Ghostwire: Tokyo review: Folklore becomes freak show

digitaltrends.com:

At times, Ghostwire: Tokyo is unlike anything I’ve ever played. My jaw drops as I run through a hallway that wildly morphs around me as if it’s a space truly possessed by evil spirits. Other times, I’m wading through another map filled with busy work, anxiously waiting for that next scripted “wow” sequence.

Developed by Tango Gameworks, the studio that brought us The Evil Within, Ghostwire: Tokyo is a first-person action game that’s most notable for (likely) being the final Bethesda game on PlayStation. It fuses horror and fantasy to imagine an eerie version of the Shibuya section of Tokyo that’s haunted by spirits — both the helpful and hurtful kind. Tango borrows familiar tropes from your typical open-world shooter, but masks the more generic design touchstones in a layer of atmospheric weirdness.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is at its best when it’s reimagining Japanese folklore in visually astonishing ways and delivering moving visualizations of what it’s like to pass on. It’s less compelling as a checkbox-driven open-world game, with limited content stretched too thin across its apocalyptic version of Shibuya.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is essentially a supernatural buddy cop story. When nearly everyone in Tokyo suddenly vanishes, a boy named Akito gets possessed by a detective named KK who infuses him with special powers. Stuck in the same body, the two must find the masked vigilante who caused the disappearance and stop him from performing a ritual involving Akito’s sister.

Calling it an “open-world first-person shooter” could technically be accurate, but it would be a surface-level descriptor. The clever thing about the game is that it’s deeply rooted in Japanese folklore, which makes tired ideas feel new at times. That isn’t just