Ghostwire: Tokyo Wants To Mix Up The Tired Open-World Formula

It feels appropriate that Ghostwire: Tokyo–a game set in a version of Japan’s capital city that has been overrun with demons, spirits, and otherworldly forces–feels both familiar and unlike anything I’ve seen in a while. While watching an extended demo, I was mentally ticking off checkboxes for the ingredients of a modern open-world action game: expansive city environment; areas that need to be liberated by interacting with landmarks; skill trees that develop your arsenal of weapons and abilities; an emphasis on traversal; check, check, check, and check. But while these, and some other aspects of Ghostwire: Tokyo, look typical for your run-of-the-mill open-world game on paper, their execution in-game is anything but.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is a marked departure from what we’re used to seeing from developer Tango Gameworks. Its previous two games, The Evil Within and The Evil Within 2, carried the DNA of studio co-founder Shinji Mikami’s most famous work: Resident Evil. Ghostwire: Tokyo, however, seems like the studio’s way of saying it’s more than just Shinji Mikami and Resident Evil 4-alikes. The irony of this is that Ghostwire: Tokyo actually began life as a sequel to The Evil Within 2.

“Yes, [Ghostwire: Tokyo] did start as a sequel to Psychobreak, the Japanese title for The Evil Within. I think the next in the series, at least,” explained director Kenji Kimura. “And through a long and winding road, it has evolved into this different idea to create a fun game that’s based in a city in Japan. At the time, there weren’t that many games that were using a city in Japan as a base. And so we thought there was a big opportunity there to make something really fun and cool.”