Forspoken is an action role-playing game developed by Luminous Productions and published by Square Enix. You play as Frey a young New Yorker that discovers a bracelet that wraps around her arm porting her to a fictional land of Athia. The bracelet she names Cuff talks to her through out the game and gives her the ability to cast powerful spells and use magic to traverse the landscapes of Athia.
As you progress through the game you start to unlock abilities and upgrades to enhance the gameplay. One of first things you unlock is the ability to parkour, holding down circle while moving in any direction will have you gliding through Athia with some flashy moves. You can unlock up to four styles of magic that you can easily swap through and upgrade as you play and gain experience points. The combat system felt lackluster and repetitive early on but got better as you progress in the game with more magic and upgrades unlocked.
The story and dialogue didn’t really keep my attention like I hoped. We didn’t get enough back story to Frey prior to her being ported to Athia and the back & fourth between her and Cuff could be a bit over the top at times. The open world of Athia felt like there should be more to do and the side quests were repetitive.
Forspoken Steam Deck Performance
The performance of Forspoken is pretty tough and feels unoptimized especially for a device like the Steam Deck. The game is in need of an update for performance but in the mean time I tried every trick in the book to get some type of stability and performance gains.
The first thing I did was install CryoUtilities. The rest of our in game settings could be found on our side bar to the right of this article (if you’re on desktop) or at the bottom of this article (if you’re on mobile).
Even with all those things done including putting most of the game settings on low, the game struggles from frame drops to low 20 fps from as high as 40 fps throughout making it a tough play and something I cant really recommend if you’re on the Steam Deck.
Update:
- Patch 1.02 added fixes for Certain technical issues occurring on Steam Deck and Performance and stability improvements on Steam Deck.
After update 1.02 I was able to get something close to a stable 30 fps depending on the area with our tweaks and settings.
Our in game settings could be found on our side bar to the right of this article (if you’re on desktop) or at the bottom of this article (if you’re on mobile).
Thank you to Square Enix for providing us with a key to review this game.
