Here’s the good news: Forspoken’s DLC is coming out earlier than the previously predicted “Summer 2023” release window, which optimists among you might consider a chance for it to live up to the potential it failed to reach in the main game. Here’s the bad news: It’s coming on May 26, 25 days after the game’s developer, Luminous Productions, gets swallowed up by Square Enix and snuffed out forever.
The In Tanta We Trust DLC will see Frey sent back in time to the Purge of the Rheddig, which took place 25 years before the base game and drove the setting’s ruling matriarchs to madness. You’ll get new abilities, a new companion, and new heights in the form of “unique, vertically-designed environments”. You will probably continue to talk to a cuff.
It’s a bit of a swansong for Forspoken, which got kicked to the curb by Square Enix not long after release, following “challenging” reviews from critics and audiences and “lacklustre” sales all around. Not one for second chances, Square Enix announced it would be absorbing the game’s developer barely a month after the game released.
It’s a shame. Forspoken certainly wasn’t great—PCG’s Mollie Taylor scored it 65% in her Forspoken review—but there were the seeds of something in there. I would have been interested to see what Luminous could do with a new project after learning whatever it learned from Forspoken’s development, and I guess this DLC is the closest we’ll get to that. Call me cynical, but I doubt one piece of DLC will manage to convince me to do a 180 in my opinion on Forspoken as a whole.
You’ll be able to pick up Forspoken’s In Tanta We Trust DLC on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft Store when it releases on May 26. If you own the digital deluxe edition, you’ll actually get it three days early, on May 23.