‘It’s like stepping into another world’: how Covid affected the eerie city of Ghostwire: Tokyo
Making games is a long old road – five years or more, often, from conception to actual release – and when Kenji Kimura was stuck for ideas on the game he was directing, Ghostwire: Tokyo, he would wander the streets of Tokyo for inspiration. Walking around the back alleys of Shibuya, where the city’s ultramodern architecture rubs up against old shrines and traditional houses, he would imagine a Tokyo eerily emptied of people by a paranormal event; what it would look like, how it would feel. Then, a few years into the production of Ghostwire: Tokyo, something similar happened. Like many cities across the world, Tokyo was suddenly deserted as people were confined to their homes in the early stages of the pandemic.
“It suddenly felt so spooky walking in the city, because we had to be afraid of a thing that we cannot see,” says Kimura. “If we needed to go somewhere, we wouldn’t deviate from the shortest path.” The team he was directing at Tango Gameworks moved from their Shibaura office to homeworking, finishing off their game about a ghostly city while living in one.
“In the worst moments of the pandemic, when we were locking down the city, it was very strange,” adds Masato Kimura, the game’s producer. “There was nobody walking the streets. It felt unreal. When you take the Yamanote train line it’s supposed to be packed, especially in rush hour, but there was just nobody on that train, even during commuting hours. Tokyo is such a populated city, but once you take all the people out of it, you start to get this sense of loneliness and melancholy.”
In the game, a creeping fog erases the crowds in Shibuya, sweeping across the city and leaving piles of clothes in its wake. It’s an action movie and a ghost story, casting you as a young guy, Akito, who survived the paranormal event because he was possessed by a vengeful spirit. Sharing his body with this spirit, Akito finds that he can battle the headless schoolgirls, creepy faceless salarymen and other ghosts now at large in place of the human population.
As players, we spend our time exploring the city in all its creepy, unsettling emptiness, defeating ghosts with magic, trying to track down Akito’s sister, and exploring the stories of the people who used to live there. Unlike many big-budget modern games it is a contained experience, taking 12 or so hours to finish, and the controlled scale means that every aspect of the game’s compressed Tokyo is astonishing to look at, from the posters in the windows of the convenience stores to the neon-lit streets to the imposingly tall buildings, full of aggressive yōkai– supernatural beings.
Both Kenji Kimura and Masato Kimura, who are not related, credit Ghostwire’s striking atmosphere to Junya Fuji, the environment designer, characterising the special paranormal effects that he created as the game’s “secret sauce”. The project began as a sequel to The Evil Within, Tango Gameworks’ successful horror game from 2014, but it soon became clear that it was becoming its own thing. The city itself was the main inspiration; before there was any story, any characters, even any idea of how the game itself would play, the team had spent years iterating its eerie version of Tokyo. This is highly unusual in game development; the gameplay idea normally comes first, and everything else from art to music and story must fit around it. But this alternative approach gave the developers the freedom to get their vision of Tokyo right first, and see where that took them.
Fuji says he had a key phrase constantly in his mind at this time: “This is not a horror game”. “How do we make something scary, uneasy, spooky, but not horror?” he says. “That ruled some things out – no gore, no bloodstains, those are horror game tools. Without using the usual things, how can we create this new sensation of uncomfortable, but still familiar?
“About a year or so after the project started, we had another year to think thematically: what people would be in the city, what would their feelings and emotions be, and how would we capture those feelings and apply them to the city itself, if there were no people left? Without thinking too deeply about game systems, we tried to keep those feelings and emotions of those people at the core of the project.”
“One inspiration was a movie Dark City: both the lighting, and the sense that something ominous was in that city, overcoming it,” adds Kenji. “We chose a place that people were familiar with, one of the first places that people imagine when they think about Japan – and from there we created this big incident, that people would disappear. From there, we were able to evolve the concept for this game.”
Ghostwire’s Tokyo certainly isuncanny, and not just because of all the ghosts. It is a familiar place to most people with any connection to Japan, even if you’ve only seen it in movies or games or TV shows, and experiencing a version of it that’s this realistic, but also deeply wrong, gives me the heebs. “The city itself is our main inspiration,” says Masato. “If you’ve been here, if you’ve lived here, you know that Tokyo has a lot of super modern cutting-edge buildings alongside very old, traditional shrines and houses, and by walking a few steps you can feel like you’ve stepped into another world.
“In this city, these wildly different things can be right next to each other. We wanted to capture that mix, strangely pieced together the way that Tokyo is, and put it into a game that emphasises and adds to it. We thought that could turn into something really interesting.”
Ghostwire: Tokyo is out now on PlayStation 5 and PC