GhostWire: Tokyo has a completely dead world, empty of other people or people to talk to. It also has routine and repetitive struggles with a boring and uninspired story. And yet I love it more than most games, even though I don’t think a lot of people will. It might take a little while to explain why, but it all starts with GhostWire’s best feature: its cold, lifeless card.
At the beginning of the game, a supernatural force makes everyone in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, Japan, disappear. A mysterious man flashes across the many LED screens surrounding Shibuya Scramble – the notoriously busy real-world intersection where the game also begins – spouting nonsense about saving people’s souls and whatnot. In short: this guy stole the souls of everyone around you except yours.
You take on the role of Akito, who is spared death when possessed by a spirit named KK. For reasons that are never entirely clear, KK in your body also means you have elemental powers. And wouldn’t you know Creepy ghosts and monsters now roam the streets of Tokyo carefree. KK needs Akito’s body to save the world from this maniac terrorizing Tokyo. Akito just wants to save his sister. If you can put your differences aside, maybe you can do both.
It’s a boring story that never does anything unexpected and never goes beyond just okay. I enjoyed Akito and KK’s banter, but other than that I never invested too much in their arcs. There are a small number of supporting characters in GhostWire – both friend and foe – but none get much screen time or development beyond the game’s purpose that they serve at the given moment, be it a boss fight, new objective, mechanic, etc. and so forth.
However, what the story does is provide narrative justification for why Shibuya is void (apart from those creepy ghosts). And I think that’s one of the more interesting parts of GhostWire; His open-world version of Shibuya is a fantastic recreation of the architectural density – minus the people. Buildings are not only tightly packed, but also feel as massive as real skyscrapers. Not least thanks to GhostWire, this is immediately apparent in the first-person perspective. I loved craning my neck to the buildings around me and feeling the sense of space and scale of the game. This scale also extends far outward as it captures Tokyo’s urban sprawl; Traversing the map takes time, although I rarely got bored walking around like a virtual tourist.
GhostWire is obsessed with the idea of urban isolation, that even in a city where millions of people live on top of each other, you can feel alone. GhostWire achieves that feeling by completely engaging people. It’s eerie to walk through a city without its people and know that there’s no one to talk to except yourself and the (literal in this case) voice in your head. Most of the time, I wish there were people—or even just one kind person—that I could find walking the streets of GhostWire. Not because I’ve ever gotten bored walking through an empty world, but because the sense of isolation and loneliness was incredibly effective and immersive.
And I mean really haunted. GhostWire jumps at every opportunity to sell its spiritual apocalypse. Occasionally the game will mess with you. As I walked around, I saw the painted lines on the street, waving in the wind as if they were thin pieces of paper. Or I’d turn a corner and find that the rain in maybe just one alleyway or small city block was now blood, painting the surrounding buildings and streets a dark, muddy red. Even more dramatically, at key points in the story, the world around you collapses. In fantastic standard moments, the levels rotate, distort and change seamlessly before your eyes as if MC Escher had taken the artistic direction. It’s endlessly awe-inspiring and fun to look at, and I loved using the photo mode to capture the bizarreness around me.
Echoing classic imagery of the Rapture, personal items scatter the map right where they were left – you can’t take your purse or cell phone with you to the afterlife. Most notably, clothes are everywhere. Especially in densely populated areas, there are often huge seas of clothing on the ground where people have disappeared. It’s images like these that hammer home not only the level of excitement of the game, but how terrifying something like that would be. Add that the city still works — lights are on, speaker systems play, you can go on the subway or to grocery stores — and GhostWire has a world not hampered by lack of activity, but empowered by commitment becomes desolate.
Desolate, apart from those creepy creatures, of course. GhostWire’s antagonist merges the worlds of the living and the dead. This sets the stage for most of the gameplay and combat.
Merging this world with the next causes Shibuya to overflow with ghosts. The vast majority of GhostWire runs from point A to point B, fighting a multitude of enemy yōkai scattered along the streets along the way, reaching your destination, and then fighting some more. There’s a solid weight and crunch to fight that’s satisfying from an aural and visual standpoint. All of Akito’s elemental powers also have their unique benefits. I enjoyed switching between my fire attack, which causes a high-damage explosion, and my water attack, which emits a wide arc that hits multiple enemies at once. It’s fun to experiment with other fun powers such as a high rate of fire wind attack, magic bows and arrows, and talismans that freeze enemies. And using the ethereal weave – which is basically a magical cord – to rip out enemy cores always looked great.
Despite having no weapons, GhostWire effectively plays like a first-person shooter. But not a very good one. Aiming is often clunky and inaccurate, and I found myself missing more attacks than not. The encounter design also rarely changes from: there are a handful of enemies surrounding this point of interest, kill them, move on. It’s not necessarily bad in that it gets the job done, but the battle quickly repeats itself. The game’s handful of bosses fare no better, often feeling clumsy and sluggish in combat.
However, not every ghost is out to kill you. When you’re not making your way through Shibuya, you’re rounding up spirits trapped between the two worlds. There are over 240,000 lost souls that it takes you to get back into the mortal spiral, which means you spend a lot of time running around, collecting – which boils down to pressing a button, or very rarely a little one Solve puzzles – and pay at different payphones all over the map. Luckily, you collect spirits en masse so you don’t have to collect all 240,000 one at a time, but it’s still a tedious side objective.
But I don’t find myself too hard on the game’s core loops. On the one hand, it’s a repetitive, rather boring take on the tired Far Cry formula. On the other hand, the yōkai designs are in a league of their own next to the love for the world of GhostWire – it has some of my favorite enemy designs in years. Blending traditional Japanese folklore with its contemporary setting and gazing at the terrifying enemies, there was never a dull moment. My favorites include Lamentation and Shiromuku, whose long black hair is reminiscent of classic Japanese horror film characters Sadako (ring) and Asami Yamazaki (Audition) as well as the various shots of Kuchisake-onna, the thin-mouthed woman, who borrows heavily from her 2007 design carved. For a horror fan, especially one who grew up watching Japanese horror movies, I couldn’t help but get annoyed with all the different creature designs, no matter how many times I’ve fought them.
It also helps that GhostWire is really short. I completed the campaign in about 14 hours, although I did spend a few extra things cleaning up afterthoughts afterwards. As boring as much of the gameplay and story may be, GhostWire never wastes your time. It comes in and out long before anything gets too old, so you can enjoy everything you love about the game without tiring you out with things it does badly.
Which makes GhostWire an odd game to review—at least within the often-restrictive confines of a ratings system. I really like the things I like about GhostWire. I would even go so far as to say that some elements – its world, enemy design, etc. – have been some of my favorites in a game for years. However, there are many elements such as story and gameplay that GhostWire can hardly cope with.
I expect some people won’t be as excited about the game as I am, and I think it’s totally understandable if you don’t want to forgive the game. But if GhostWire connects to you, I think it will really connect to you. It’s weird and unique and I love to see this type of game get such a budget, put everything on the table and use that money to create amazing and awesome art. And for that alone, I can’t help but love GhostWire.
