I’ve been making my way north slowly for days now. What was at first an imminent threat has subsided to one that sits in the background: the Mongols have invaded the island of Tsushima and I am the only one that can stop them, sure, but for now they seem content to wait in their war camps and let me take my time as I chase foxes and birds through golden forests and sweeping grassfields, reflecting on my journey in the shade of a red maple tree. Sometimes I murder 6 men in seconds as I see them passing by, then off to see what this little golden bird wants to tell me. This is the world of Ghost of Tsushima: slow, occasionally brutal, contemplative and easy. It is fitting that it comes now as the last major exclusive for the PS4 and the last major AAA release before we start getting into cross-gen territory, because it feels like a little encapsulation of the entire last generation of gaming. It is not the best game of the generation, no. But when it comes to AAA console gaming, it seems to encapsulate the past 7 years better than any game yet.
Moreso than being an open-world game, I would call Tsushima a map game. The game plops you down on an open map, like any number of games have done before, and it populates that map with icons that you can go check off. Liberate an outpost, honor a shrine, climb a not-tower to get a new charm. Collect upgrade materials for your equipment along the way, grow stronger, encounter occasional story.
It does so much of this beautifully well. This is, perhaps, the prettiest game I have ever played, making staggering use of color and light to produce an endless stream of social media-ready screenshots that you never quite get used to, even after dozens of hours. The game knows this, and leans in: one of the open world activities is simply to lay down your sword, observe the world around you, and write a sort of lame haiku.
The combat is engaging, and exciting: on normal difficulty you’ll soon find yourself hopelessly overpowered next to your hapless Mongol enemies, and the game transitions to being less about how you can kill these enemies and more about how you want to kill these enemies. You can rush in with perfect parries and attempt to make them look silly and go down in one shot, you can slow time and nail headshot after headshot with your half bow, you can go nuts with bombs and throwing weapons and fell an entire crowd in seconds. You can just go ahead and sneak around, if you like. Like the exploration, it feels smooth, satisfying, occasionally punctuated but ultimately comforting.
That’s Ghost of Tsushima. It does so many of the things that so many of the games I love have done this generation, but it does them with grace and ease. The same is true even for the generally uninteresting story: it’s not winning any writing awards, but it also doesn’t try to. It just presents a series of more or less straightforward, predictable plot beats with a couple of engaging-enough characters and a wealth of lovely shots. It asks very little from you, and it gives plenty. Like the exploration, and like the combat, it is smooth above all else.
I would be remiss not to mention the things that Tsushima does better than others. Its uses wind that blows in the direction of your objectives rather than traditional waypoints, and its lovely: it avoids cluttering the screen and it requires just enough active participation from the player. Rather than simply pointing at an icon, you scan the environment every once in a while for little dancing leaves to see where to go. The end result is the same—you are guided to your objective—but the journey is so much more pleasant. The same goes for the small golden birds that will sometimes fly around you and guide you to a new point of interest, or the simple and enjoyable activity of chasing a little fox around until it shows you a shrine.
I am more glad than I expected to be to have a game like Ghost of Tsushima. Rather than giving us innovation, Sucker Punch has given us care and craft with the things we already know. It is a comforting thing to have, here in a moment when my country is still grappling with its failure to contain coronavirus and when the future seems less predictable than it ever has before. It strikes a delicate balance of predictable, able to live in both the back and front of my mind as I play it. It is the encapsulation of this entire console generation, and it’s come at just the right time.
I’m a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games,
I’m a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games, technology and that whole gray area that happens when technology and consumers collide. Google