Forspoken looked pretty good when we played it in late 2021, but a trailer that dropped in August 2022 left a very different and much less positive impression. Some of the edgy dialog, which commentators on Twitter have compared unfavorably to Joss Whedon, quickly dominated the conversation, while the PlayStation 5 reviews that began flowing yesterday found Forspoken to be, as PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor put it, "bullseye average."
We don't have our own Forspoken review up yet—no pre-release PC codes were offered for review, so Mollie is still working on it—but you can still get a sense of what it's all about courtesy of the Forspoken demos that are now available on Steam, Epic, and the Microsoft Store.
Details about what the demo offers aren't offered on the storefronts, but Square Enix confirmed that it's the same as the PS5 demo that came out last month.
"This specially-crafted crafted demo gives you the opportunity to really dig into the game’s fluid traversal and take on some truly monstrous enemies in combat," Square Enix said in December. "Don’t worry about spoilers—there’s no story in this taster. It’s more about giving you a chance to engage with the super-satisfying gameplay!
"It drops you in Avoalet’s Water Garden—a beautiful area of Athia with plenty of space to run around and practice your parkour abilities… and a lot of snarling, corrupted beasts to engage in battle. You’ll be given five main objectives to complete, but there’s plenty of scope to just explore and dig into the entertainingly deep mechanics too."
It's a beefy download for a demo, clocking in at roughly 43GB on Steam. It may be worth the effort, though, especially if you're not 100% confident in the capabilities of your PC. As we noted when the system requirements came out last week, the minimum spec—including a GeForce GTX 1060 CPU and 16GB RAM—will get you 30 fps at 720p; if you move up to 1440p, still at 30fps, you're going to need an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7 8700K, an AMD RX 6700 XT or Nvidia RTX 3070, and 24GB of RAM, which is both steep and weirdly specific. Given that, an opportunity to see how Forspoken will run on your rig without having to rely on Steam's refund policy is probably a good thing.
Forspoken on PC is available now for $70/£65/€80. We'll have our own review of the PC version posted soon.
