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Ghostwire: Tokyo is looking a little creepy, very weird, and all radWho you gonna call?
Who you gonna call?
Ghostwire: Tokyois an upcoming action-adventure game from Tango Gameworks (aka the folks behindThe Evil Within), which means it has ghosts and ghost-adjacent monsters in it. Last night Bethesda showed off a bit more of the game with astreamed showcase, with a ten minute breakdown of the game in action. I, however, was privy to a hands-off presentation that comprised a whole half an hour of Ghostwire Tokyo being played. What luxury!
It reminded me much less of The Evil Within than I expected. It has a lot of horror elements, don’t get me wrong, but Ghostwire: Tokyo is much more of an action game using the language of horror to convey its themes than the other way around. Rather than spending most of your time on the back foot, creeping around in the hope you can get past a lumbering ball of dead lady limbs with most of your health intact, time in Ghostwire: Tokyo is more likely spent one-shotting headless demon schoolgirls with a bow and arrow. The general vibe, if not the specifics, reminded me a lot of classic, thundering 90s and 00s action films like Blade. So, in other words, Ghostwire: Tokyo looks rad as hell. Even better, it’s also unashamedly strange.
Ghostwire: Tokyo - Official Gameplay Deep DiveWatch on YouTube
Ghostwire: Tokyo - Official Gameplay Deep Dive
The premise is that a spectral fog has swept through Tokyo and now nobody is left in it. Indeed, there are clothes in the street where people have vanished. It’s impossible not to see a parallel to the pandemic at the height of lockdown, where a step out of your front door for your daily mandated walk saw you enter a strange ghost town, like Cillian Murphy at the start of 28 Days Later. But there’s also a whiff of Damon Lindelof’sThe Leftoversin here, and, if you’re a fan of death-game shows,Alice In Borderland.
And yeah, to cycle back, the combat looks cool. You can level up different elemental attacks, or even sneak and do quick stealth kills. There will be boss fights every now and then, too, but we don’t know what form they will take just yet. I like that the idea seems to be a normal kind of dude becoming a hero and cleaning up this ghost town like a latter day Egon Spengler. It’s a heady fantasy, to be unafraid in a creepy and literally haunted setting. And the backdrop - a city that is most often depicted in pop culture as specifically being very full of people, now uncannily empty - is inherently unsettling.
But what excites me most about Ghostwire: Tokyo is that it seems prepared to just do loads of weird, strange stuff and not bother to really explain it. Who cares how you can send ghosts through the telephone? That’s just how ghost rules work. Deal with it. Yeah, why wouldn’t a ghost hunter use a bow and arrow? That makes perfect sense!
Is it as weird as theaverage solo-dev eyeball-themed text adventureon Itch? Probably not. But this is all exactly the kind of thing I wish studios were allowed to spend decent budget and manpower on more often. I don’t want loads of sequels and Disney properties, I want people to make action-adventure games with a load of ghost-heart-tearin' new ideas and inspirations. Really let ‘em rip! So if Ghostwire: Tokyo is as good as it looks, I can only hope Tango Gameworksdon’tmake a sequel.
