Bellevue, Wash.-based studio Sucker Punch announced today that its open-world samurai action game Ghost of Tsushima will be released June 26. Ghost has been in the works for most of the last six years, and is expected to be one of the last big exclusives for the PlayStation 4 before the debut of Sony’s new system at the end of 2020.
Ghost is Sucker Punch’s first release in six years, after the stand-alone spinoff Infamous: First Light. The company was founded in 1997 by a team of former Microsoft employees, and made its debut with 1999’s Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the Nintendo 64. It subsequently struck a deal with Sony to develop the popular Sly Cooper series for the PlayStation 2.
In 2009, Sucker Punch dramatically changed gears to create the dark superhero game Infamous for the PlayStation 3, which quickly became one of the must-have exclusives for the system. Sony went on to acquire Sucker Punch outright in 2011.
Sucker Punch would later influence the development of the PlayStation 4 during the production of Infamous: Second Son, a launch title for the system set in a slightly-fictionalized version of the Seattle area.
Sucker Punch’s co-founder Chris Zimmerman told me during a demo at E3 2018 that he doesn’t see Ghost as a video game so much as “an attempt to make a time machine.” The company has gone to extreme lengths to depict feudal Japan during the Kamakura period as realistically as possible, in the service of embodying the fantasy of being an actual samurai.
Ghost of Tsushima is set in 1274, on Tsushima Island, in the wake of the first Mongol invasion of Japan, which was initially a slaughter.
The Mongols’ way of fighting, by all accounts, was utterly foreign to the samurai of the period. The Mongols employed cavalry tactics, shield phalanxes, gunpowder charges flung by catapults, and poisoned arrows, while the samurai that opposed them were dramatically outnumbered and used to a more formal, individually-focused style of combat. The Mongols simply overran the small groups of Japanese defenders in their way.
At the start of Ghost, Tsushima Island is in ruins, and little is left to stand between the Mongols and the Japanese mainland. You play as Jin Sakai, one of the last surviving samurai, whose entire way of life has been torn down around his ears. The Mongols have killed almost all of his peers, mentors, and heroes, and Jin’s just received a series of bloody object lessons about how his previous training doesn’t really work in this situation.
Ghost is the story of how Jin is forced to reinvent himself to survive and fight back against the Mongols, learning to rely on allies and tactics that he previously would’ve seen as beneath him, in what promotional materials refer to as the “way of the Ghost.”
While Jin is a lethal swordsman, you can also use other combat tactics, such as stealth and assassination, as you explore a war-torn, occupied Japanese countryside.
Ghost of Tsushima will ship in three separate physical editions. Buyers of the Special Edition ($69.99) receive several digital extras, including an art book and a Director’s Commentary featurette, as well as an exclusive steelbook case.
The Collector’s Edition ($169.99) also comes with a cloth map, a war banner, a physical art book, a Japanese furoshiki, and a heavy polyresin replica of one of the samurai masks that Jin wears in the game.
