Yotei’s Ghost
Sucker Punch
My life has changed. I’m older. I am married. I have a toddler and a newborn. I’ve entered the “wow gaming is hard to deal with” phase of my life, although reinforced, at least, by the fact that it’s my job. However Yotei’s Ghost was truly an interesting and welcome experience for this new era of my life.
I’m positively crawling through this game. The reason is that it’s something I must play on console, rather than on PC, given its PS5 exclusivity. Although I can do this part of the afternoon given my job, once my kids go to bed I always play on my PC when my wife settles down on the couch to watch something after a long day at work. I hardly have time to play console games on weekends anymore. So my time for Yoteï has been reduced by at least half compared to the old times.
It’s just a very different experience, and the forced console play combined with the forced lack of time combined with the nature of Yoteï made me take my time in a way that I don’t with ultra-grinds, especially for all my beloved live service PC games.
The result is that I played Yoteï for an entire week, and I killed exactly one member of the Yotei Six, the gang you’re supposed to take revenge on. And that member is someone you kill in the game’s prologue, so things don’t really move very quickly.
It’s nice. I’m literally distracted by everything. The villagers cry for help. Smoke from campfires. Pieces of map directing me to skill point shrines. Foxes, birds and now wolves leading me. Certainly, this shares many similarities with The Ghost of Tsushimabut it was back in my childhood days, many times over, and as such it feels like a totally different experience.
I don’t know what these “time to beat” sites are about. 20 hours to complete the main questline, 40-50 for Platinum the game. No. Fake. Lies. Even though I’m not that far behind, I see plenty of other people with at least double that in every category, and unless you’re just speedrunning the entire game, I don’t see how you’d get close.
Yotei’s Ghost won’t take me less than a month to beat at this point, something I don’t think I can say about any single-player game I’ve played, unless we count my four different V races in Cyberpunk or something like that. I intentionally saved this to play after events like Borderlands 4 And Hades 2, and with little interest in most other games for the rest of the year (Battlefield 6 it looks great, but it’s just not my thing these days), I have the wiggle room to give it the attention it clearly deserves.
So, am I about to give it a GOTY, given how much I love it? Sorry, it doesn’t beat Expedition 33. But it’s not always a competition, Yoteï exists on its own terms, and it’s a great follow-up to what was my GOTY at the time, The Ghost of Tsushima. I really couldn’t ask for more, considering what I’ve been through so far. And what I will experience for many more weeks, it seems.
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