Ghostwire: Tokyo Interview - Shinji Mikami and Kenji Kimura On Breaking Free From The Confines Of Survival Horror

thegamer.com:

“Ghostwire Tokyo is definitely not a horror game,” director Kenji Kimura tells me. “We are trying to make a game that is spooky and mysterious and maybe the trailers made it feel like a horror thing, but it’s not. That’s not our intention, it’s definitely a spooky thing but it’s almost on the border of horror.”

This blunt statement might catch fans of Tango Gameworks by surprise, a studio founded by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami that cut its teeth on The Evil Within - a game that was very clear about being a direct homage to survival horror classics that helped define the genre decades ago. But with Ghostwire: Tokyo, the studio hopes to break new ground and escape from an archetype it has long been cast into. Ahead of the game’s launch next month, I caught up with studio founder Shinji Mikami and game director Kenji Kimura to talk about the history of Tango, how Ghostwire came about, and what they hope to achieve with this spooky new outing.

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It’s been over ten years since the foundation of Tango Gameworks, with Shinji Mikami piecing the studio together after a continued dissatisfaction with Capcom, hoping to create a space that prioritised young talent while steering the survival horror genre in a direction that it had long lost sight of. “I started a company because I felt we needed to give young talent a chance,” Mikami says. “As head of the studio, it was pretty natural for the company to start by making the sort of game I was known for. So we created The Evil Within, its sequel, and a bunch of DLC for that, which I’d describe as phase one of the company.”

The Evil Within’s success allowed Tango to continue fostering young creative talent from