Rating of
4.5/5
Sony’s Cinematic Sandbox Success
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/04/25
“Ghost of Tsushima” (“GoTs”) is the second attempt at a new Sandbox IP coming out of a Sony first-party studio in the last decade. The first of these efforts was “Horizon: Zero Dawn,” which came from Sony subsidiary, Guerrilla Games, whose only real previous experience was with the flavor-of-the-day slop that was the Brown-and-Gray early-‘00s FPS. I did not like “Horizon: Zero Dawn” for a number of reasons, but the primary shortcoming in my eyes was the poorly-designed, rote-feeling Sandbox gameplay, which littered the map with dozens of icons marking spurious and dubiously-useful activities for the player to check off a list.
“GoTs,” on the other hand, is the product of the much-more-seasoned Sony subsidiary, Sucker Punch, whose initial claim to fame was the cartoony Stealth/Platformer, “Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus,” and whose most-recent work for Sony has been part of the Sandbox genre, with the ‘inFamous’ series. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a Sony subsidiary studio with a pedigree deeply engrained with Stealth and Sandbox gameplay concepts would do a better job at creating a compelling modern Sandbox game than a studio that previously only made lowest-common-denominator FPS swill… And that’s exactly what has happened here.
Presentation
“GoTs” is blatantly (and verbosely) inspired by the samurai-themed martial arts movies of the late director, Akira Kurosawa, who was most active between the 1940s and 1960s, but whose vision of Feudal Japan and samurai culture became the mould from which all other’s would cast their own works, influencing not only Japanese live-action film, but anime, manga, and Western concepts of the theme as well. There’s even a “Kurosawa Mode” in the game’s options to turn it into a grainy, black-and-white experience, just like the movies that inspired it.
In general, it’s almost always a sign of quality when a development studio creates their own game engine from scratch instead of leaning on Unreal of Unity… and that’s exactly what Sucker Punch did. “GoTs” is entirely its own animal, and the engine shows very little in the way of visual quirts. Cloth and hair drape more naturally than in any other previous game, with yurt flaps being particularly impressive (and the occasional insane cape clipping proving there’s still at least some room for improvement. The game uses an extremely minimalist HUD, with player navigation primarily aided through naturalistic in-world methods. Chiefly, whenever the player marks a location on their map or selects an active quest, the in-game wind will blow in the direction the player needs to go. Likewise, when the player is wandering the open world aimlessly, if they approach a point of interest, a yellow bird will appear and beckon the player to follow it, eventually departing with an echoing call once the player gets close enough to the point of interest for it to appear as a map icon.
The open world of Tsushima Island isn’t exactly accurate, and it does take liberties with seasonal biomes by making the Southern part of the island exist in a perpetual Summer, while the further North the player moves with the story, the colder and more Winter-like things become. However, there was some effort put into recreating some iconic locations from the real-world version of Tsushima – and apparently stupid tourists were visiting them because of the game and trashing them to the point that the Japanese authorities had to close them to visitors (so sad, but predictable). The environments in the game look absolutely fantastic, with realistic plants, foliage, rock formations, beaches, bamboo forests, Buddhist and Shinto shrines, and pretty much everything else one would expect in a Feudal Japan setting.
What really blew my socks off about the presentation, though, wasn’t just the game world and its inhabitants, but the stylish and truly Cinematic way the game frames the dozens of iconic moments throughout. Each chunk of the story (and side quests) opens and closes with an in-game camera shot that sent tingles up my spine. And if a movie-grump like ME felt that way about the game’s artistic vision, true movie fans (and especially Kurosawa fans) might have to change their pants after each session. This is a game that looks good, knows it looks good, and takes every opportunity to reinforce that it looks good!
Audio is likewise exemplary, with a dual-audio system featuring either English or Japanese dialog. Subtitles exist for a bunch of languages as well. As a self-proclaimed dub-lover, I played “GoTs” in English, and was incredibly impressed by the fact that the character models lip-synch perfectly to either dialog language. Vocal performances are excellent across the board, with a cast of seasoned videogame voice actors, with only a smattering of TV or film credits among them (keeping the budget sane). What shocked me was the fact that Sucker Punch went ahead and modeled the in-game characters to look nearly identical to their VA performers, which is usually something you only see if the VA in question is an A-lister and driving the game’s marketing (*glares at Keanu Reeves in “Cyberpunk 2077”*). Outside of the voiceacting, the soundtrack is subtle, but generally quite excellent, with memorable moments that stand out more because the background music isn’t overdone.
Technically, “GoTs” is incredibly solid, and I’m glad that Sony decided to spend the resources to port this game to Steam for PC gamers to enjoy. It supports Xinput out of the box and includes Xbox-themed button prompts. I had a tiny number of technical hiccups – the game froze on me once at initial startup, and a couple of times the combat UI got borked and wouldn’t let me switch projectiles until I saved, quit to the title screen, then reloaded), but I can’t say they were intrusive or dragged the game’s overall quality at all.
Story
“GoTs” is set during the Mongolian invasion of Japan in the late 13th Century. While this invasion was an actual historical event, the way it is portrayed in “GoTs” takes EXTREME liberties with events, making accounts of the game’s version on the invasion incomprehensible to someone who knows the actual history, and vice versa. Very few historical figures make appearances in the game’s narrative, favoring fictionalized characters driving a more accessible, relatable, and straight-forward plot to the messy history in which both the Mongols and the Japanese come across as terrible barbarians.
In our fictional account of the Invasion of Tsushima, the infamous Kublai Khan’s cousin, Khotun Khan, leads an unprovoked, unannounced, and completely off-the-leash invasion of the Japanese island of Tsushima, which sits between mainland Japan and the Korean peninsula. A massive army of every samurai on the island assembles to meet the Mongol ships at the beach, but are slaughtered almost to the last man due to the Mongols’ overwhelming numbers and unfamiliar gunpowder-based weapons (bombs, which are, actually, a historical invention of the time). Our hero is a young samurai named Jin Sakai, nephew and ward of Tsushima’s ruling samurai, Lord Shimura. The two fight the Mongols as hard as they possibly can, but are both ultimately defeated. Lord Shimura is taken hostage by Khotun himself, while Jin is left for dead on the beach.
Recovering sometime later in the house of a female thief named Yuna, Jin learns of the fate of the samurai, that he is the last one left on the entire island, and that Lord Shimura is being held captive in his own castle. Thus our young and inexperienced samurai is suddenly saddled with the responsibility of his entire social caste, while also being inexperienced and recently injured. Yuna shows Jin a handful of useful thieving tricks, including assassinating foes unawares, which Jin initially finds to be reprehensible and dishonorable. However, over time, witnessing the horrors inflicted by the Mongol horde, Jin slowly begins to loosen his definition of ‘honor,’ developing a personal philosophy that squares the samurai’s role as protector and force for justice, while acknowledging that those without honor don’t deserve to receive honorable treatment in return.
Jin’s tale unfolds over the course of three Acts, each taking place in a specific chunk of the island, starting in the South and ending in the North. In each area, the player is free to wander the region, seeking out a wide variety of landmarks with gameplay relevance, but also tracking down a handful of important supporting characters who will help him on his journey. Each of these supporting characters has a dedicated quest-line that builds both the supporting character’s personality and their relationship with Jin, but Jin’s own personality as well. It is, however, generally not possible to play important side-quests ‘out of order,’ and the quests found while free-roaming don’t really have a lot to do with the overarching narrative, making “GoTs” somewhat ‘worse’ at non-linear storytelling than a masterpiece like, say, “Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey,” but even being on the more-linear side, the plot and sub-plots remain engaging, and Jin’s personal struggles remain all-too-relatable.
Overall, “GoTs” took me about 60 hours for a blind, mostly-completionist run, which I felt was just right for the type of story it was trying to tell and the size of its open world. The DLC zone, Iki Island, which is part of the Director’s Cut edition Sony released on Steam, adds roughly another 10 hours to the game’s runtime, while providing its own plotline (that goes even further away from the historical account of the Invasion). While the writing and narrative we get is “good” and doesn’t go quite as far down the “Modern Audiences” rabbit hole as most of Sony’s other recent projects, the fact that the portrayal of the Mongol Invasion is almost completely divorced from historical accuracy and a handful of Woke anachronisms (female samurai wielding katana and tanto instead of naginata) makes the historian in me sad.
Gameplay
“GoTs” is a very good copy of an Ubisoft-style Sandbox game, with some of the rough corners sanded down. Instead of the player finding themselves in a massive map absolutely covered in a vomitous layer of icons, the world map is mostly covered in Fog of War, which can be cleared by simply exploring. Jin has a horse companion available for the vast majority of the game, and the vast, open spaces in the game world actually warrant horseback travel instead of simply hoofing it everywhere on foot. However, any time there’s a narratively driven bit of travel, it seems like the locations are so close to each other that horse travel isn’t necessary.
Jin’s capabilities start out INCREDIBLY limited, with only basic samurai combat available from the outset. Due to the honor code of bushido, this combat revolves around declaring a standoff between Jin and ALL of the enemies in an area, in which defeating their leader in a single, well-timed stroke should make the rest of the enemies surrender… but because they’re crazy Mongolians, they DGAF and attack en masse anyway. Throughout the game, as Jin questions the strict and cumbersome warfare of his father and uncle, he picks up more and more new tricks that would feel more at home in the arsenal of a ninja than a samurai, including smoke bombs, explosives, archery, and a whole host of stealthy assassination-style takedowns. All of the so-called “Ghost” skills are unlocked via side-quests, while Jin can improve his ability to not completely suck in open combat by observing (and then killing) Mongol leaders in order to unlock three additional combat stances.
Stances are one of my very large beef’s with “GoTs’s” gameplay. Jin starts out with a stance that is good against other dudes using swords (either single, double, or double daggers). However, even from the beginning of the game, there are Mongols everywhere armed with sword & shield, polearms, and heavy weapons… yet it takes nearly 20 hours to unlock all of the stances to make melee combat feel… not “good,” but “usable.” If using the “wrong” stance against an opponent’s chosen weapon, the opponent will block or dodge almost everything Jin throws at them. Even when using the “correct” stance, most rank-and-file Mongols will block everything until Jin hits them enough times to stagger them, opening them up to free hits and (probably) death.
To make matters worse, while I disliked the melee combat in “GoTs” until I unlocked more stances, and after that only found it tolerable, I REALLY hate the one-on-one duels that make up the game’s boss fights. When dueling an opponent, the game completely changes genre, from the typical Sandbox game to a fill-on 2D Fighting title, with the same amount of BS input-reading cheater bosses who block and dodge way too proficiently and whose own flurrious attacks prove irritatingly difficult to parry or dodge in return. There are a few upgrades available that can be an Ace in the Hole for Jin in boss duels, but for the most part, it’s just an exercise in pattern memorization, ‘gitting gud,’ and ‘gitting lucky,’ which I absolutely hate in game design.
That said, there aren’t enough boss battles to ruin the overall experience of exploring and gradually corrupting a noble samurai into a ninja-esque vigilante, while also murdering lots and lots of Mongolians in creative ways. The Stealth-centric gameplay really excels, and shows-off Sucker Punch’s long history of the genre. Enemies don’t have particularly good eyesight, but there is no way to hide bodies, and they WILL notice when their friends get killed. However, just because the Mongols in a given village, encampment, or whathaveyou are alerted does NOT mean that they’ll instantly know exactly where Jin is hiding, making the process of eliminating the least obvious first, or deciding just to toss a blackpowder bomb into a campfire a fun and engaging one.
In addition to learning new skills in the previously mentioned ways, the player has three other main options for making Jin stronger (and these really aren’t ‘optional’). First is the perk point system, via which the player earns RPG-style experience points, filling segments on an experience bar. Each segment grants a point that can be spent on unlocking skill tree nodes, while the final segment of each bar grants Jin a small maximum health boost and an additional point of Resolve (which is spent for self-healing or activing a couple of special sword moves). The second method involves finding landmarks, with hotsprings increasing Jin’s health, and bamboo cut challenges (basically low-key Quicktime Events) increasing his resolve (and most other landmarks offering statless cosmetic items). The third method involves upgrading Jin’s gear at various craftsmen found in the game’s towns and villages. There are craftsmen to upgrade Jin’s swords, bows, armor, and projectile quivers, who each demand specific resources as well as a generic in-game currency referred to as “supplies.” Each and every piece of armor Jin finds in the game has unique properties which can be upgraded by the armorer, while Jin’s weapons are unique and mostly static, outside of generic overall performance improvements. Aside from weapons and armor, Jin can also equip a handful of Shinto charms, which provide a wide variety of minor buffs “because he believes in magic,” I guess. Jin can equip up to 2 Major Charms and 5 Minor Charms when fully upgraded in the talent tree, with Major Charms sometimes offering game-changing abilities (like passive health regen outside of combat!), while Minor Charms are generally limited to piddly, incremental bonuses… though there are a handful of overperforming Minor Charms that can be upgraded by praying at enough shrines to the point of competing with Major Charms in potency by the end game.
I only played on the Medium/Normal difficulty, and outside of going full-assassin, I found the combat to be mostly unpleasant, clunky, and dubiously responsive for things like perfect parries. Fortunately, there is an Easy mode, and even an optional toggle to make Easy mode even easier, so that’s definitely good from an accessibility viewpoint. However, building a game with gameplay that players must suffer through or turn-off altogether in order to gain access to the game’s narrative is a disservice to the game overall.
Overall
“Ghost of Tsushima” is a far better representative of Sony’s first-party titles on PC than ‘Horizon.’ In fact, the amount of polish and expertise put into the game’s blend of narrative and world design puts it right up there with the best Sandbox games Ubisoft (and others) have ever produced. However, the overall excellent experience of getting to play a bonafide Akira Kurosawa movie is muted by the complete disconnect between the game’s story and the history it’s allegedly based upon, as well as the not-particularly-fun-or-polished melee combat.
Presentation: 5/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4.5/5
