Forspoken is a hectic blend of open-world environments, a hectic combat system, and a parkour game, with everything that those three descriptors would entail. The protagonist, Frey, has the entire continent of Athia to explore, with ferocious foes to defeat, tons of spells to collect and upgrade, and plenty of things to learn.

RELATED: Games With Amazing Dynamic Weather Effects

Getting to grips with Forspoken can take a while, especially as the game drip-feeds you new abilities gradually. There are many features that are a bit more opaque than would be preferable, so let us give you the best primer to the world of Athia and the game's mechanics that we can muster.

Explore The Accessibility Options

If you explore the Settings menu, you'll find a great roster of options that will let you personalize your game experience exactly how you want it. You'll find the most useful settings under Gameplay Balance and Accessibility Settings, and there are a few great settings that we'd recommend you ensure are turned on for the best experience.

For the best quality of life changes, make sure you have Automatic Item Gathering enabled and Item Visibility set to Enhanced Visibility in the Accessibility Settings tab. There are tons of items to pick up in this game, and having to pick each one up individually will waste a lot of time - making this an automatic process will save you time and frustration.

For the best ways to tweak the difficulty, mess around with the Gameplay Balance settings. If you only want to make the game a little easier, turn on Automatic Support Spell-Switching and Automatically Use Healing Items. If you want things to be considerably easier, turn on Auto-Evasion. Note that these settings are independent of the main Difficulty setting, and could be considered further accessibility options.

Don't Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

As an open-world game, the difficulty of the challenges you'll find as you explore are not necessarily linear. While the earlier regions tend to be on the easier side of things, there are certain challenges that are best saved for later:

• Mutants should be considered high-difficulty optional bosses that you may need to wait a very long time before you can comfortably take them on. They hit very hard and can often only be taken down reliably once you can exploit their weaknesses.
• Certain Locked Labyrinths require certain movement spells before you can complete them. Thankfully, they all contain convenient teleporters to the surface, so you can leave if you find yourself unable to complete one.
• Getting the highest scores (or sometimes even completing) on many Flashback challenges often requires high stats and lots of upgraded spells.

How To Unlock New Spell Sets

While the UI sort of hints at it, Frey is not limited to her initial set of Frey's Magic for the entire game - in fact, 'Frey's Magic' is only one of four different sets of spells, each of them corresponding to a different element. The only way to unlock these is to progress the story a certain amount, so don't put off your story missions for the sake of exploration - acquiring new spell sets is also the key to unlocking new movement abilities, many of which are 100 percent required for certain platforming and movement challenges.

The table in the expandable below details the individual chapters in which you will acquire each different spell set - open at the risk of light spoilers!

Spell Set	Element	When It Is Unlocked
Frey's Magic / Purple Magic	Earth	Chapter 2
Sila's Magic / Red Magic	Fire	Chapter 6
Prav's Magic / Blue Magic	Water	Chapter 9
Olas's Magic / Green Magic	Air	Chapter 11

• Sila's Magic and Prav's Magic are learned right at the beginning of their respective chapters.
• Olas's Magic is learned halfway through Chapter 11.

read more

Unlocking these spell sets before you make an effort to explore the map and take on the harder challenges will make those challenges far easier - you'll have many more tools in your pocket and you'll be able to exploit every weakness in the game once you have all four.

The Importance Of Spellcraft Challenges

Very early in the game, you'll unlock spellcraft challenges in Cipal. These are optional, long-term challenges that you can take on three-at-a-time to improve your individual spells. Doing so will make the spells better - usually by improving the damage they deal. It's a good idea to first focus on the spells you use most during battle.

There are some spell challenges that are particularly useful for everyone to get as soon as they are able:

• Enhancing Flow, Leap, and Scale is easily done and will improve your Stamina Recovery rate.
• Enhancing Modify and Rarify will give you access to the full repertoire of Breakstone crafting.
• Enhancing Leach will give it a passive healing effect after use, making it even better at dealing with poison.
• Enhancing Aegis gives it a passive strength buff after use, making it an all-around great buff spell. The buff will apply even if you don't heal a debuff with it.
• Enhancing Zip removes the stamina cost entirely, a crucial upgrade for certain movement challenges and puzzles.
• Enhancing Distortion extends its effect duration, making it an even better way to deal with huge groups of enemies.

In addition to these, enhancing your Surge Magic and Spell Set Switching spells is great for boosting your overall damage output. Try to get these and the above list of spells enhanced as soon as possible.

Where To Spend Your Old Coins

There are three places you can spend your Old Coins, which are obtained from the plethora of locked chests that require you to solve sliding panel puzzles to open. The first two are the Bookseller and the Cat Lady in Cipal - the former unlocks new abilities to attach to equipment, and the latter will add new toys to your bedroom in Cipal.

If you don't have access to the Bookseller or Cat Lady in Cipal at the moment, you'll need to progress the story a little.

The third is a strange individual hidden away in a corner of Visoria, to the west of Athia, who you can talk to in order to trade your Old Coins. Once you gain access to this region, it's very handy to go meet him.

To find him, you'll need to head to the southern tip of Inner Visoria, which borders Tanta's Demesne and Academy Hills. Explore this area to find the Curiosity Shop and the Curio Collector inside - he offers some very interesting items in exchange for Old Coins. The table below details what they do.

As you can tell, these are very useful and very expensive items. For this reason, we recommend not buying things from the Bookseller or the Cat Lady until you have everything you want from the Curio Collector.

Fast Travel Options

As you explore Athia, you'll become used to unlocking Fast Travel locations - every Refuge you enter and every Belfry you use to explore the lay of the land are convenient fast travel destinations.

It's also possible to travel directly to Monuments of Wisdom. These are the Monuments that allow you to take on Flashback challenges, and they're scattered throughout the world just like any other type of point of interest. To use them for Fast Travel, simply select them in from the map menu and take on their challenge - you can quit from the confirmation menu immediately after teleporting there.

Don't Forget To Analyze Your Foes

Once you've unlocked Cuff Search, you should be aware that you can use this ability in the midst of battle to analyze your enemies. After Cuff Searching, get an enemy in your sights and press the Cuff Search button once more.

This will bring up the information menu for that enemy. The important piece of information that this screen tells you is the enemy's elemental strengths and weaknesses - using this is fast and takes all the guesswork out of a fight.

NEXT: The Most Realistic Video Game Cats