Reviews
[Review] ‘Ghostwire: Tokyo’ is Full of Ghostbusting and Soul-Searching
In Bloody Disgusting’s Ghostwire: Tokyo review, we find comfort in the melancholy as well as the melodramatic of this Tokyo ghost story.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is not the follow-up to The Evil Within 2 you might expect from Tango Gameworks. Yet it clearly shares in its predecessor’s DNA. It deals in the art of death, but it’s a little more sobering, and without the level of violent destruction found in the bloody adventures of Sebastian Castellanos. Where that game pulled its horrors from the mind, Ghostwire: Tokyo quite literally draws from the spirit. This makes Ghostwire: Tokyo an intriguing prospect. A refreshing change of pace from the developers’ past.
Where it does feel like a Tango Gameworks game is in its plot. An accident leaves a young man named Akito dead on the streets of Shibuya. He’s brought back when a rogue spirit of a detective nicknamed K.K. tries to take over his body. The pair awaken just in time to see a mysterious fog envelope the city, causing everyone to vanish sans clothing. Everyone that is, except Akito and his new spectral roommate. They start at odds with each other, but it soon becomes clear their personal missions have connective tissue and they learn to work as one.
It’s perhaps fitting then that the opening chapters felt much the same way for me as well. While much of what makes up Ghostwire: Tokyo is familiar, it initially feels a bit awkward to get to grips with exactly what Tango Gameworks is going for. I can see why its roots as a sequel to The Evil Within 2 were pulled up and out into a new direction, because it holds an entirely different tone and mood to either of those games. There, the influences were clearly from the West, whereas Ghostwire: Tokyo’s framework is almost entirely embedded in its developer’s home country and culture.
At the heart of that is its depiction of Tokyo. The game’s Quality mode on PS5 allows for Ray Tracing that makes the rain-drenched streets and neon glow truly pop, albeit at the cost of a hindered frame rate. It’s worth it though because outside of enemy encounters, it really adds something to the exploration of every street, convenience store, dingy apartment building, and ominous alleyway. I was surprised by the verticality of Ghostwire: Tokyo. I had assumed it would be largely a street-level affair with some bits set higher up for story purposes. Instead, the game offers a view of Tokyo from on high quite often, and doesn’t punish high rise exploration with pesky fall damage (Akito can even glide downward for a short while).
I could understand if people came away from the open-world approach here and asked ‘but what’s in it for me to explore a world literally lacking in life?’ The answer, best as I can give anyway, is that Ghostwire: Tokyo wants you to look at what’s missing to fill in the blanks. The crumpled clothing that litters the streets. Or the adorable dogs and cats that roam Tokyo, mournfully searching for their now absent owners (don’t worry, you can make them feel better with a pet and a snack).
While coming at this from a different angle, the best comparison would be Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture. There are smaller stories to be discovered that allow trapped souls to move on that not only paint specific pictures of lives abruptly cut short, but of the city’s relationship with its folklore. The main story can get a little overblown and sometimes feels a bit light on its own, but delving deeper into the game’s world this way greatly enhances the overall experience. I’d also recommend playing the free prelude visual novel that was released ahead of the main game’s launch, as it enriches the K.K. side of the story.
Before Akito can explore deeper into the city, however, he needs to cleanse Torii gates in order to push back the damaging fog. It’s not entirely part of the main mission, but it’s an essential activity if the dynamic duo is to rescue the spirits of those who’ve succumbed to the fog and stop the cause of the whole thing.
Standing in the way of that is a bevy of nasty spirits. From headless schoolchildren to scissor-wielding women in trenchcoats, Akito and K.K. have plenty of weird and wonderful monstrosities to confront. Luckily, K.K. has brought along a special set of skills to combat them. Through special element-infused hand movements, a magic bow, and incantations, they can vanquish the menaces of the mists.
At first, the pair can only use the power of air. This flings green shards towards foes, inflicting damage. When enough damage is built up, the ghost’s core is exposed, allowing Akito to pull it out, destroying them in the process. my initial response to this combat was to play it almost like a first-person shooter. Not entirely a bad idea as elemental powers effectively behave like different gun types (each with an ‘alt-fire’ mode when charged), but the aiming, and pace is set to a slower pace than this, where every ‘bullet’ counts. It ends up a little strange, especially because the addition of a block button makes it a bit of a hybrid between shooter and melee combat akin to Dying Light.
Consumable items help when the usual arsenal isn’t enough to push back the numbers. These incantations can do a variety of things. From creating a thicket of thorns that obscure Akito from the roving eyes of spirits to deploying an area of effect that stuns anything that wanders into it. Things do get dicey far more often as progress is made in the story. For instance, Akito gets tasked with guarding others at points and needs to fend off waves of enemies, so these extra tools become an essential part of the battle strategy in both confrontation and avoidance.
The Dualsense controller’s haptic feedback is excellently implemented in combat, making every element power feel different and putting pressure on the left trigger as you struggle to pull the core from ghosts or cleanse a shrine. Its microphone in tandem with subtle ripples of rumble gives the ethereal booming timbre of K.K.’s voice extra amplification too, but honestly, the pairing of the Dualsense and the Pulse 3D headset combines most beautifully to immerse me in the world of Ghostwire: Tokyo. The shuddering breathing sound that rises the closer Akito gets to a spirit is a consistent reminder of the power audio holds here, and Masatoshi Yanagi, one of the composers for The Evil Within 2, has concocted an often haunting soundtrack that works in tandem with the onscreen action rather well. When singer Eve accompanies his work, it feels even more powerful in its melancholy.
With so much power in Akito’s hands, the worry would be how the game uses its horror effectively. During an early chapter, Akito and K.K. are briefly separated, putting Akito in a vulnerable state deep in enemy territory. It’s not an uncommon tool to strip a character of power for a time to artificially shake things up, but given the fragile union of Akito and K.K. it serves to show how reliant they are on each other, even if Akito has just enough in him to scrape by this nervy segment.
Boss fights and areas affected by crushing barriers shift reality into more surreal pastures. If you were longing for something akin to the trippier parts of The Evil Within 2, the shifting environments Ghostwire: Tokyo regularly throws out will quench that particular thirst.
I think it’s fair to argue that Ghostwire: Tokyo works best when it sticks to its default first-person perspective. Tango Gameworks is a little too invested in pulling away from it for cutscenes, and this can occasionally cause a jolting change of tone and took me out of the moment in more than one instance. It’s not all unwelcome, but there are definitely points where it would have played out better with the established perspective.
If you head into Ghostwire: Tokyo hoping for The Evil Within 3 then sorry, you’ll be largely disappointed. If you can accept it as its own thing from the off, however, it’s far easier to slide into its groove and enjoy what the haunted Tokyo streets have to offer you. I found Ghostwire: Tokyo to be an effective mood piece that dabbles in loud absurdity and melodrama, but also retains an air of melancholy and quiet horror that compliments that superbly. Make no mistake, this is a game that demands you take your time soaking up its many stories to really enhance the main one, so missing that will undoubtedly leave anyone doing so feeling sold short because there’s a lot of repetition at its core.
Me, I still like to just stand and stare at an abandoned city as the rain drifts down in hazy sheets whilst the pulsing glow of neon and Yanagi’s ethereal soundtrack throb in unison. Moments like that have nothing and everything to do with why I enjoyed Ghostwire: Tokyo.
Ghostwire: Tokyo review code for PS5 provided by the publisher.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is out on PS5 and PC on March 25.
Reviews
‘Dive or Die: Children of Rain’ Review – The Punishing Difficulty Overshadows the Addictive Qualities
I know plenty of games use the ocean as a source of dread, but very few have made it resonate as much as Dive or Die: Children of Rain, a new horror exploration game from Drop Rate Studio. Not quite a roguelike, the game recalls the vibe and structure of Darkest Dungeon or Aliens: Dark Descent, but instead of exploring cursed dungeons or a Xenomorph-infested planet, your diving into a post-apocalyptic aquatic abyss teeming with eldritch horrors. It’s a challenging and demanding game, but it’s worth the investment for those that like tense exploration and desperate resource management.
The Black Rain came out of nowhere and drowned the world. The oceans rose and buried our world in a watery grave. You play as a band of survivors living in a floating village trying to save what’s left of the world. Old Jack, a member of your group, is haunted by visions and believes you can appease the Maker of Rain, the incomprehensible being that flooded the planet, by diving into the depths and collecting eight lost idols. But time is of the essence, as there’s only 40 days left until the final flood comes to take you.
Each day, you send one of your people down into the depths in search of an idol, but it’s not quite that simple. The dives are presented in 2D, making it feel slightly Metroidvania-y in the way you explore. Your divers each have their own unique set of stats that are upgraded over time that will help them on their dive. Oxygen capacity, carry weight, hit points, and sanity all are important to monitor as you plunge the depths and face the horrors beneath. At the beginning, when your characters’ air capacity is still low, these dives can be pretty brief, lasting only a couple of minutes, but still full of important decisions about what types of resources you should collect on your specific run.
It should be noted that while the resources and enemies change a bit from day to day, the map you’re exploring is static, so navigational knowledge can quickly become just as important as any resources you may pick up. These resources will be crucial to your success, as there’s upkeep that needs to be done at your base. The community has a nutrition and morale value, and those both tick down depending on the number of people you have in your base. Picking up food and heirlooms will help increase your stats, while going into a negative value can have disastrous effects for your community. Narrative events will frequently happen at the base, sometimes involving a simple choice to make, and this can give characters different status effects, which greatly affects their efficiency during a dive.
Fortunately, they don’t all have to be good divers. Your base has a variety of buildings that all grant bonuses if you station a member of your team there. For example, having someone manning the lighthouse will allow you to send people on expeditions where they have a certain percent chance to come back with items and survivors, while stationing someone at the Town Hall can increase your upper limit of nutrition and morale. Not only can each building be upgraded as you collect and spend resources, but leveling up a character can give you a chance to pick new abilities that enhance their abilities at a specific location.
Characters will gain experience points both for diving and for manning locations, and leveling up always feels meaningful. Not only are you given an opportunity to increase their stats, but the abilities they gain can help you focus their utility, whether that be for exploration, resource gathering, or a specific function in the town. When getting new characters in your camp, by default you get one per day but others can join from expeditions, they will often come with specific abilities that show you how best to use them. Whenever I got someone with Iron Lungs, a skill that allowed them to dash without any penalty to oxygen consumption, I knew that I would end up focusing all their skills on diving, making a powerful explorer that I used when I had specific, challenging goals in mind.
Another way to help improve your characters is crafting new items at the workshop. You start the game with a rudimentary knife and needle gun, but as you find blueprints and upgrade the structure, you’ll be given options to craft more useful consumables along with permanent upgrades. At the beginning, it was exciting to get things like a brighter lantern or bigger oxygen tank, but by the end I was getting things like supernaturally enhanced storage lockers and a teleport option called the “blood gates.” Occasionally, exploration is gated behind new technology, limiting you on where you can go until you are able to upgrade yourself to a specific level. This not only gives you a satisfying feeling when you finally are able to, for example, pass through toxic areas, but also helps keep you to earlier areas while you’re lower level, without letting you go too far out of your depth, pun intended.
As I mentioned, there’s a 40 day countdown timer that you’re given, but there’s an important structure in your camp that can help you push back the countdown. When manned, the altar allows you to make sacrifices to the Maker of Rain, which fills up a meter that will delay the flood. Sacrificing nutrition or morale will fill the meter 25 percent, which means it will take a while for you to build up to actually earning a day, so the real way to keep your head above water is by sacrificing your characters. These will give you 15 percent per level, so you’re incentivized to kill the best of your roster when times get tough. It’s a brutal choice to have to make, and it really elevates the decision making you’re doing. I would occasionally get a level four character from an expedition and give them abilities that helped them earn XP faster, just fattening them up for the altar with no intention of ever using them as a useful member of my society. It really shows you how the dark, cultish mindset of your society quickly devolves into desperate barbarism, making for a bleak tone that might not be for everyone.
When you plunge into the Abyssal Pool, you’ll find distinct biomes with their own types of creatures that are out to tear you to shreds. Things start out pretty basic, with serene reefs around sunken buildings, but things quickly get horrifying and surreal. Each of the areas has their own visual theming, each gorgeous in their own right, and often have specific creatures that have their own gimmick. Running into these beasts and figuring out how they operate is part of the fun and mystery of the game, so I won’t spoil it here, but they provided some of the best horror moments I’ve had in gaming this year. Thanks to the excellent sound design, you’ll always hear them coming before seeing them, making for truly terrifying moments. I’ll never forget hearing a guttural roar from the deep, dashing my way back to the surface, and seeing a glimpse of something at the edge of my lantern range encroaching on me from the abyss below.
Getting to actually see the creature is just as exciting, because the monsters are rendered in a heavily-lined art style with designs that capture the alien feel of what lurks in the oceans. Classic sea creatures twisted into Lovecraftian forms lurk the Abyssal Pool, and their beautiful, Mike Mignola-like forms will always leave me with a combination of terror and awe. They each have their own unique audio cues, allowing you to prepare for what’s coming, though forewarned rarely means forearmed.
Since you’re going to be frequently passing through the earlier biomes, there’s a clever mechanic incorporated that allows you to escalate the challenge for greater resources. Each zone has a place where you can sacrifice a diver, which makes the monsters in that area more dangerous while also allowing for blessed resources to spawn there. The blessed versions are necessary for higher level crafting and upgrades, so you will need to make the sacrifice at some point, but when you do it is up to you. It’s a smart way for allowing you to opt in to higher level stuff at your own pace, even if you still have the countdown bearing down on you.
Searching for the idols is the main driver of progress, and the way they dole out the objectives is clever and thematic, if occasionally frustrating. You’ll be given instructions on how to find them in the form of visions from Jack, providing vague guidance without giving you concrete direction. It’s a double edge sword, because I do really enjoy the exploration, and the experience of something clicking into place feels so great when you finally figure it out, but there have been times that I’ve wasted so many in-game days following the directions incorrectly in a dangerous zone.
You’ll assemble your in-game map by collecting fragments as you explore, but it can only be viewed at the library between dives. Once you’re being guided to the later areas, it feels really punishing to die quickly in a new, unmapped environment after spending a lot of time struggling to get a high level character down there. The game does provide ways for you to get up or down faster through quick travel as you get upgrades, but it still feels like there were too many times I took a level 7+ character to a lower area only to get eaten by something I didn’t know how to deal with. Much like Darkest Dungeon, it feels extremely punishing to lose someone you spent so much time on. I know this is the intended experience from the developers, but I found it more frustrating than exciting most of the time.
Once you do get your hand on an idol, there is a new ability unlocked associated with it. These can be equipped at the altar, and the number you can equip is based on the structure’s current level. For how central these are to the plot, I was hoping that they would be a little more useful, but I found myself often forgetting they were there. While they definitely helped me out in a pinch more than once, nothing felt like a massive jump in the power curve that I was looking for.
Every day, there’s a chance for the world condition to change, adding some strange modifiers to your dives. Much like the discovery inherent in the exploration, these were fun to figure out as I went. The first time I saw it say “RED MOON” made my skin crawl with the possibilities, as I had no idea how it would affect my dive. Since you’re usually trying to plan a dive around a specific objective, whether it’s resource gathering or exploring or an idol run, these conditions derailed those plans several times, causing me to figure out how to pivot to get something out of a more dangerous day.
As much as I enjoy all the resource and base management involved in the game, the real secret sauce for Dive or Die is how good those dives feel. Even when you have a creature’s gimmick figured out, it’s never in a way that trivializes it, keeping you on the edge of your seat trying to execute perfectly to circumvent it. There’s nothing more thrilling than grabbing that idol with 30 percent oxygen left and making a mad dash to the surface, panicking and making a wrong turn, only to successfully get to an exit with five percent oxygen to spare. While I think having a map that you could view while exploring would be immensely helpful, I usually had a screenshot of it on my second monitor, there’s something about forcing you into a position where you have to intimately know the world yourself is so satisfying.
Pressure mechanics like the incoming flood are extremely risky for games, as that extra layer of challenge can really make your losses free double frustrating. If I take out my level 10 diver to the deepest zone I’ve ever been, only to have them get killed by something I had no idea existed, it feels devastating. Not only do I lose a diver I’ve put a ton of work into, but I also just spent one of my valuable days getting absolutely nothing. This can be compounded if you made mistakes early on without realizing it, making things extremely rough as you’re sacrificing high level divers just to hold back the flood. I saw a post on the Steam forums from the developers saying that there would be an Endless Mode available from day one, but it wasn’t in the review build I played. I hope it exists upon release, because it’s something I would definitely recommend if you find countdowns like that to be too stressful.
About halfway through, I got very frustrated by the timer because one of the upgrades for my workshop was stuck behind an extremely rare resource that I had no idea where to find. Based on the name of the resource, I tried to guess where it was, but could not find it after wasting several days looking for it. I had so many blueprints that told me I needed to upgrade my workshop, and even though I possessed the resources to craft the items, I wasn’t allowed to. Once I found the needed upgrade material, I was actually able to upgrade the workshop twice in a row because I had already collected the other materials needed for the next level in the time it took me to find it. It’s a fine line to walk when you are putting this level of challenge in front of the player and trusting that they’ll be able to find things in the order that you want, and this part crossed that line and massively demoralized me for several hours of playtime, and probably not in the way the developers intended.
Dive or Die: Children of Rain is a punishingly challenging game that finds multiple ways to keep the pressure on you. While most of the time it works to make your successes feel truly thrilling, there are times when your losses take the wind out of your sails in a negative way. Despite my frustrations with later game difficulty, it’s hard to deny that the game captures the combination of wonder and terror of the deep better than almost any other game I’ve played. The environments are horrifically beautiful, populated with the unsettling eldritch monstrosities and plenty of eerie mystery. The experience of desperately ascending to the surface, trying to remember the turns to take as the sound of a massive beast gets louder and louder on your heels is such a unique brand of horror that this game manages to capture. Even when the setbacks were mounting and I was losing hope, I found myself saying “just one more dive” over and over again. The level of difficulty won’t be for everyone, but fans of the desperate feeling of Darkest Dungeon or XCOM will find a lot to love here.
Review code provided by publisher.
Dive or Die: Children of Rain is available now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
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