Wordless test on PS5: wet firecracker

Frey, forgive me, but we must now part ways. First of all, I appreciated your freshness and frankness, sincerity and flexibility. Even this common passion for cute cats was our real common ground. I wish our adventure could last longer. But I cannot follow you in all this imperfection. I was ready to publish this first meeting, which was not love at first sight. I even imagined this test forgotten, the name given to your epic, as a beautiful and grand declaration of love. It will do nothing but shine a light on your faults, which unfortunately are too many for us dates becomes idyll. Frank, forgive me.

forgotten It is the first age firecracker of 2023. However, on paper it had the skeleton of what would become an instant classic: a 100% new universe where the hero carried a priori charismatic (not entirely true), a studio that has everything to build after taking part in its preparation. Final Fantasy XV, promising graphics engine and editor – Square Enix – who knows how to do this when launching new licenses. For 100% new, this attraction should have spawned a project that has garnered praise. On arrival, forgotten nothing more than a pile of bad ideas resulting in an experience of endless mediocrity. For a game that dreams of being the successor to Alice in Wonderland, this creates a serious rabbit hole for us.

A to Z should be forgotten

forgotten tells us the story of Frey, an outcast from New York with a troubled past who wants to save enough money to escape his reality and run away with his cat Homer. Unfortunately, he will be caught in the kingdom of Athia, which is about to explode after a mysterious mist appears, corrupting even the four figures responsible for protecting the locals. Accompanied by a strange bracelet and talking a lot, Frey is not at the end of his surprises.

If you’ve read even three fantasy novels in your life, then you won’t be surprised forgotten. We’re clearly in the archetype of the heroine who comes out of nowhere and is suddenly forced to improvise as the savior of a people she doesn’t understand and doesn’t understand. We can predict the result in advance, because there is no directed effort to make everything more digestible and less generic.

Despite Frey’s constant insults (with a real appetite for the word “f*****”) and our lack of empathy for him, forgotten trying to hide his lack of personality. There’s also a real problem of tone: with overpowering sarcasm, the game says a lot for little that needs to be said. A plot that wants to be too uninhibited, especially with MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) gags, sabotages the installation of rare dramatic stakes. Because we don’t care about everything, we don’t want to believe anything anymore. Shame on fantasy.

Everything from the art direction (the appearance of the soldiers …) to the overall implementation, which ties everything and everything together, is a little unusual. worse, forgotten sometimes it feels like real mush, both artistically and graphically. For the exclusive PlayStation 5 (in the console segment), the name Square Enix is ​​far from ecstatic. Faces lack expression, backgrounds are ridiculous, some textures are hard to see… It’s a shame, because some visual effects are really worth seeing (to hell with visibility), other eye-popping details (near-ground textures, for example) are reprehensible). The next generation deposit is to look for the side of loading times, which is a real hyper reduced, and also feels good for DualSense. We thought so naively forgotten It would be one of the best looking games on the PS5. In particular, it is necessary to consider the position by choosing a performance-oriented display mode (at least it is liquid).

Slow gameplay behind complex systems

My career as a journalist specializing in video games has put me in contact with the worst in terms of video game production. Some of them I had to force myself to finish. forgotten It’s far from the worst experience I’ve ever played, but its frivolous gameplay seriously gave me a hard time. It was maybe the first time I didn’t want to start a game, even under professional pressure and knowing and finishing more failed games in the last decade. The finding is truly damning forgottenwhere everything is blurry – both in nested systems and in feelings.

The first hours forgotten they are dramatically discouraging. First there is Frey’s course of action. It seems to him that he is constantly full of debris on his ice skates, making his movements very uncertain, if not random. The Parkour system that allows him to hover and go anywhere doesn’t help. After ten hours of play (the time it took me to see the end credits) I still didn’t understand where the game was letting me go. Added to this chaotic action are battles that quickly become pointless except in the final moments (which some would go so far as to date). And you’ll be spared the hilarious infiltration sequence when Frey is inactive, letting the enemy off guard.

For several chapters, the game treads water and gives the impression that we always do the same thing when defending ourselves. Specifically, Frey has defensive spells and offensive powers, with one trigger assigned to each of the families (left for defense, right for attack). Then the developers multiply the complex mechanics. Colors add abilities, hyper-specific challenges must be completed to gain power, equipment can affect traits (you can even paint your nails!). Despite this improvement in multiple layers, we’ll still summarize the most unnecessarily long confrontations as: hammering the R2 trigger until it hurts your index finger (hint: consider reducing the power of adaptive triggers in the menus).

In short, behind the poorly sold depth, if not poorly delivered, forgotten it’s surprisingly empty. It makes so much available for so few purposes. Of all the possibilities the title struggles to offer, perhaps only the final boss is there to show a hint of potential. Do not rely on any charms for exploration: not only are the sets empty, but as a bonus, the few side quests they contain are not very interesting (lots of battles). Fortunately, there are cute little cats to cheer up fans of this sharp-eared animal. Without them, I probably would have quit without a second of regret.

Judgment

we liked it

• The hero is lovable
• TALKING CATS!
• A sense of power despite everything

We liked it less

• A game that lacks finishing touches
• There is no effort in the story
• It’s visually disappointing

We have a habit of thinking that everything in excess is insignificant. This is a brutal observation that applies to Forspoken. Stacking up bad ideas, this game full of promise becomes a brutal disappointment for a hero we want to love and a player we want to pity.

Forspoken isn’t good enough to make PS5 owners dream. His game isn’t flawless enough to recommend blindfolded. Finally, what he says is not emphatic enough to avoid the impression that he is talking too much to hide his unhappiness. The first haunting of 2023 has a name, and it fell to Forspoken.