A second hands-on preview of the upcoming game Forspoken has revealed more about what players can expect from the new fantasy adventure title. The Square Enix game is slated for launch early next year, and tells an isekai-style story about protagonist Frey Holland, who's mysteriously transported from her New York City home to a magical realm. Screen Rant attended a special extended look at the new game that showed off more of the game's narrative and explained its base mechanics further.

While some of the game's story was shown in the last preview for Forspoken, the gameplay demo took place mid-game, offering little exposition or introductions. This latest look began in chapter two of the game, and also included chapters three and five, starting off just as Frey has been transported into the land of Athia. Athia has been ravaged by an event Frey dubs The Break, which has spread a corruptive miasma across the world that kills almost anyone who comes across it - except for Frey. Players are introduced to characters like Auden, who helps Frey out of a tricky situation, and whose father was a Cognoscent, a sort of academic who was studying The Break.

Related: How Forspoken's Magic System Will Work

These characters help set up Frey's journey to learn about and stop The Break, while others like the young girl Olevia introduce players to the game's important crafting mechanics - and as an added layer, also help show the occasional cracks in Frey's tough facade through the wholesome nature of some of their interactions. Players can collect materials from throughout Athia to craft things like healing potions and upgrade their cloak to provide added benefits as they progress. New dynamics between Frey and Cuff, her sentient talking bracelet, are also shown off in the new Forspoken preview, with bits of tutorial demonstrating how he can be used for functions like a compass and scanning areas for valuables and enemies alongside colorful banter between the two of them.

Forspoken's Frey facing a large dragon.

Boss battles are a large part of this new preview, showing the complexities of combat the game has to offer and how it ties into Forspoken's dark story details. In the chapters featured, players face a fierce dragon as well as one of the Tantas - magical matriarchs that rule over Athia and whose conflict between them may have led to The Break - who is seen both in a fight where she uses a knight as a vessel and in conflict as herself in a later chapter. The Tantas seem to consider Frey an interloper and threat to their power, and defeating each of them will result in Frey unlocking new types of support and attack magic, of which there are four total types of in the game: Purple, Red, Green, and Blue. Each battle big or small will utilize a letter-based ranking system that determines the amount of loot players get afterwards, losing ranks for things like taking damage or not using a wide variety of moves.

The preview shows how Forspoken's magical parkour traversal system can be used for a myriad of different purposes during combat. This ranges from things like quickly navigating to the back of shielded enemies to hit their weak side to speedily relocating behind elements of the environment to dodge otherwise unblockable attacks like a dragon's fiery breath. Players will be able to unlock new types of this movement as they progress, starting with Frey's basic Flow ability and later gaining more that allow her to do things like chain large jumps together to scale surfaces more efficiently.

One of Forspoken's Tantas in red garb and golden headpiece.

Magic and parkour lie at the heart of Forspoken, but this new look into the game's earlier chapters have shown much more about how these core elements tie into the game's narrative in a natural way. A larger look at Athia also emphasized how Forspoken aims for some of the best visuals in an open-world title, with Square Enix subsidiary developer Luminous Productions utilizing a special in-house engine to design the game. This new look Forspoken has shown the game will not just be rich in terms of its traversal and combat system, but in the intricacies of its storyline and characters as well when it releases early next year.

More: Forspoken: Everything We Know So Far

Forspoken will release for PC and PS5 on January 24, 2023. Screen Rant attended a special hands-on event for the purpose of this preview.