If you’ve seen the recent reboot of the Charmed TV show, Cuff has the exact vibe of the irritating, supercilious Watcher who pretends to be woke while talking down to the three witches of colour in his charge. Cuff has the soul of a judgemental, casually sexist, upper-class alternate-universe Englishman, and appears to be the source of Frey’s power. That bracelet turns out to be Cuff, the magical equivalent of Clippy. Athia is a magical land afflicted with a kind of magical sickness, called The Break, that turns flora and fauna into either violent zombies or glowy purple trees/rocks.īefore she was sucked through the portal, Frey tried on a bracelet that she found in an abandoned building. After she conveniently hands off the care of her cat to the kindly judge who let her off (perhaps the most unrealistic scene in a game set largely within a magical alternate universe), she is sucked through a portal to Athia. She’s a young Black woman whose parents abandoned her at birth, and she’s fresh off a run-in with the law, followed by a more aggressive run-in with a violent gang. In Forspoken, you play as Frey Holland, a young New Yorker with a backstory ripped from one of the more mundane episodes of Law and Order. I will likely update this review during the week if I can force myself to endure more of it (maybe something really cool happens in the late game that makes the drudgery worth it?), but here are my thoughts on what I’ve played so far. Once you factor in how long games take to download on Australian internet, and my annoying need to sleep (and refusal to crunch to finish a mediocre game), I have only played around 5-6 hours of Forspoken so far.

On a related note, the codes for Forspoken, a game that is said to run for 30-40 hours, were sent out to most reviewers yesterday morning, less than a day before the embargo lifted at 1 AM AEDT today (an hour after the game became available on digital storefronts in Australia). They’re not always right, of course, and this isn’t a hard rule.

The rule of thumb: the earlier you get the game, and the earlier the review embargo is before launch, the better the company thinks it is. Allow me to lift the curtain for a moment, friends: Normally, when a publisher has faith in a game, the PR team will send out code a week or two ahead of release so reviewers can play through it properly, marinate in the story, and then write a thoughtful review.

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