Forspoken is not my game of the year, I'd be shocked if it's anyone's. The maligned open-world RPG took its licks at the beginning of the year, and honestly from long before that, as 10-second clips were dissected out of context. I'm not going to talk about the dialogue discourse beyond I think the dialogue is okay. Forspoken is destined to be reassessed in 3-5 years and diagnosed as "not that bad." It's really not that bad. We do have to talk about race though.
love this! There's a lot of things that have been bouncing around in my head about Alan Wake 2 regarding race also. There's some very explicit call outs regarding race in the game and they feel disingenuous given all the time and space outside of those moments, but during the moments I had some positive feeling. But then the binary of everything being totally fine all the time and then this character randomly brings up race feeds into the racist idea of Black people making up their problems out of nowhere. I don't think Remedy did it well, but they did try, and that might be worse? Not sure. Great read on Forspoken though. It's all a reminder why I try to just play smaller/indie games.
love this! There's a lot of things that have been bouncing around in my head about Alan Wake 2 regarding race also. There's some very explicit call outs regarding race in the game and they feel disingenuous given all the time and space outside of those moments, but during the moments I had some positive feeling. But then the binary of everything being totally fine all the time and then this character randomly brings up race feeds into the racist idea of Black people making up their problems out of nowhere. I don't think Remedy did it well, but they did try, and that might be worse? Not sure. Great read on Forspoken though. It's all a reminder why I try to just play smaller/indie games.