We’ve seen an hour of gameplay from Bethesda’s most mysterious game and reveal what Ghostwire Tokyo has to offer in our preview.
So if there’s one thing that really excites us, it’s a good mystery. And Ghostwire Tokyo is probably the most mysterious game Bethesda as a publisher has to offer right now. After all, there has been little more to see so far than some very mysterious trailers that raised more questions than they answered. What kind of game was this going to be anyway?
Now we have finally seen a whole hour of gameplay of the action adventure game by Resident Evil creator and Evil Within developer Shinji Mikami. And can say: it’s not what we expected.
What is Ghostwire Toyko about?
Imagine waking up one morning, making yourself a nice hot coffee, going about your day’s work and suddenly realising that 99 percent of your city’s population has disappeared without a trace. Instead, it is now overrun with “visitors”: faceless men in suits, headless schoolgirls, flying heads (no relation) and creeping abominations with long hair and a face made of fangs. Sound good? Great, then Ghostwire Tokyo is for you.
Because that’s exactly what main character Akiro has to experience, who, to make matters worse (or lucky?), also merges with the consciousness of the deceased ghost hunter KK, whose voice accompanies him on his search for the truth.
This dynamic duo roams abandoned Tokyo, fighting off “visitors” with the help of so-called Kuji-kiri hand gestures (an ancient Japanese martial art). To find out what is behind the sudden horror apocalypse, they have to clean gates that have appeared in the city and thus uncover the fog of the quasi-open world step by step. So far so good. But here the first surprise is already waiting.
How exactly does Ghostwire Toyko play?
The key data we had on Ghostwire Tokyo so far painted a blurry picture, but still raised certain expectations. After all, developer Shinji Mikami is the father of the Resident Evil series himself and created the survival horror series The Evil Within after his departure from Capcom. And since Ghostwire Tokyo is not stingy with its horror theme either, many probably had a similar image in mind at first. Far from it.
Even the first trailers hinted at action-packed sequences, but after getting to see an hour of uncut gameplay, we know: Action fights are on the menu here and creepiness is more of a side dish. There is no trace of survival either. Instead, everything revolves around nimble movement through the open world – for example via grappling hooks – and fighting the numerous enemies that flood Tokyo.
We perform our Kuji-kiri hand gestures from the first-person perspective in ranged combat – and trace their symbols on the controller using the analogue sticks. It is not yet clear how the whole thing will be controlled with mouse and keyboard and whether we can also optionally place our attacks on individual keys. If we attack an enemy from ambush, we have the option of taking him out with a single attack. So stealth will also play a role. Together with boss fights, shops and unlockable skills, this makes for pretty classic action-adventure fare.
But will Ghostwire Tokyo be a good game?
What do we like so far? What remains open?
The absolute highlight of Ghostwire Tokyo is probably the atmosphere and the exciting setting. Admittedly, with the Yakuza series Ghostwire has an almost indomitable competitor when it comes to a great depiction of modern Japan. On the other hand, we’re not walking the thriving nightlife here – but through a deserted, apocalyptic version of it. And that’s what Ghostwire Tokyo captures magnificently so far.
The graphics, especially in terms of animations, are not absolutely world class and some of the textures look a bit too polished and sterile to be really believable. But the lighting mood and the design of the city convinced us in the first hour. In addition, we have seen a beta version that is still graphically unfinished. Ray tracing is supposed to be available in the final version. Especially the paranormal designs should be a highlight here – Ghostwire has the chance to create some unforgettable images.
In our gameplay presentation, for example, we experience how Akiro climbs through the surreal twisted version of an apartment building and then finds himself in a long corridor – which finally dissolves and reveals a view of the city hundreds of metres below. And the enemy design, located in Japanese folklore, is also spectacular: hundred-metre-high giants made of insect-like black matter or ghost women with horrible grimaces and giant scissors.
Now it remains to be hoped that the different enemy types will also bring exciting mechanical challenges – because that’s exactly what The Evil Within managed to do only to a limited extent back then and deceived with its grandiose visual enemy design over the actually always the same and quite shallow gameplay mechanics.
By the way, we heard the Japanese voice output in the presentation, but there will also be an English and a German version. And in this country, we can look forward to some well-known speakers like Tommy Morgenstern, who already voiced Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead and Son-Goku in Dragonball Z.
After the presentation we can say: The gameplay shown makes you want more, but also raises completely new questions. We will find out how varied and fun the action gameplay will really be on 24 March 2022, when Ghostwire Tokyo is released on PC and PS5. We look forward to finally fully unravelling the mystery surrounding this long-announced game.
Editor’s Verdict
I love rediscovering horror. And Ghostwire Tokyo manages to do that for me in two ways. Firstly, it has really dug deep into the encyclopaedia of Japanese horror and presents entirely new images than the same old zombies and abandoned psychiatric wards. And secondly, it wraps this theme in a completely different genre of game than you would expect.
Instead of a pure story adventure or survival game, it wants to create an action-fest whose combat mechanics incidentally evoke pleasant memories of the Harry Potter game for the PS2 in me – in which we had to trace the symbols of our spells with the controller. But that’s only in passing.
Do I think Ghostwire Tokyo will end up being the game of 2022? No. But it doesn’t have to be. Personally, I’m up for fluffy action fights in a fresh setting and a mysterious story. It doesn’t have to be perfect – I just hope that the story has that certain something to keep me glued to the screen for hours on end.
