As a result, the world felt utterly lifeless and dead, which, I suppose, can be explained in-lore as a result of the Break. What did set off some red flags was the complete lack of any NPCs or characters whatsoever throughout the entirety of the demo. Yes, the 1-minute narration is essentially all the plot you get, but I don’t mind that too much since the point of a demo isn’t to be story-focused. This cataclysm explains why there’s nobody around and so many monsters and annoying bird enemies.

There’s something about a Break in the world of Athia, too. It starts with a generic narration of the basic premise: an annoying New Yorker girl is isakaied into a fantasy world, with a talking cufflink giving her supernatural parkour abilities. The demo, understandably, doesn’t give too much of this away. The next aspect that many are curious about is the story. There’s an option to turn down the frequency of the banter, but it doesn’t save the poor presentation of the characters so far. Frey constantly comes off as immature and whiny, and her magical cuff ain’t much better. First, let’s get the obvious out of the way the dialogue between Frey and her magical cuff is every bit as cringe and annoying as the trailers made it seem.

Not because the demo lacks content quite the contrary, this demo offers lots to explore. The PS5 demo for Square Enix’s Forspoken just released over the weekend, and I’m not overly impressed.

Forspoken demo impressions