Tango Gameworks’ Ghostwire: Tokyo is out next week and despite some horror elements, it offers more of supernatural adventure compared to the studio’s previous outings. Game director Kenji Kimura and producer Masato Kimura spoke to WCCF Tech recently offered and provided some interesting details on what to expect.
First off, it’s not exactly an open world game but more of an “action-adventure game with a sandbox style map,” as per Kimura. “When we were thinking about the genre of this game if this was an open world game was a question that we wanted to kind of address first in this response. Depending on your view of what an open world game things might change, but for us, we think this is an action-adventure game with a sandbox style map, with a mystery that you want to solve by exploring through the city. In that light, it probably wouldn’t fall into the open world genre, but that’s our thinking.”
In that sense, the game is built from the ground up to “make it fun, just to walk around and explore the city.” In that sense, steps were taken to ensure it wasn’t too scary for the player. “We didn’t want to prohibit exploration. We wanted to encourage it. And also we didn’t want to make it too stressful for the player to explore,” says Kimura. “We wanted the player to have the ability to go wherever they wanted to go that felt interesting to him or her as the player. If you see something that’s cool, you want to go there and we want to remove the hurdles or the stress that would normally exist to actually go there.” This includes vertical exploration like scaling up buildings.
So now the real question – how long will the experience be? If you’re sticking to main missions, then it should be “about 15 hours” as per the developer. However, those who want to complete all of the side content as well would take about 30 to 40 hours depending on their skill level. Overall, it’s a fairly lengthy experience for those who take their time.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is slated to release on March 25th for PS5 and PC. Console players who purchase the $80 Deluxe Edition can receive 72 hours early access. Stay tuned for more details and check out our hands-on preview for the first two chapters here.