Previews
[Preview] ‘Ghostwire: Tokyo’: Tango Gameworks’ Latest is Building on ‘The Evil Within 2’ in Supernatural Style
We got a Ghostwire: Tokyo preview, and came away impressed by the supernatural new game from Tango Gameworks.
I have this strange fondness for seeing normally populated worlds in video games emptied of humanity. Ever played The Forest with enemies turned off? Wandered through some of the quieter ruins of the Seattle suburbs in The Last of Us Part II? Or maybe plodded through an abandoned vault in Fallout? I live for that odd, haunting solitude, and Tango Gameworks’ Ghostwire: Tokyo seems to have plenty of it.
A 30-minute preview of Ghostwire: Tokyo was shown to press recently, and it showcased the streets of Shibuya suddenly shorn of a human population, save for protagonist Akito. There’s a sense Rapture has occurred. A strange fog is blanketing the area, and a spiritual presence seems to be the only clue as to what’s occurred. Akito is alone in a sense, if not for the spirit that shares his body and the host of Yokai lurking unseen in the mist throughout the area.
It seems everyone has moved on mysteriously and Akio now possesses mystical powers to take down the Yokai menace, and set the people’s spirits free through might and magic. Faced with cracking the mystery, and finding his family. Akio finds a demon-masked antagonist standing in his way.
Ghost Town
Something was quickly very clear. There’s a careful calmness to Ghostwire: Tokyo that seems to add an unnerving and impactful atmosphere to a deliciously offbeat ghost story. Despite being quite different from Tango’s previous outing, The Evil Within 2, there’s a distinct underlying style that echoes across from it. Where The Evil Within 2 distorted normality through the mind’s eye of another, Ghostwire: Tokyo pulls the abnormal into actual reality. Certain objects in the environment appear charged by malevolent energy, and manifest into Yokai or strange supernatural tendrils. Among the monsters, friendly and unfriendly, shown were a floating cat called Nekomata, bird-like creatures, headless schoolgirls, and umbrella-carrying ghoulish businessmen.
Akito’s spectral infusion comes from the soul of a detective called K.K. that bonded with him in an accident. This reluctant union has gifted him the knowledge of rituals and spells to banish foes and unblock barriers through special hand signals called Ethereal Weaving (unsure if it’s related to Samara). Imagine, if you will, combat by Dr. Strange. Akito fires at spirits with energy from his fingers (yes, magic finger guns!). Further signs then pull at the very being of these spirits until they explode in a shower of supernatural debris. It makes for a pretty spectacular light show, and I hope there’s a host of variations on them in the full game. There were different elemental types (wind, etc) and a mystical bow that Akito picks up partway through the demo, so it certainly seems like he’s going to build something of an arsenal to combat the growing threat.
Outside of the mystical combat, the pair need to dispel that fog. This appears to be done by swiping the touchpad to write out symbols at certain barrier points that manifest as corrupted Torii Gates. Of course, the further into the fog-shrouded glow of Tokyo they go, the meaner and deadlier the obstacles become. Other obstacles will appear to slow your roll too, as the footage showed Akito trapped inside a building that was being ‘squeezed’ by an angry presence. Akito’s solution was to seek out the cause, and in the highlight of the demo, it caused the interior of the building to constantly shift and change in creepy and psychedelic ways as the fabric of reality crumbled.
Helping The Lost and the Damned
Despite the bonding, Akito and K.K. have their own agendas, so there’s a bristling quality to the pair’s relationship. It’ll be fascinating to see how this union plays out. It’s one of a few things that reminded me of The Darkness (the game, not the English rock band) in that it features a protagonist is unwillingly inhabited by another being (so also a bit like Venom, Shadow of Mordor, or the anime series Parasyte: The Maxim).
Beyond their squabbles, Akito and K.K. get to have kinder interactions at least. Lost souls drift about Shibuya, and many can be saved by helping them find closure. In the demo, a spirit laments the disappearance of her friendly Zashiki-Warashi and pleads with Akito to help find it. After following the clues, it turns out it was being held captive by a demonic landlord (so, just a landlord). Once that’s dealt with, the spirit and its Yokai are reunited, and can be at peace. Lovely.
Hopefully, there’s a good balance of helpful and hurtful in Ghostwire: Tokyo, because as cool as it is to fight off nasty demons and spirits, some levity is welcome. We won’t have too long to find out at least.
Seeing Ghostwire: Tokyo in action has raised my interest levels a fair bit. It appears to show a studio that took the right ideas from The Evil Within 2’s development and forged on with something even more inventive.
Ghostwire: Tokyo preview provided by the publisher.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is out March 25 on PS5 and PC.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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