“I think he said it’s the first time he’s played a character that isn’t actually a character but an object, but during performance capture we still had him on stage so that he was there going through the motions, talking and having that one-to-one interaction in the moment.” “Cuff is her companion who we want to be with her on this journey and find a voice that can have just as much gravitas in terms of the screen presence even though it’s just an inanimate object.” Mitsuno says. Cuff, a seeming native to the world of Athia, juxtaposes Frey’s brash and guarded personality with a dry sardonic wit.īut even though Ella Balinska’s performance required all aspects from her performance, from likeness to motion capture, it was still important to stage Cake’s vocal performance from the offset, despite a lack of corporeal presence within Athia’s world. Throughout much of our playtime in Forspoken, Frey and Cuff engage in short, but frequent bursts of patter as they both wrestle with their codependence.

“All the complexities that the character has – Ella just knocks it out of the park.” “She just ticked all those boxes, she has a sense of humour, she has determination, she has capability of showing a soft vulnerable side that we wanted Frey to have,” creative producer, Riao Mitsuno, tells us. So when it came down to casting their lead, Ella Balinska stood out during the development process. Having been fused with a sentient bangle called “Cuff” (Played by Jonathan Cake), Frey is endowed with magical powers that allow her to cast spells and, crucially, traverse this new environment with great momentum.įinding the right voice and likeness to carry the promise of a new IP was crucial to the early stages of worldbuilding. In Forspoken, a young New Yorker called Frey (played by Ella Balinska) is transported to the world of Athia, a strange and fantastical land plagued by a blight known as the “Break”, which has led to the near-extinction of humanity in their universe.

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