Game Ghostwire: Tokyo
Developer Tango Gameworks
Publisher Bethesda Softworks
Format PC, PS5
Origin Japan
Release March 25
You’re unlikely to feel haunted in a crowd, especially in the crowds of the most populated city in the world, so the first thing that happens in Ghostwire: Tokyo is the elimination of all the people. As Tango Gameworks’ paranormal action game begins, the streets are engulfed by a fog that disembodies anyone it touches, leaving behind a sad little heap of clothes and the sparkling blue afterimage of a soul. A man in a Hannya mask gloats from the enormous TV screens at Shibuya Crossing, once the Earth’s busiest intersection: humanity, he promises, stands on “the precipice of transcendence”. But not everybody has gone to the rapture. Your character, Akito, is saved from evaporation when his body is possessed by a mysterious phantom, KK. The experience leaves his face branded with fizzing black energy and his knuckles coursing with elemental magic – just the thing to wield against the hordes of demons, or yokai, that now wander Tokyo in the citizenry’s stead.
is not a work of horror, but its bestiary of folkloric monsters stands comparison with the worst of Tango’s previous . Take the kuchisake-onna, a vengeful spirit with a bandaged face wielding a huge pair of scissors. In legend, the creature asks its victims “Am I beautiful?” before carving them up. ’s version has no time for such pleasantries, making it advisable to attack her from behind. Elsewhere, you’ll trade fireballs with dangling rope dolls, and dodge the flying kicks of giggling, headless schoolgirls. There are hybrids of woman and tiger that recall the necromorphs of , and gaunt, Slender Man-style suited gents with no facial features at all. Many ghosts are equipped with umbrellas, using them to block attacks, though there’s no
