Episode 153 - Rinko Suave - Ghostwire: Tokyo

Next time we meet, I’ll have lived a good full podcast. Welcome back to the finale of Spooktember in July! Today, we’re going to be talking about Ghostwire: Tokyo, a first person shooter game from Tango Gameworks, the developer of The Evil Within. Ghostwire is a sort of a horror game, but with an emphasis on magical first-person combat and Japanese culture, which makes it sort of an odd experience because of where its priorities seem to be. The open world parts of the game are in a lot of ways bog standard, with myriad collectibles, “Ubisoft towers” to clear to open new sections of the map, sidequests and other digressions, but on the other hand, there are also pages upon pages of item and character descriptions, full of folklore and details about everyday life in Japan. It makes the actual world of the game feel very realized, and downright educational at times. The combat contains a lot of systems, but not a lot of incentive to engage with that depth, as encounters tend to be fairly easy to overcome either with your basic “elemental weaving” attacks or with stealth, limiting the amount the player will actually experiment with the advanced techniques or other weapon items like the bow and talismans. To some extent, this is a shame, because the game’s setting and visuals are at times captivating, but taken as a whole this still isn’t a bad game and there’s a lot of fun to be had if you’re willing to look past the more banal parts of its design. We’re going to be talking about our perception of how this game was received and its potentially overlooked content update that adds a lot of good things to the game, how the open world both succeeds and fails by following trends in design that are over a decade old, and we address the very real danger of flip-kicking school children. Thank you for joining us again this week! We had fun cobbling this stupid theme together, and this was the game I’m most happy to have had a reason to play. Not because it’s the best of the games we talked about, but because it’s a title we likely wouldn’t have played otherwise, and one that is pretty fascinating at times. It isn’t groundbreaking, but it focuses on things most games don’t, and it’s always fun to see something in the triple A space trying to do weird things. What did you think of Ghostwire? Did you play at release and if so were you aware of the update that came out? Was I justified in comparing this to No Man’s Sky? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be tackling a game on the complete opposite end of the genre spectrum and talking about Rimworld, so we hope you’ll join us for that!