Foregone is a whirring pastiche of ideas that came to define the last decade of side-scrolling action games. There remains an artful satisfaction to cutting through hordes of exquisitely fashioned monsters across splendid vistas but, without a thought to call its own, Foregone's performance will be consigned to oblivion the moment its player puts down their controller. It's a beautiful, sterile wasteland.
You’ve played Foregone before you’ve played Foregone. Big Blue Bubble’s side-scrolling action game reaches across roguelikes, metroidvanias, and soulslikes to arrange a delectable medley of aesthetically pleasing and mechanically soothing methods to murder ten thousand demons and fight a half dozen bosses. Foregone is not like any one of these action subgenres but, quite paradoxically, also exactly like all of them. It’s like the ideas were centrifuged out of genre staples and then someone reassembled the product without adding any new ingredients. What’s left is an identical specimen in a slightly different but very convincing facsimile. Foregone is a remix of a song that doesn’t exist yet. With any hope I will spend the next 900 words discovering what I am talking about at this exact moment.
Foregone opens with a story that doesn’t matter. A place called Calagan is in the process of being razed by unique classes of undead monsters under the control of the Harrow, which is evil. The player embodies an Arbiter, a combat-proficient soldier dispatched to sort this business out. Along the way the player will run into literal lore books that inject one paragraph of trope-drenched narrative at regular intervals. The Arbiter herself will sometimes deliver soliloquies composed of casual observations and deep social regret. You know how this story ends as soon as you learn the premise. No part of Foregone‘s plot is especially compelling, which would only be a problem if the player needed a tangible reason to fight an extremely large murder bird or solve the logistics of some asshole teleporting ten feet to fire a gun with an element of surprise. Bad guys exist, please kill them.
There are plenty of attractive tools to help the player kill monsters. Two types of swords, a spear, a pair of knives, and gunchucks outline available melee weapons. A pistol, bow-and-arrow, a burst-fire rifle, and a shotgun compose the ranged options. Foregone’s considerable equipment inventory also makes space for armor, a necklace, and a ring, all of which either add bonus effects or boost defense. Every piece of gear is color coded based on strength and rarity. As the player makes their way through Foregone’s (roughly) twelve levels, gear rarity and power levels increase. You’re always guaranteed to have a capable weapon nearby.
Foregone also plays around with a cash economy. Gold is money and used to pay the blacksmith to make weapons better. Blue orbs are, well, something, and are employed to fill out a skill tree. All are lost if the player dies on the field, but, in true Souls form, can be reclaimed if the player can make it back to where they perished. I died four times in Foregone. By the end I had every inventory item at max rarity with a maximum upgrade, and I had filled out the skill tree enough to my liking.
Metroidvania element exist in kind of name-only. A ground pound, wall climb, and air dash are technically new abilities, but there are low incentives to ever revisit past levels and try them out. Foregone’s levels are static, eschewing the trend of procedural generation, and I never felt the compulsion to go back and see if I had missed anything. I got the trophies for maxing out skill trees and consuming every lore book so I am honestly not sure if I missed anything at all. All of these elements are here but it is not clear why or if they were designed with any kind of purpose exceeding a perfunctory necessity.
A light magic system adds a bit of customization for the player. A barrier, a laser blast, and AOE attack, and a health recharge are among these abilities, and each accept blue currency with their own branching skill trees. I found the health recharge to be among the most essential, but I alternated between various offensive options for most of the Foregone. Eventually I settled on the barrier because I liked feeling invincible for a brief amount of time. In any case, these abilities and distinct weapon varieties ensure there’s a style of Foregone out there applicable to anyone.
Foregone prefers quantity to quality with its escalating onslaughts of monsters. Mounted guns, annoying flyers, shield-bearing sorcerers, raw melee infantry, and teleporting melee specialists compose some of their ranks. The solution, almost every time, is to dash behind your opponent. This will allow a second or two of open melee thrashing. When monsters collect into groups (which is Foregone’s preferred method of creating difficulty) the strategy is identical. Slide behind guys and thrash them. There’s a bit of agency required with personal priorities, I liked to leap over the gunners first, but not a whole lot of room for individual expression. Once you’ve solved the mystery of Getting Behind Guys, Foregone is effectively solved. There is no room for subversion.
Rudimentary platforming challenges surface after the first few levels. You’ll have to make use of the double jump and dash to hop across scores of elevated platforms. You’ll need to dodge cleverly hidden spikes in the sewers. Be sure to close off all the vents spewing poison gas or suffer the consequences. Watch out, if you stand under a muddy platform for too long, rocks will fall and cause minor damage. Like so much of Foregone, these concepts are confidently executed, but they’re not particularly engaging or original. Reliability is achieved at the cost of identity.
Boss fights are a genuine treat. All of Foregone‘s moving characters operate with a level of animation challenged by Owlboy but bosses, especially, command the screen with Punch-Out!! levels of dramatic presence. Hera, the aforementioned giant bird, bursts out of the gate and states the rules: learn the patterns, recognize how to exploit them, and be prepared for when they shift mid fight. Finding ways to get behind the boss and take advantage of their animation commitments remains a key strategy, but finding room for gun potshots created a satisfying level of risk and reward. Foregone’s decision to regurgitate its boss roster in its closing levels is…understandable, it can’t stop subscribing to genre norms, but they’re cakewalks by the time they’re reheated for the player.
In fact, Foregone’s closing trio of levels, composing a last bastion of sorts, is a rolling wave of anticlimaxes. There’s room enough to level up the avatar, but the player’s skillset is well past complete. Even a handful of new enemies are subject to the same strategies from the last few hours. I’m not particularly great at videogames but I wiped the floor with everything here. By the time Foregone gave up on coherent levels and resolved to teleport me around to different one-off chunks, I was more than ready for it all to be over.
And then it was. Foregone ended. The final boss was unique and mechanically dense, but ultimately left the field without any kind of creative signature. It was the final boss because Foregone had to have a final boss. It fits in with Foregone’s unconscious theme of feeling like an algorithmically assembled action game. Popular elements of prevailing action games have been, quite expertly, recreated and reanimated in the shape of Foregone. I liked playing it. In a year I will forget it ever happened.
Foregone is a whirring pastiche of ideas that came to define the last decade of side-scrolling action games. There remains an artful satisfaction to cutting through hordes of exquisitely fashioned monsters across splendid vistas but, without a thought to call its own, Foregone’s performance will be consigned to oblivion the moment its player puts down their controller. It’s a beautiful, sterile wasteland.
