Square Enix's Forspoken gets a May 2022 release date
Leaping out of cover next spring
Forspoken, a game whose name I will never pronounce correctly but was once known as Project Athia, finally has a concrete release date. Announced tonight at The Game Awards, Square Enix's big action RPG adventure will be hitting PC on May 24th 2022. I guess that technically still counts as 'spring' and therefore doesn't constitute a delay on its previous launch window, but it sure is a lot closer to summer than I was expecting. In any case, there's a shiny new trailer with some very hammy villains to enjoy at the same time.
Forspoken is the next game from Luminous Productions, the studio that brought us Final Fantasy XV. Despite sharing the same eye for realism as Noctis and his boyband pals, Forspoken looks to be a very different flavour of action RPG. It puts you in the shoes of New Yorker Frey Holland, who suddenly finds herself alone and under attack from several fierce-looking dragons in the fantastical world of Athia one day. Seriously, I've heard of the urban jungle, but this really does take the cake.
In the new trailer, we learn a bit more about the role Frey will play in this new world. Despite being labelled as 'hellspawn' by an angry-looking priest (all right, mate) and deemed unable to survive the corruption spreading through the land, Frey agrees to help the last remaining citizens of Athia get some answers about why their world's dying.
Turns out she's not so helpless after all, as she not only has the ability to jump leaps and bounds through the very lovely looking landscape (not to mention surf through it on a crystalline hoverboard), but she can also fire bursts of energy out of her hands, conjure giant flaming death swords, wield a bow, command the elements... It looks like a lot of fun.
Frey also turns invisible at one point, but I'm hoping this doesn't mean there are insta-fail stealth sections involved, because we all know they are the absolute worst. That said, I'm not sure it's worse than that bloke's evil cackling laugh at 1:13. Jeepers. What a scream.
Flashy combat (and terrible laughs) aside, it's Forspoken's traversal system that most intrigues me. It looks like there's an element of grappling around the landscape, but I'm curious to know what it all feels like under the thumbs. Jogging round the plains of Final Fantasy XV was always a little bit more of a chore than I wanted it to be all those years ago, although some of Frey's moves do look reminiscent of Noctis' teleport ability in battle.
Fingers crossed some of my old FFXV muscle memory returns when Forspoken launches on Steam, the Microsoft Store and the Epic Games Store on May 24th 2022.
We stayed up late to cover the PC gaming news at the marketing extravaganza: hit our The Game Awards tag for everything, or skip to Every trailer at The Game Awards 2021.