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Ghostwire: Tokyo would be the perfect holiday, if it weren’t for all the ghostsSightseeing meets wight-fleeing
Sightseeing meets wight-fleeing
There’s a YouTube channel I’m fond of called Virtual Japan, where a 4K camera serenely glides through gorgeous Japanese hotspots:Sapporo in the snow,Christmas lights in Tokyo,residential back streets in the pouring rain. You hear nothing but ambient city sounds and the tromping of a cameraman’s feet. You could be watching a HUD-free FPS, albeit with incredi-graphics. Finally, inGhostwire: Tokyo, someonehasmade a game of it, albeit with occasional ghost zapping.
A Walk In The Rain In Ghostwire: TokyoWatch on YouTube
A Walk In The Rain In Ghostwire: Tokyo
Ghostwire has the same eye for detail asYakuza’s Kamurocho, but applied on a city-wide scale - and it tickles the same parts of the brain. You’re drinking in the shopfronts, the billboards, the flyers plastered in dingy alleys. What’s missing, obviously, is the people, but this isn’t some washed-out post-apocalypse. It’s set in the immediate minutes after the departure, so music still pipes out of stores (zippy pop in convenience stores, smooth jazz from discreet bars) and puzzled dogs are looking for their owners. Is it wrong to think this is an ideal way to take in a city? Nailing a perfectly framed photo is certainly easier without the masses.
Also odd is how much of Ghostwire revolves around collecting souls and depositing them in phone booths. (Again, Silly Narrative Reasons.) It’s not just an optional collectathon but your main means of levelling up, and there are clusters of them crammed in every nook. The more I play, the more I’m convinced someone at Tango is a huge Crackdown fan. It has the same rhythm as that game’s orb hunting: every soul cloud you hoover up leaves another prize in your eyeline and so you find yourself pulled from pick-up to pick-up in a hypnotic daze. To give you an idea of how much of this stuff there is, in six hours I’ve collected 30,000 of 240,000 souls.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea, but it’s weirdly low energy from the House of Shinji Mikami, gaming’s foremost rollercoaster architect. A career that stretches betweenResident Evil, God Hand and Vanquish tells us not to pigeonhole him, but I’m surprised to see his involvement in something this sedate. On the flipside: it does go hand-in-hand with the virtual tourism. What is the quest if not an excuse to spend tens of hours getting intimate with every cul-de-sac? I just worry that it might prove repetitive in the long run. Ask me again in 210,000 souls’ time, when I file the review.
What makes this especially jarring is that when combat kicks off, it’s as Mikami as hell. Ghostly salarymen and headless school girls swarm the screen as you chip away at their outer body to expose a life core, ready to yank out in a shower of tasty particle effects. This focus on crowd control and prioritising between long- and close-range threats is stuff Mikami’s been doing for decades. What makes it quirkier is the decision to opt for offensive hand gestures instead of guns - no, not flipping the bird, but Kuji-kiri-inspired digit flexes that summon elemental projectiles.
If you were being ungenerous you could say that the wind projectile is a pistol, the water slash is a shotgun and the fire blast is an RPG. But a lot is squeezed from these simple moves. Wide arcs of water eat through huddles of schoolkids, say, or prove deadly if you lead a demonic platoon through a bottleneck. And a charged explosive shot can scatter a crowd, letting you swiftly execute floored enemies with a flick of a paper seal. Given that fights are all about overwhelming you from multiple angles, any trick to whittle down numbers is a godsend.
As far as I can tell, there are no magic attacks beyond these three, so I’m intrigued to see how much can be made of the moves over tens of hours. Right now, I’m content ripping through ghosties and then whipping out my phone to see how the sights compare to Google Street View. There are enough fights to keep me watchful, but not enough to get in the way of my virtual holiday. Can this balance be sustained over the three quarters of map I’ve yet to demist? Should Virtual Japan be worried about Tango eating their lunch? We’ll find out soon enough.
This preview is from playing the PS5 build, as are the screenshots
