Ghost of Yotei

Credit: PlayStation

There are a surprising amount of digital bears in PlayStation’s truly excellent first-party samurai adventure, Ghost of Yotei, which released back in October of 2025. You’ve got wild bears, pet bears, orphaned bear cubs—hell, even a demon bear that yearns for sweet release from its seemingly immortal prison of rotting flesh and tortured misery.

There are so many bears, in fact, that I bearly had time to focus on the game’s main resentment-fueled, blood-soaked campaign. I’m being intentionally facetious, of course, as the copious sidequests in Sucker Punch’s sprawling open-world offering don’t only star forest-dwelling omnivores. On the contrary, they span a vast RPG spectrum, requiring you to do everything from liberate raider-infested farms, to tracking down murderous bounties, to investigating tall tales while gambling away your life savings and taking baths in luxurious hot springs.

For context, Ghost of Yotei is the ridiculously refined sequel to 2020’s similarly great Ghost of Tsushima, and during the 50 hours I’ve now spent with it, I’ve often found myself completely ignoring protagonist Atsu’s hellbent journey toward ultimate revenge in favor of these well-written tangents. Joyous distractions, you could call them; happy excursions apparently custom-crafted for wayward explorers like myself. Honestly, I think that’s why I haven’t fully completed the game just yet, even after 50 hours, as I’ve been taking my sweet time simply getting lost.

Ghost of Yotei is quite good at fostering this sense of happenstance discovery, and almost to a fault. For much of the time I’ve spent roaming 1600s Ezo, galloping around on my trusty steed, the main narrative has felt somewhat secondary to whatever random path I’ve decided to follow. It’s not that the story isn’t interesting or performed nicely (with some particular exceptions I won’t call out here), but rather because Atsu’s world is so fun to explore.

Sucker Punch has breadcrumb-trailed the entire experience with curious threads to pull at, and that pull is strong due in part to Ghost of Yotei’s brilliant visuals. They’re best-in-class, brimming with pastoral landscapes that feel like playable photos. I’ve been running the game on a PS5 Pro via the Ray Tracing Pro graphics mode, which is exclusive to the higher-end console and targets 60fps gameplay with top-tier lighting.

Breathtaking would be an understatement. This might actually be the most striking video game I’ve ever played, and much of it comes down to the amazing contrasts Sucker Punch has pulled off here. Bright purples against simmering yellows. Brooding thunderstorms against vibrant greens. Stark whites against blues so tangible you can practically taste them. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of unending eye candy. That said, it’s a bummer PlayStation doesn’t seem interested in porting more of its own titles to PC, as I’d love to see Ghost of Yotei running on my RTX 5090.

Continuing on the hardware front, Yotei takes full advantage of the DualSense and all its haptic magic. Subtle vibrations accompany every story beat and different soundtrack hits, as well as the ebb and flow of the game’s ever-present wind. You also get to paint by way of the touch pad, which is satisfying and neat. Plus, you can cook and forge weapon upgrades with the controller’s motion features, although admittedly, I found myself skipping these segments as I got further into Atsu’s revenge tale.

In general, the DualSense feels fantastic in Ghost of Yotei, especially during exploration and combat. Fighting is ridiculously intuitive, and chaining attacks together, especially in tandem with throwing dropped swords way across the battlefield to execute peripheral enemies, makes you feel like a complete badass. I will say that I didn’t care for how much you have to switch weapons during encounters, as its an integral part of the overall strategy, but it can make fighting feel a bit interrupted. The severed limbs make up for this shortcoming, however.

So, the game feels great to play, there’s plenty of things to accomplish on its sizeable map, and the graphics are a pleasure to behold. You can really tell a lot of love went into making Ghost of Yotei, though in the end—and it pains me to write this—its not particularly exciting or groundbreaking. Yotei is like a solid steak dinner, in that its well-made, it tastes fantastic and its predictably enjoyable.

My recent revelation is that I’m losing some patience for these narrative-heavy games. Like many of us older gamers, I used to think this was the future of gaming, back when Metal Gear Solid on the PS1 showed us that rescuing the princess wasn’t the only lens through which we could save the day. You could tell a serious story in this medium, and many of us were completely on-board.

With Sucker Punch’s latest, though, I found myself feeling exasperated every time a cutscene would destroy a stretch of good pacing, and maybe that’s just my evolving personal preference breaking through. Perhaps I’m slowly outgrowing these polished games that so desperately want to be movies. Games I so desperately wanted to be movies.

I don’t bemoan their glaring quality, absolutely not, nor their existence. I applaud both, actually. What I bemoan is the subtle self-indulgence, the quiet self-importance, the ‘look at our art’ insistence. Even though I thoroughly enjoy Ghost of Yotei, I want it to be more game than cinema, and I acknowledge this has to be a difficult balance to strike in a AAA PlayStation title these days.

I think these sorts of experiences still have their place in the modern gaming landscape, but given how long they take to develop and how much money they cost to see to fruition (Yotei was on the lower budgetary end, supposedly), I do hope Sony and Sucker Punch take some more risks in the future, especially with the upcoming PS6. For now, I’ll enjoy the open-world beauty that is Ghost of Yotei, while I dream of less games-as-art and more pet bears. Definitely more pet bears.

Disclosure: PlayStation provided a review code for coverage purposes.