Harrison Abbott previews Ghostwire: Tokyo….
The near adjacent releases of Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring (a pair of titles that are diametrically opposed in many ways) have ignited a fierce debate about the design principles for open-world games.
To give you the short version, one camp believes that everything ought to be neatly packaged and signposted for consumers, so that they don’t miss out on any content. Meanwhile, those on the other side of the fence argue that the whole point of sandboxes should be to encourage discovery and nurture a sense of exploration (without a glowing waypoint marker telling you exactly where to go at all times).
This discussion got heated after a bunch of developers — employed by AAA companies like Ubisoft and Guerrilla Games —criticized Elden Ring’s more hands-off approach. Specifically, they took issue with how FromSoftware’s latest eschews a lot of conventional wisdom about how open worlds are made.
For instance, it doesn’t populate the user interface with icons showing you where every last morsel of content can be found, nor does it keep track of your progress with an active quest log. Plus, the HUD is rather minimal, and it goes out of its way to hide vast swathes of its world so that only the most diligent of players can find everything. Suffice it to say, this is not by-the-book design and it has divided opinion.
Regardless of where you stand (and if you think it’s poor form for developers to publicly bash the competition like this), it should go without saying that there is room for more than one type of experience. Not every game has to fit into the established formula and regurgitate the same ideas.
If we were to be super reductive about it, there are broadly two types of open-world at the moment. There are those favoured by the likes Assassin’s Creed, where everything is itemized in an orderly to-do list and there are certain repetitive, busywork tasks that musts keep performing. Then there’s the Breath of the Wild approach, which is more about getting you to roam the environment and stumble across adventures organically.
For its part, Ghostwire: Tokyo is a hybrid of the two philosophies. On the one hand, it has a map that’s crammed with icons and there are some of those copy-pasted, bloat activities for you to be getting on with.
Yet there’s also a lot of stuff that you can only discover by exploring. Whether it’s a useful power-up hidden atop a neon-lit sky garden (that you must reach via improvisational platforming) or a creepy side-story about a revenant that lurks in school toilets (which you happen across when scouring a restroom cubicle yourself), not everything here is clearly delineated on the map. And that’s where the fun comes in!
First-Person Shooting (Without Any Guns)
For our preview slice, we played through the first two chapters of the game, which comprised seven main missions and ten side quests. From what we could piece together, the basic gist of the narrative is that a cataclysmic event has wiped out the human populace of Shibuya (a commercial ward of Tokyo), leaving behind only stray cats, dogs and otherworldly spirits known here as “visitors”.
You play as, Akito, the one person who managed to outlive this localized end of days. Despite your status as a lone survivor, you have still had a near-death experience and subsequently draw the attention of a ghostly detective (who goes by the cryptic initials “KK”).
Without invitation, this spook possesses Akito’s body, and you then find yourself in the unenviable position of having to share motor control functions with them. Throughout the game, both host and trespasser will bicker and wrestle for supremacy, in a plot beat that feels very similar to the recent Venom movies.
On the plus side, this symbiosis does imbue you with various paranormal abilities that will help you fight the monsters that are now prowling Tokyo’s streets. You have spectral vision that allows you to see through walls and assess threats, alongside the power to glide over rooftops and an astral tether that can be used as a kind of grappling hook.
Of course, there’s an offensive arsenal as well, in the form of a spirit bow (for covertly picking off enemies at a distance) and your “ethereal weaving” moveset. It is through the latter mechanic that Ghostwire reveals itself to essentially be a first-person shooter, albeit one without any actual guns. Think of it like you’re using Doctor Strange’s wavey hand spells instead of an AK-47.
In a nutshell, ethereal weaving is a type of ranged magic that is themed around one of the four elements. Wind is your standard pistol, water is a shotgun for use in close-quarters, and fire is the obvious stand-in for a grenade launcher. As far as our preview was concerned, there was nothing for earth.
Each branch of ethereal weaving has a standard light attack and then a unique charged attack, as well as its own dedicated upgrade tree. They complement one another really well and switching between them is extremely fluid thanks to the touchpad on the PS5 DualSense.
The more you play, the more of these combat abilities you will gradually unlock. For example, there are contextual finishing moves for use in different situations, a rage mode that gives you a significant damage buff, and throwable talismans that are infused with other properties (such as a deployable piece of cover and an electric bomb).
You don’t always need to take such a direct approach for battling creatures, however, as stealth is often the more efficient route. While enemies can soak up many projectile hits before they’re downed, you can just execute them with a single back-stab instead and skilled archers should be able to clear out entire zones using just the aforementioned bow.
Regardless of how you choose to approach encounters, it all feels great thanks to satisfying visual feedback (you will blow searing holes in enemies with each shot) and fantastic use of the DualSense gimmicks.
On that note, this is arguably the best use of the controller’s technology since the Astro’s Playroom tech demo. All of the ethereal weaving hand motions are accompanied by their own subtle haptics, the adaptive triggers will resist your finger pull whenever you’re trying to cast bigger spells, and the gentle patter of rainfall is simulated by tiny vibrations in the palm of your hand. Not to mention, the inbuilt DualSense speakers also get a workout here, with audio cues for whenever KK wants to speak or to let you know that enemies are hiding nearby.
Exploring A Literal Ghost Town
All these features help to immerse you further in Ghostwire’s authentic recreation of Tokyo. The sights and sounds of the city have been meticulously captured, with an impressive level of detail throughout. You can spend hours studying the garish advertisements, peering through shop windows, examining the contents of street food carts, and watching the automated parts of this metropolis continue to do their thing, despite the fact that there aren’t any humans around.
On that note, even though every last trace of mankind has been completely wiped from Shibuya it doesn’t feel empty. You are constantly surrounded by unsettling reminders that these streets were once teeming with life.
For instance, you might turn a corner and notice a deserted intersection that is strewn with leftover umbrellas and suitcases. Or you could find a buzzing mobile phone that displays the last text message conversation somebody had with their parents.
Likewise, if you stroll down the entertainment district you can still hear pulsating techno music reverberating down the dark alleyways. In general, the audio mix is really evocative, giving you a proper sense of place. Just taking a walk down the street, you’ll be able to hear food sizzling on grills, muffled Tannoy announcements emanating from within convenience stores, and pachinko machines blaring away inside arcades. It’s a very immerse mix, especially if you have a pair of 3D headphones to get the most out of it.
Were it not for the freaky monsters (more on them in a bit) this could honestly be appreciated as a virtual tourism experience. You do really feel like you are exploring Tokyo and there are plenty of real-world sightseeing opportunities to tick off.
The in-game database provides you with lots of background information about the city itself and wider Japanese culture. Should you visit a religious shrine then your compendium will be updated with an entry about Shintoism or the afterlife. Meanwhile, a trip to a cheap motel will shed light on how some Tokyo businessmen like to unwind and collecting secret items will reveal more about the world of Asian art or local urban legends.
Meeting the Locals
Speaking of which, for many western players the most interesting part of Ghostwire will be how it exposes you to new folklore and unfamiliar mythology. You won’t be dealing with your garden-variety spirits here, as every single creature type has a distinctive design and lore.
There are Slenderman-esque grunts (who turn out to be the leftover souls of overworked office drones), headless schoolgirls that manifest from teenage anxiety, children in yellow raincoats that use a whistle to alert others to your presence, and giant women with oversized scissors ready to cut off your head.
While the developers over at Tango Gameworks have been quick to point out that this is not a horror title — despite the involvement of legendary Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami — all of these foes are very creepy, and it can be quite stressful when they’re ganging up on you. In our preview, there were one or two effective jump scares too, as well as an intense sequence that robbed us of the ability to fight back and had us sneaking around a hostile base without the use of magic. It wasn’t exactly Amnesia, but it was suitably disempowering and led to a few suspenseful close calls.
Outside of the standard enemies, there are occasional bosses and even some friendly monsters that you will meet in side-quests. Highlights include a mission that has you trying to catch a mischievous Karakasa kozō (an animate umbrella with a protruding tongue) and one in which a Nurikabe spirit traps somebody inside a motel room for all eternity.
For a change, this optional content is actually more engaging than the main story, given that each of the little side-quests has a unique flavour. Rather than just existing as boring padding to artificially inflate your playtime, they’re more comparable to the contracts you’d take on in The Witcher 3.
They each tell engaging stories and usually revolve around you having to find a specific way of luring, defeating, or appeasing the given monster. For example, there’s a terrific mission that has you trying to coax out a Kappa spirit by enticing it with a cucumber and another in which you tail a possessed doll around the city. You’ll always be excited when more of these green markers appear on the map, as that’s when you know that you’re in for a weird and wonderful distraction.
Obligatory Open-World Chores
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the rest of the open-world, which does have some of that tedious filler we mentioned earlier. To be fair, there’s not an overabundance of it (certainly not when compared to the likes of Far Cry) but there’s still enough to make you feel a little fatigued.
Opening your quest log will reveal that there are outposts to liberate, corruption spots to cleanse, Tanuki spirits to round up, and rare artifacts to sell. It’s stuff that you’ve done a thousand times before in other game and it doesn’t feel like it’s there for the sake of creativity or even entertainment. Instead, you get the impression that a higher-up simply mandated it be there for the sake of increasing playtime metrics.
Mercifully little of this busywork registers on the map though, and so you don’t have one of those horribly cluttered UIs like you do in Assassin’s Creed (where it looks like somebody sneezed all over the screen). Plus, you can’t just set a waypoint and then follow a path to find collectables, meaning that you are at least incentivised to look around and see what you can uncover. Which is always a more rewarding way to go about things.
As such, it’s not the worst case of open-world bloat we’ve seen (it helps that you slowly unlock more districts of the city as well, and so aren’t faced with a huge to-do list right at the start), yet things would honestly be improved without it. In our short time with Ghostwire, we were already getting sick of purifying shrines just to open up new districts, and it’s doubtful that this routine will become any more fun after we have done it a dozen more times.
These tired mechanics have been hanging around open world-games like a bad smell for well over a decade, and it’s time they were left in the past. It will be a shame if the generic tropes undermine the rest of the experience, because Ghostwire doesn’t need that crap to stand out. It’s already compelling enough with just a handful of meaningful side quests.
In short, the combat here is tight, the world is intriguing, the (proper) side activities are worthwhile, and it’s got strong atmosphere. As long as those tiresome open-world cliches don’t suffocate it, then Ghostwire: Tokyo could be something quite special indeed.
Ghostwire: Tokyo will be released on PS5 and PC on March 25th. A preview copy was provided by the publisher.
Harrison Abbott
