izigame.me

I had this game in my radar since I heard good things about it from Mutahar, about two years ago. Since then a couple of friends recommended it to me. I finally decided to play it and I'm really glad I did.
The first thing that I noticed about this game is the presentation, it feels really premium both in terms of graphics and cinematics. Ghostwire Tokyo managed to immerse me in its world like few other games could. The story is simple, Akito has a bike accident and gets possessed by a spirit, KK, and together they fight to cleanse Shibuya from a fog which turns everyone into spirits and save Akito’s sister who has been kidnapped.
I don't want to spoil anything but the story will explore much of the traditional Japanese lore about death, demons, spirits and other such creatures. There are some awesome set pieces and in general it really got me on my toes. At the end it gets a bit emotional and I also really appreciated the ending.
The gameplay is a classic action adventure open world where we will follow a main storyline, but we'll also have tons of stuff to do, from secondary missions to collectibles of any kind. I appreciated a lot of the secondary missions, some of them are really interesting. There's one in particular which takes place in a school and it was really scary, it actually gave me goosebumps. It also reminded me of Silent Hill.
The map is pretty big and we'll be able to unlock chunks of it by cleansing the gates which generate the fog.
The world is filled with details, and it’s very explorable, both horizontally and vertically. We can indeed climb all buildings, and glide from roof to roof in order to further explore and collect all the items.
KK will give us powers, so we pretty much have gun fingers and shoot out energy. The animations are pretty cool, and although at first they are a bit slow, by leveling up we'll be able to upgrade our moves and make them faster and more lethal.
This game is also VERY Japanese, almost as Japanese as the Yakuza series. For someone like me who is really fascinated by that culture I find it fantastic, since it's filled to the brim with typical Japanese stuff, from the foods and drinks, to a lot of traditional objects, cats, buildings, music, and the list goes on.
Speaking about music, the soundtrack is great, with pumping music when the action kicks in and very epic pieces overall. I'm not an expert and it's always hard for me to talk about music, but all I can say is that it really fits and once again it has some great Japanese vibes.
In the technical compartment I had some really high highs and some really low lows. Let's start with the positives, the graphics are insanely good looking, and the world is a joy to look at. Having a pretty capable machine I tried cranking everything up, and for a while it seemed ok, but when I started unlocking big chunks of the open world the troubles began.
Basically the game ran smoothly with everything maxed and TSR upscaling at 1440p, but I eventually started experiencing freezes as if I was running out of VRAM. Checking my VRAM utilization I noticed it was capped at 12 GB even though I have 16 available. Eventually I tried lowering some settings and ended up using the optimized settings by Digital Foundry with some tweaks. In the end, despite the vram utilization was still hard capped at 12 GB, I managed to get a freeze-free experience which arguably looked even better than before, since disabling ray traced shadows allowed me to also disable TSR and play at native 1440p with 60 fps. All in all I'm pretty happy with the results, even though in that department the game could have benefitted from some more time in the oven.
I played about 20 hours and completed the main story and roughly half of the other open world activities and side quests. I'm really happy with the experience and I could have continued a bit more, but ultimately I like to move on from games. Despite the technical issues, this is an amazing game and I recommend picking it up, especially if you like anything Japan related!