Ghost of Tsushima
I wanted to love this game. It was made by Sucker Punch, the studio behind some of the most beloved games of my childhood—The Sly Cooper Trilogy. (By the way, you can stream those on PlayStation now, and yes, they’re still fantastic.)
I gave Ghost of Tsushima two chances to win me over. On my first attempt, I blamed my lack of enjoyment on the festive flu I caught, assuming my judgment was being clouded by coughing fits. But a second playthrough confirmed the unfortunate truth: it wasn’t the flu—it was the game.
Coming to Ghost a few years after its release didn’t do it any favors. The ninja/samurai stealth and combat genre is crowded, with decades of iconic titles to draw from, yet Ghost feels like a series of tired tropes rather than something fresh. Unfortunately, it doesn’t channel those tropes into a meaningful homage—it just feels dated. Those trailing stealth missions, for example, should have stayed back in the early 2010s. They were dull then, and they’re even worse now that we’ve all played a thousand of them.
Speaking of Assassin’s Creed: I was bitterly disappointed in the world design. The landscape of 1200s Japan, the Kamakura period, offered a great backdrop, but it was massively underutilized. There was plenty of content, don’t get me wrong, but none of it felt particularly meaningful in terms of character or narrative development due to its repetitiveness.
I heard a lot of feedback calling the game a work of art, saying it was beautiful to look at—and it was. The golden leaves drifting in the wind, the sunsets over fields of grass, the cinematic duels framed like a Kurosawa movie—it was all stunning. Unless, of course, it was one of the gazillion unskippable cutscenes. Those became extremely stilted and grating after the first 20 or so.
But visuals alone can’t carry a game. Ghost leans far too heavily on its style to distract from its lack of substance. While it’s clear Sucker Punch poured their hearts into recreating the look and feel of feudal Japan, the gameplay and narrative never rise to meet that same standard.
The world itself, though beautiful, often feels lifeless. NPCs exist only to deliver fetch quests or spout the same few lines, and the villages you liberate remain static and unchanging. Instead of immersing you in a living, breathing world, Ghost reduces its setting to a series of checklists, robbing it of the magic that games like RDRII manage to deliver in spades.
But that hollowness wasn’t apparent immediately. Within the first two hours of the game, I felt like a real samurai. The combat felt a little foreign in places but mostly satisfying. Switching between stances to counter specific enemies and engaging in flashy duels offered a solid mechanic.
As the hours went by, though, the cracks started to show. The system doesn’t evolve beyond its core mechanics, and once you’ve mastered the basics, there’s little challenge or surprise. Parries and dodges become second nature, and enemy encounters blur into one repetitive slog. While there’s an attempt to layer in tools like kunai, smoke bombs, and bows, these feel more like afterthoughts than essential strategies. Comparatively, games like Sekiro push the player to constantly adapt, rewarding precision and creativity in combat.
What’s worse, the AI doesn’t do the game any favors. Enemies are painfully predictable, with unit slotting leading to hilariously awkward combat sequences where enemies politely line up to attack one by one. It feels as if the game is scared to overwhelm or frustrate you. For a story that’s supposed to be about survival and war, the combat lacks the intensity and stakes to make it feel like you’re truly fighting for your life.
This brings me to my biggest complaint: the severe lack of consequences, and by extension, player agency. The story hinges on the protagonist’s inner conflict—whether to win through sheer strength or subterfuge. It’s honor versus necessity, and it has all the building blocks to be one of the most engaging games to date. But Ghost rarely forces you to grapple with the consequences of your actions.
You can stealthily assassinate an entire camp one moment and stroll into a village as a celebrated hero the next, with no acknowledgment of the contradiction. With no consequences, there are no stakes. And with no stakes, I may as well not have played at all. It feels as if the game wants to be admired more than played. The cutscenes, the overly scripted moments, the lack of player agency—all seem designed to keep you looking at the screen rather than engaging with it. Ultimately, Ghost of Tsushima feels like a game that’s more in love with the idea of being a samurai epic than actually delivering one. For all its beauty, it struggles to make you feel like a part of its world, leaving a hollow experience behind the cinematic sheen.