There is no shortage to side content throughoutForspoken.The world of Athia is littered with ruins to explore, enemy camps to conquer, and Locked Labyrinths to dive into. In the case of these Locked Labyrinths, however, their potential for impressive new content and additions to the overall lore of Athia does little to cover that the current designs are lacking in key areas.
In some regards, these Locked Labyrinths have a strong relation to a similar concept fromBloodbornethat also didn’t live up to the hype that these separated dungeons originally ran on. While there are some interesting decisions in the later versions of these dungeons, the majority do little to elevate the side content inForspokenbeyond being a short detour to fight a handful of enemies.
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Forspoken Fails to Earn the Labyrinth Namesake
The name Locked Labyrinth isn’t exactly a perfect description of theseoptional dungeons inForspoken, considering that not all have multiple directions to choose at any one time, and none really twist around on themselves to get players lost. All the extra hallways give are optional materials to hunt down and a handful of free magic to gather in order to unlock new spells. So, most of these “Labyrinths” are little more than a long hallway with a few stops to fight a handful of mostly easy enemies between each stretch of marching straight forward.
Given the minimal, modular designs of these Locked Labyrinths, it might have been interesting to see more care be put into the placement of the rooms and halls that make up these dungeons. Instead, the individual design of each Labyrinth comes off as uninspired and is just there to fill space and offer the opportunity to drop some lore for thehistory of Athia. This all leads pretty strongly to a criticism that has been raised in the past about FromSoftware’sBloodborneand its repetitive Chalice Dungeons.
Forspoken Didn’t Learn from Bloodborne’s Mistakes
It can be difficult to say if the design ofForspokenconsidered the Soulsborne seriesas an inspiration during development, but Luminous Productions could have benefited from understanding the successes and failures of FromSoftware’s titles. The specific reception of the Chalice Dungeons could have helped to direct the developer towards either improving the Locked Labyrinths or avoiding the potential pitfall altogether. This is because it can be difficult to make these type of modular dungeons interesting when each new one doesn’t bring enough to the table to really improve the concept.
In the case ofBloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons, the construction of these optional areas was primarily designed towards making sure that they could be procedurally generated with a combination of different individual pieces. The tailored dungeons that lead in a linear line towards the Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen boss fight are one thing; they’re somewhat more interesting by their intentional designs. However, when relying on what could have been a Soulslike/Roguelike dungeon with infinite possibilities, most of these optional locations are so similar to each other that there’s hardly a reason to keep exploring.
While the Locked Labyrinths don’t have the same psuedo-Roguelike issue as the procedural Chalice Dungeons, they do run into the same repetitive designs that leads to criticism. Considering that there is some lore linked directly toForspoken’s final bossand a handful of cloaks and necklaces locked behind these optional dungeons, it is strange that the design is so bare. There is still hope that a future DLC or update might be able to expand the Locked Labyrinths to something more impressive, but at the moment, they are an unfortunately poor mark on the open world of Athia.
Forspokenis available now for PC and PS5.
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