to exist inside a world that feels like it’s worth exploring.
Luminous Productions did announce that the studio will be shutting down and folding back into Square Enix, but I hope all of its hard work is not lost forever. We may never see a Forspoken sequel–I sincerely hope we do–but, at the very least, Square Enix needs to slap those magical parkour features in a new game to give us that fantastic free-run feeling once again.