We’re in the dark about a lot of things we’d usually know about a game such as Forspoken at this stage of its development: the new parkour-them-up action-adventure game that is rearing to release on January 24, 2023. This lack of knowledge about more than just skin-deep things, ie. about the way the game will actually look, feel, and perform on PC is due to the fact that Square Enix did not provide early review codes to gaming news outlets.

Daan Koopman spent 4 hours with the title, and posted about it on Twitter, along with a short video we have some thoughts about.
Koopman’s words didn’t do much to inspire confidence in the title, and the 46-second-long video was somewhat hard to watch because of the unpolished dialogue between the two heroes, the quality of Frey’s motion capture, and the general feel of the showcase.

Played about 4 hours of Forspoken. It took a little while to get going, but the game is going okay. I have to adjust to its systems a little bit. Fast paced parkour and casting magic spells? There is a lot to take in. Forspoken has the open world tropes like heaving collecting… pic.twitter.com/E254oCV7lt

— Daan Koopman (@NintenDaan) January 22, 2023

Not exactly awe-inspiring musings of a person who enjoyed a highly-anticipated title we know so little about.

Of course, Koopman isn’t the top authority when it comes to all things Forspoken, but the general vibe doesn’t seem to be in the game’s favor. Many are advising against pre-ordering (always a good idea in our book), and lamenting the forced dialogue but we’re having trouble being optimistic about Forspoken’s actual performance on PC given its super high recommended system requirements:

Recommended:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows® 10 64-bit (After November 2019 Update) or Windows® 11 64-bit
• Processor: AMD Ryzen™5 3600 (3.7 GHz or better) / Intel® Core™ i7-8700K (3.7GHz or better)
• Memory: 24 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD Radeon™ RX 6700 XT 12GB / NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 3070 8 GB VRAM
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 150 GB available space
• Additional Notes: 1440p 30fps, SSD 150GB

These graphics and RAM requirements should produce a 4K experience at 60fps, but the additional notes clearly state that all we’ll get is 1440p at 30fps, in exchange for 150GB of disk space.

All this to say that Forspoken will go the way of Cyberpunk 2077, or worse. You read it here, folks. However, Forspoken is set to release tomorrow, 24 January 2023, so we may just be proven wrong, which will be a welcome change.