Ghostwire: Tokyo Preview: A Foggy, Unnatural Trip Through Tokyo

Ghostwire: Tokyo looks to be the type of video game that really needs to be played to be fully understood. That said, from what's been shown of it so far, including a recent lengthy hands-off presentation attended by ComicBook.com, it does seem like it will scratch the itch of anyone looking to play a somewhat spooky action-adventure mystery with glorious high-definition visuals.

The title sees players take on the role of Akito, a man that survives a mysterious disappearance in modern Tokyo thanks to having also survived a fatal crash by… having the spirit of a veteran ghost hunter, KK, merge with his body. A dangerous fog has enveloped Shibuya, cutting it off from the rest of the world, and Akito and KK have to figure out what happened and confront the masked character, Hannya, who set it all in motion.

This, of course, is easier said than done now that humans basically aren't around beyond a few here and there. The streets of Shibuya are filled with supernatural enemies called Visitors that can't be damaged in any normal manner. Instead, Akito and KK mostly use something called Ethereal Weaving, which is a bunch of different hand gestures, to fight. There are some other weapons available to Akito, like some sort of mystical bow, but it seems like the aforementioned gestures will be the most common.

The visuals for Ethereal Weaving look mighty impressive, and all the elements – wind, water, and fire for attacking and earth for blocking – have appropriately snazzy effects attached to them. Ripping exposed cores from the Visitors after a couple of strikes seems to be the easiest way to do a lot of damage, and it looks like that's something anyone looking to progress in Ghostwire: Tokyo will be doing a lot of during their time with the title.

The one major problem with a hands-off presentation and gameplay videos in general is that it's hard to get a sense of combat's pacing, and that looks to be a big chunk of what Ghostwire: Tokyo is all about. In some moments, it appeared to be a little clunky or slow, and while the Visitors, spirits, and yokai haunting Tokyo can be unsettling or even adorable like the cat spirits functioning as shopkeepers, there was never any real sense of tension or urgency when taking on the Visitors. Every new enemy often seemed more like a temporary nuisance and less like something imminently dangerous.

Akito and KK can also clear areas of dangerous fog by cleansing corrupted torii gates. It's unclear exactly how these gates became corrupted in the first place or what the overall purpose of cleansing them might be, but ultimately it seems to make areas less difficult to traverse and is worth the time to seek them out. Thankfully, cleansing them looks to be relatively straightforward, but finding them and clearing out enough enemies to give the player time to actually do that is not always simple.

Easily the most impressive part of the presentation was seeing Akito and KK get embroiled in a distortion of reality. This is apparently a regular occurrence in Ghostwire: Tokyo, and none of the normal rules of traversing Tokyo appear to consistently apply here. The game plays with the design of the level in much the same way as 2006's Prey, at least in terms of connecting one portion to another, in a way that leans into the unsettling, unnatural setting already present in the rest of the game in an honestly exciting way.

In the section shown off, Akito and KK had to destroy barrier stones in order to escape a building while reality distorted all around them. As they moved through the building, the walls around them would shift from room to room, with up being down or an untraversable room disappearing entirely, becoming nothing more than a cupboard after the barrier stone was shot down inside.

Over the past couple of years, hands-off digital previews like this have become increasingly common for obvious reasons, and it's always difficult to get a strong sense of what any game being shown in this way has to offer. In my own experience, the only significant way in which to measure a preview of this sort is: Am I more excited about the title than I was before? Do I want to know more about what has been known? Does it look like the sort of video game that seems worth spending time in once it releases? Thankfully for me, and for Tango Gameworks and Bethesda, the answer to all three is "yes," even if it is a qualified one.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is scheduled to launch for the PlayStation 5 and PC on March 25th. Anyone that pre-orders the digital Deluxe Edition of the video game via the PlayStation Store will also be granted early access starting March 22nd. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the upcoming video game from Tango Gameworks and Bethesda right here.