Each enemy in Foregone dies in a dazzling explosion of pixelated currency, splashed all over the beautiful untouchable animated backgrounds. It’s a game with exquisite graphics and lush multi-layered backgrounds, packed with whirring machinery and gurgling fountains, fiery bellows and ancient crumbling architecture, all shot through with majestic color. Those backgrounds serve as a fine analog for the experience: beautiful to behold but distant, an animated canvas with no apparent effect on the basics of slashing, looting, and shooting. A lightweight narrative and a few more engaging bosses aside, Foregone is simply an incredibly basic action-platformer, wearing the costume of a metroidvania game but designed as a linear straight shot, end to end.
Playing as The Arbiter, there’s a few different abilities and maneuvers to discover aside from the reliable double jump. An invincible sliding dash is probably Foregone’s favorite button prompt, allowing the heroine to bait foes’ attacks before sliding right behind them to punish their locked animation. That described dynamic implies that any enemy poses a significant threat, though, let alone convincing intelligence. Some crawl along walls like Metroid Zoomers, some feature one or two melee or AOE attacks, most shoot some sort of projectile, and the only time they’ll really get the drop on the player is when they’re teamed alongside each other.
Foregone’s Arbiter isn’t quite overpowered, but a smattering of weapons and skills grant the upper hand in most any fight. A recharging healing ability is handy to keep equipped (but not mandatory), with the secondary ability usually swapped around as more unlock in the sequence. She also has a few projectile weapons of her own, guns and shotguns and, for some reason, a slow-to-cock bow, all of which refill their ammo reserves after using melee attacks. It’s not a terrible system and essentially rewards mix-ups, but falters when combined with the simplicity of the action itself - each melee weapon features a single combo, so even if there might be “gunchuks” in the game, they’re no more interesting or inventive than a pair of daggers.
Navigation is probably Foregone’s best feature, especially after unlocking the air dash ability. Unlike most other 2D platformers, dashes provoke momentum, helping The Arbiter travel more quickly through the city of Calagan's districts and buildings in a constant sprint. However, most checkpointed areas in the game aren’t particularly large, and it’s usually beneficial to take every enemy apart along the way, especially the marked ones which inhibit progress beyond locked doors.
An outpost hub lets players take breaks from linear travel to teleport back home and upgrade abilities and weapons, as well as offload the immense pile of vendor trash dropped from random mobs. Foregone features a surprising amount of gear to grab and an even more surprising amount to ignore and scrap, with scarcely different pieces of equipment to tirelessly scrutinize; should The Arbiter choose 14% more resistance to time-based damage or 8% more health? Will either ever be tangibly felt in combat? Is it at all relevant that this shotgun has a power value of 44 instead of 42?
This schism between Foregone’s systems and any meaningful application describes how superficial the gameplay really is at its core, rendering the stunning work put into the visual presentation for naught. It's got some meticulous 2D pixel art to gawk at and a buttery smooth framerate that pops on the Nintendo Switch, whether played in handheld mode or docked. The original release at launch would occasionally degrade with some technological slowdown or stuttering, but at time of this review it seems that an update has cleared all of that up. Load times are a little slow, but they feed a gorgeous game that looks even better in motion than in screenshots.
Sadly, those visuals are little more than window dressing for a muted and unimaginative project, a platformer whose many identical ledges are patrolled by mindless drone-like enemies with minimal intelligence. It doesn’t help that, while Foregone’s main character is always quick on her feet, slow attack animations kill that momentum, contrasting with the spritely and limber combat in Bloodstained or Dead Cells where even just the movement alone is a pleasure. What’s left is a game that works so well on paper - boasting great graphics, plentiful gear, and yes, even gunchuks - that’s fundamentally monotonous in practice. It’s certainly not a disaster, but for the premium cost of $30 on the Nintendo eShop, gamers deserve better.
Foregone is out now on Steam and The Epic Games Store for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. A digital Nintendo Switch code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.