This review will first cover the Ghostwire: Tokyo at launch, and then discuss how The Spider’s Thread update affects the end product.
For some, Keanu Reeves stole the show at E3 2019 when he unveiled his involvement in Cyberpunk 2099, for others it was Ikami Nakamura. A first-time game director who had previously worked as a designer on the likes of Okami and The Evil Within, Nakamura passionately introduced her new game, Ghostwire: Tokyo, with nervous excitement. After four years of working on the title, however, Nakamura left the project before its release due to health issues. She was replaced by another first-time game director, Kenji Kimura, who was known for his work as a character designer on the Tekken series. Despite her departure, Ghostwire: Tokyo still embodies many of Nakamura’s interests; bringing to life a contemporary, metropolitan Tokyo absent of people and haunted by supernatural beings and urban legends. There is a vision here, but it’s buried in repetitive gameplay and a surprisingly bland open world.
Developed by Tango Gameworks and published by Bethesda, Ghostwire: Tokyo is a supernatural first-person shooter set in the Shibuya district of Japan’s capital. It is an open-world game steeped in Japanese folklore from a studio purposefully branching out from its previous work. Which means, if you are looking for a survival horror game akin to Tango’s own The Evil Within series, then look elsewhere as Ghostwire: Tokyo is more Far Cry meets Doom than Resident Evil. As such, the game features many of the worst aspects of Western open-world design. Lifeless, repetitive, and empty; Ghostwire: Tokyo mixes Japanese folklore and Western game design to its detriment.
When a mysterious fog consumes the busy district of Shibuya, Tokyo, the city becomes a ghost town. Literally. Cars abandoned, crashed, their engines still running; dropped phones unlocked and mid-message within bundles of empty clothes. These are all that is left of the shopping and business districts’ busy inhabitants. Only a young man, Akito, remains. His body is inhabited by the spirit of KK, a detective who investigates the supernatural, and together the pair set out to uncover the truth behind this mysterious mass disappearance.
Open World Game Design
Through the Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed series, Ubisoft popularised a formula for open-world map design that utilized so-called ‘Crow’s Nest Cartography’. These games featured climbable landmarks such as famous/notable buildings and towering radio towers and, as a reward, revealed the surrounding area on the player’s in-game map; simultaneously filling it with collectibles and activities. Commonly and rather dismissively known as ‘Ubisoft Towers’, this method of progression has become a staple of open-world games, with some criticizing it as formulaic and repetitive. Similarly, it can lead to a game’s Heads Up Display, in-game map, and quest list becoming cluttered with an overabundance of symbols and waypoint markers.
Ghostwire: Tokyo’s own ‘Ubisoft Towers’ are Torii Gates. Towering red arches that emit a damaging ‘Sprit Fog’ that permeates adjacent areas. ‘Cleansing’ is a major part of Ghostwire’s gameplay loop, however, the world that is revealed by the Torii Gates is a largely empty one. Tango has gone to the effort of creating an almost photo-realistic depiction of one of the earth’s most famous cities (which by all accounts is also an accurate one) only to not put anything to do in it. Ghostwire’s Tokyo is, ironically, lifeless. Each street blends into the last with very few distinct, memorable locations.
Similarly, be they landmarks, tall buildings, or just difficult climbs, ‘Ubisoft Towers’ are usually points of interest to the player. Something on the horizon for them to travel to. Bar a few notable, story-related locations, Ghostwire: Tokyo’s Torii Gates are very unremarkable and scattered randomly across the map. By making the Torii Gates so essential to progressing through the main story, as well as accessing Shibuya, Tango has made a by-product of modern open-world games into THE central mechanic of their title. And it’s just so boring. The main story is good, but the pace regularly screeches to a halt as Tango put the next mission deep into an unexplored, locked part of the map. Requiring several hours of repetitive grinding to continue.
Kimura told Polygon in March 2022 that “the team wanted to make the game something of a sightseeing experience that could show off its recreation of Tokyo”. If this was a tech demo showing off what Tango can do with the Unreal Engine 4 then Ghostwire: Tokyo is a fantastic demonstration of their skills. It looks amazing, especially the atmospheric lighting. This isn’t a tech demo though, it’s an open-world video game.
Collectables
For a world without any real interactivity, and very little to do in it; there sure are a lot of collectibles in Ghostwire: Tokyo. This is the second core mechanic of Ghostwire, unleashing your inner kleptomaniac and gathering everything from paintings to a child’s toy, to lost kites and a serial killer’s calling cards. There is no challenge to finding the collectibles, just go to the waypoint on the map and look around for a minute. Even worse are the spirits that Akito and KK vow to save. Repetition is a curse that haunts Ghostwire: Tokyo, and this is best seen in the numerous bundles of human spirits scattered around Tokyo (usually 100-200 worth). Hoovering them up contributes towards earning currency and XP. Simply walk up to the ghostly cloud and hold R2 to suck them into paper dolls called Katashiro, and then deposit them into a telephone box. All 240,300 of them. That’s right, there are almost a quarter of a million souls to collect. It is one of the most mind-numbing gameplay experiences I’ve had in an open-world game and even made me yearn for the days of Assassin’s Creed 2’s feather questline (if you know, you know). I’m certain that the process of collecting these souls, and the ‘puzzle’ that sometimes appears, repeatedly drained my DualSense controller’s battery. Although, with a population of roughly 13.96 million people living in Tokyo, maybe Tango should be thanked for only including the Shibuya district in their game.
Side Missions
Across Shibuya are distressed spirits unable to cross over into the afterlife. These short side stories are arguably the best part of Ghostwire: Tokyo, with Akito and KK uncovering clues and following the trail as any good ghost-hunting detective would. There are some really interesting and, dare I say, scary stories here and it’s a real shame that Tango didn’t go all in on this aspect of the game. Early highlights included helping an eye transplant patient too afraid to close their new eyes and saving a child prodigy from a jealous master of the craft.
Every quest giver is a faceless blue spirit with creative names like ‘Crying Man’ or ‘Woman in Mall’, which makes many of the missions blend together. Despite a collection of interesting story ideas, the gameplay often lets the experience down by culminating in a simplistic, repetitive shooting gallery. The best missions require the player to do more than just shoot. For example, the aforementioned quest involving an eye transplant patient: it sees Akito and KK exploring a haunted hospital ward, looking through doctors’ notes and patient records to find the original source of the haunted eyeballs (which is a sentence I never thought I’d write).
There is a mission that sees the pair repeatedly running into a child who wants to play hide and seek, and another that transports the pair to feudal Japan to free a nobleman’s spirit. Quests like these are much more interesting than “Go here, shoot that”, and really show what Ghostwire: Tokyo could have been. What’s worse is that Ghostwire: Tokyo features a perfect entry point for these more investigative missions with KK’s Case Files, one of the many collectibles that can be found around the city. Not letting the player investigate these cases themselves is a huge missed opportunity.
In the same vein, there are many Yokai running rampant around Shibuya, and capturing them rewards the player with an upgrade material called Magatama. Each Yokai is visually distinct (my personal favourite is the chubby Nurikabe that disguises itself as a wall) but the gameplay around them is insultingly lazy. Not only are the encounters copied and pasted across the map, but some Yokai missions are identical and make the different creatures feel interchangeable. For example, the cloth-like Ittan-momen, uncomfortably long-necked Rokurokubi, and sickle-wielding weasel Kamaitachi all involve following the creature till it arbitrarily stops; the Kappa and Karakasa-kozo meanwhile need to be slowly, tediously snuck up on, and the Kodama and Oni involve you protecting a tree and dog respectively. It’s the same animations, the same dialogue, and the same easy, monotonous tasks over and over again.
Combat
Onto the combat and Ghostwire: Tokyo is, essentially a first-person shooter. As a side effect of KK’s possession of his body, Akito is able to perform powerful elemental magic attacks called Spirit Weaving, which uses a material called Ether as ammunition. These are Wind, Water, and Fire based; each of which has a standard attack and a charged attack. Wind is Akito’s primary power, with Water and Fire Ether hard to come by in fights; however, Fire is by far the best ability. With Fire, Akito shoots either a narrow blast of flame or a charged explosive fireball. Early on Akito takes possession of KK’s Demon Bow, a weapon that makes stealth a cakewalk, as well as Talismans. These throwables can do a variety of things in both stealth and combat. For example, the Thicket Talisman spawns bushes to hide in and the Decoy Talisman produces noise to lure enemies, although neither of these came in handy during my time with the game. Not even during a stealth-focused boss fight.
The Stun and Exposure Talismans are very satisfying to use though. Exposing enemy ‘cores’ is a key part of combat in Ghostwire with Akito’s Spirit Weaving tearing chunks from enemies until their glowing orange core is visible. Enemies can be killed normally, or by grabbing and removing their cores. Doing this also charges Akito’s Wire-In ability, so using Exposure Talismans on weaker enemies is very helpful. The Wire-In ability allows Akito and KK to embrace their bond and unleash an ultimate ability that boosts damage, slows time, and exposes cores easier.
There are a few abilities to be unlocked that grant the likes of health and ether when destroying enemy cores, and once these are attained Ghostwire: Tokyo takes on a combat style akin to Doom-light. Fighting enemies at mid-range before getting up close and personal to destroy their core, retrieving ether and health in the process. Combat is fun at first as you blast elements at spirits and avoid or block a good variety of enemy attacks. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that every combat encounter in Ghostwire: Tokyo is the same and can be easily navigated by circle-strafing around enemies to get them all in front of you, maintaining your distance from them, and then spamming your Spirit Weaving abilities.
There are some difficult enemy types like the Shine Dancer and Lamentation that are stronger and scarier but for the most part, on both normal and hard difficulty, enemies don’t require much effort to defeat. The challenge comes instead from managing resources. It’s easy to burn through arrows and Talismans in larger battles without a way to restock, and Water and Fire ammo spawns are limited and inconsistent.
Many larger fights see Akito teleported to a circular arena with waves of enemies thrown at him. There are a handful of floating destroyable objects (which are used throughout the game to refill ether) and a little bit of set dressing, but other than that you’re just repeatedly fighting the same enemies in a bland white void. An arena that actually does a disservice to the narrative build-up to these fights. For example, one side mission sees Akito and KK investigating a series of disappearances at a train station. There is a palpable sense of unease as the pair travel deeper underground and learn more about a ghost station and the violent spirit tied to it. The player boards a ghost train, only to end up traveling to the same bland white void that they fought spirits conjured by a possessive hoarder in earlier. It comes across as a little lazy on Tango’s part, teleporting the player to the same boring environment for pretty much each horde fight. Even the spectacularly haunting Hyakki Yako Spirit Parade that Akito can gate-crash teleports you to the same arena.
The first boss even takes place in the arena void! On the topic of bosses, they are not good. The first saw me running around like a headless chicken waiting for ammo drops to spawn in; something that really took me out of the spectacle of fighting a magic ghostly gorilla thing. The second, a gigantic cat boss, may be one of the worst bosses I’ve ever fought in a video game. It was so tedious I almost quit as the game forced me to crawl up behind the boss and stun them. It’s poorly designed as the game gives little indication of how to stun the boss, and then would not register button inputs when trying to grab the boss’s cores. This lead to the boss quickly recovering and batting Akito away like a gnat. Doing laps of the unique-looking environment gave way to long patches of standing waiting for the boss to get in the right position to attack and stun. There are explosive gas cans that work effectively, but they respawn obnoxiously slowly. I was forced to wait several minutes between attacks, and, as I alluded to earlier, the Thicket and Decoy Talismans which have been designed for stealth, are completely useless in this boss fight!
It is such a shame that Ghostwire: Tokyo stumbles over so many of its individual parts because there are several good ideas here. The central premise is a lot of fun, and the bestiary is absolutely fantastic. Each vengeful enemy is well-designed and different, even within their respective groups. Take, for example, the variety on display within the Rain Walker enemy type: standard Rain Walkers are the most common enemy in the game and look like Slenderman performing Singin’ In The Rain; Shadow Hunters also wield an umbrella, but their police uniforms display a corrupted spirit that no longer knows what it is protecting; and Relentless Walkers are larger, stronger spirits with a more lavish umbrella and adornments, based off of violent businessmen. There is such an interesting range of vengeful, almost human spirits. Whether it’s headless cartwheeling schoolgirls the Students of Misery, puppet-like Shine Dancers (which make rain flow upwards), or the scissor-wielding,
ferocious Kuchisake; it’s impossible to criticize the appearances of Ghostwire: Tokyo’s enemies.
The Spider’s Thread Update
While working on this review Tango Gameworks released The Spider’s Thread Update, a major addition to Ghostwire: Tokyo that I feel brings it closer to the developer’s intended vision. It’s proof that Ghostwire: Tokyo’s combat and exploration have potential, but the open-world collect-a-thon gameplay of the base game hampers the experience. With this update, I almost get what Tango was going for here. The new mode strips the game back to its basics; focusing on combat and light exploration; and makes Ghostwire: Tokyo almost feel (as mentioned earlier) like the latest incarnation of Doom. Should the whole game have been a rogue-like? Absolutely not. But Spider’s Thread suggests a level of variety and fun missing from a lot of the core game.
Spider’s Thread Game Mode
Among a number of quality-of-life improvements, the update has added several new weapons to Akito and KK’s arsenal, as well as a new game mode. The titular Spider’s Thread is a 30-level rogue-like that sees Ghostwire’s protagonists descending into the pits of a ghostly labyrinth, challenging their combat, parkour, and exploration skills to the limit as they hunt for the Great Spider Tsuchigumo. A being whose webs are threatening the living world. It’s a side story to the main game and doesn’t require players to have finished Ghostwire: Tokyo’s campaign, being available from the start menu.
By structuring Spider’s Thread as levels, Tango has perhaps inadvertently demonstrated what does and doesn’t work within Ghostwire: Tokyo. Replacing the empty open world of the main game with semi-open spaces scattered with enemies, a clear objective, and a handful of resources to pick up (food and ether are more essential than ever in this mode) really shows that Ghostwire should have never taken the route it did with its open world. While that annoying white void arena reappears, there is plenty of variety between levels as they take aspects of the open world and flip them (sometimes literally) on their head. Usually Ghostwire’s levels are at their best when they throw the player into trippy, alternate dimensions that bend the laws of physics and have them running on the sides of skyscrapers and leaping from one floating car to another, the environment shifting and transforming around them as they blast Visitors away.
The skybox is beautiful as Tokyo hangs in the centre of a spider’s web like a fly ready to be feasted on. Spider webs replace the main game’s Spirit Fog, used here to funnel the action and keep the level as its own area. Thematically appropriate, the low-resolution webbing does not stand up to closer inspection. Parkour (which is poor in the main game) remains a big issue as the awful traversal is awkward and unresponsive, with Akito frequently rubbing his face against climbable objects without mounting. What’s more, with the Spider’s Thread update there has been a noticeable increase in lag between Akito clambering over an obstacle and being able to continue moving afterward. Mirror’s Edge, this is not.
Fear For The Children
The update also comes with a new mission, Fear For The Children, and it is a fantastic addition to the game. It sees Akito and KK investigate an abandoned, haunted middle school after learning that a group of students, having been inspired by KK’s supernatural sleuthing, have formed their own paranormal research group and inadvertently released a malevolent entity onto the school. It is not a massive area and does involve a bit of back tracking, but Fuchihashi Middle School is a fantastic small slice of Ghostwire: Tokyo’s best features. Creepy and intense, there is a lot of variety on offer here in regards to level design, exploration, combat, and unique gameplay mechanics. The only criticism I have is that the exterior of the middle school has a lot of empty space; and I experienced my one and only crash with the game after defeating Fear For The Children’s final boss. Back to positives however, and the Spider’s Thread update also provides some much needed character development for KK. Not only do we get a glimpse into his life scouring the city for supernatural phenomena during the Spirits of the Modern Age questline – a side mission that sees the player criss-cross the length and breadth of Tokyo searching for locations from 25 haunted photographs – but also the consequences of KK’s actions with his ‘fan club’ causing trouble at the middle school. Even the Yokai encounters added are an improvement on the main game, even if it’s because they are slightly different to the dozens seen previously.
Combat Improvements
Combat has been massively improved with this update, it’s more fluid and quicker, and it looks a lot nicer too. Each Spirit Weaving element has a new, third attack (all of which are activated by pressing the right analogue stick after loading up a charge attack). Which adds some much-needed variety and strategy to combat encounters. Wind’s Shinhaya ability turns Akito’s main attack into a rapid-fire finger gun; Water’s Wadahaya produces an Area Of Effect attack that freezes nearby enemies caught in it; and Fire’s Hinohaya attack gives Akito a flamethrower in the literal palm of his hand.
They all have their pros and cons but, as with the Spirit Weaving attacks at large now, all feel viable depending on what enemy the player is facing.
The hard difficulty now feels hard, with enemies actually packing a punch, whereas before Normal and Hard felt identical and equally easy. Two new Talismans have also been added, there is the Spirit Well Talisman which spawns an ether-producing well for a short period of time; and the Updraft Talisman which will shoot Akito into the air – useful when trying to navigate the Tokyo skyline and for fleeing sticky situations.
Two things of note that are only in the Spider’s Thread mode: the upgrade screen has been given an appropriate spider web shape (far superior to the main game’s boring layout), and Prayer Beads have been given a revamp. A largely forgettable and inconsequential reward for cleaning Torii Gates in the main game; in the Spider’s Thread mode Prayer Beads now encourage further variety in how the player can approach each run as they feature buffs and debuffs to certain attributes. For example, one may increase damage output but also increase damage received. Last but not least, Ghostwire: Tokyo now has a dodge ability. And it’s a game changer. Dashing left and right, combat feels more fluid and exciting, and it’s now more than just getting all the enemies in sight and keeping your distance. Likewise, the new parry abilities combine with the boost in difficulty to make blocking more important, and fun.
Conclusion
Ghostwire: Tokyo is a beautiful game with an amazing array of distinctly Japanese foes steeped in fascinating folklore. It launched with an undercooked RPG system that didn’t encourage different playstyles or tactics and the Spider’s Thread update has improved the player experience; combat is a lot better, and the new mode is a good change of pace that really demonstrates Ghostwire’s best parts. Many of these quality-of-life improvements and combat elements should have been in the game on release however and demonstrate a fractured vision of Ghostwire.
The game is at its best when it lets the player investigate specific areas of the world (a forest, an apartment block, a spa, etc.) and discover the stories within. Tango Gameworks must be commended for their attempts to recreate Shibuya’s towering skyscrapers and bright, neon streets; but this open world actually distracts from what the studio gets right. Japan has rich spiritual mythology and unique urban legends, and Ghostwire: Tokyo is fantastic when Tango is allowed to express its creativity. There are several short, well-told stories dotted across Shibuya, but all of Ghostwire: Tokyo’s strengths are in service of repetitive gameplay, underwhelming combat, and a bland and empty open world.
I’ve stopped giving games numbered scores, but for the sake of demonstration: I would give the base game a five out of ten. After the Spider’s Thread update, however, that score would be raised to at least a seven.
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