Overall, I was struck by the fact that this game - a rare action RPG (and an M-rated one, no less) starring a Black woman - is weirdly safe. When a gameplay demo was released in December, earlier concerns still hadn't really been addressed.Īfter playing the game myself, I can definitively say that if you were concerned about Forspoken being a mess of cliched writing, you're unfortunately not wrong. But rather than getting praise, the release of a trailer last year received derision from gamers who targeted the overly self-aware exposition in the voiceover. This was a big deal, because fewer than 8% of video game protagonists are Black women despite 73% of Black people identifying as gamers.

It wasn't until March 2021 that it officially became Forspoken and devs revealed that the protagonist would be a Black woman named Frey Holland, voiced by Ella Balinska (2019's Charlie’s Angels movie). When Forspoken, which was developed by Luminous Productions and published by Square Enix, was announced in 2020, using the placeholder title Project Athia, the game was shrouded in mystery. At that point, I didn’t know how much longer I could take it. This 21-year-old woman character was making me feel very, very tired, and it was only halfway into a game that took me 16 hours to complete. The whole exchange made me wince, because Frey’s response felt bizarrely cruel in context. She repeats his words on destruction and corruption in a nasally, self-important tone, and Cuff objects before mocking Frey's voice in turn.

You sound like a serial killer,' Frey snaps. 'Destruction and corruption are forms of creation in themselves,' he points out. Still, the morning after escaping a magical storm, her talking bracelet companion, Cuff, points out that there's something about the chaos spreading around them that seems aceful. She's been thrust into a world even crueler than the one she used to call home, and she isn’t happy about it. Over the course of Forspoken, now out on PlayStation 5 and PC, its protagonist, Frey Holland, is very angry. Prices are accurate and items in stock as of the time of publication. BuzzFeed may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page if you decide to shop from them.

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