Ghost of Yōtei Thinks I’m Stupid

I reached 30 hours in Ghost of Yōtei last night. Since picking it back up again after a quick review departure to cover Little Nightmares III for Game Informer, I have been devouring Sucker Punch Productions’ spiritual follow-up to 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima. I spend each work day excited to reach the night because it’s then that I can jump back into this 17th-century recreation of Ezo, known as Hokkaido. The more I play, though, the more I wonder if Sucker Punch thinks I’m stupid.

Ghost of Yōtei isn’t an easy game; it’s also not a hard game. It is a safe, comfortable, and satisfactory sequel. Its story has largely fallen flat for me, and though I recognize I’m probably only halfway through, I can’t help but feel like this is another Sony Revenge Story. And I’m half expecting Atsu’s quest for vengeance to feature a twist that intends to make me feel bad for controlling Atsu on said quest – like 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, is Ghost of Yōtei going to try to teach me that revenge is unfulfilling? I hope not. But aside from my general uninterest in the story so far, I’m enjoying a lot of what Ghost of Yōtei does. It continues the lineage of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that Sucker Punch experimented with in Ghost of Tsushima, improving on it significantly, making exploration in Ezo fun and exciting.

Its combat is vastly improved over its predecessor, and I think this is the biggest upgrade for the sequel. I even enjoy a lot of the characters I’m meeting in various Sensei, Bounty, and Tales side quests, certainly more than those I meet along the golden path. The more I play, though, the more I’m recognizing a pattern in how Ghost of Yōtei dolls out information.

Ghost of Yōtei refuses to let me think, to wonder, for myself.

It features a spyglass, usable by tapping up on the d-pad, and it’s best used for getting a clearer look at something in the distance. In a very Zelda fashion, you can create a waypoint that the game’s wind navigation system will guide you toward. I like that it doesn’t follow in the steps of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, which coincidentally dived into feudal Japan (finally) the very same year Ghost of Yōtei launched, rejecting the go-to mechanic of allowing me to mark every target my glass hovers over. But admittedly, because it doesn’t feature a mechanic like that, I rarely use it, unless the game tells me to.

When it tells me to, like during a Sensei side quest last night with Master Enomoto in the Teshio Ridge region, I’m instructed to locate Kitsune hideouts and other enemy-related objectives. Except, instead of allowing me to discover them myself, reinforcing how this spyglass should be used, the game blurs the corners, brightening them with a white light, to say, “Don’t worry about actually putting thought into this, what you’re looking for is right over here.” Realizing how this spyglass mechanic actually works sent my mind racing through a lot of what Ghost of Yōtei has been doing, signaling to me, the player, that I must be stupid.

Throughout Atsu’s questing in Teshio Ridge, you encounter Kitsune hideouts and other structures designed to be “puzzles.” I put puzzles in quotations because they hardly require any use of your brain to solve. There’s a cipher to use, yielding the impression I’ll need to use it more handily, but every puzzle I’ve encountered where the cipher reminder pops up requires either rotating some fox statues, placing fox statues on pedestals, or lighting fires under fox statues. You can use the cipher if you really want to feel smart while playing, but I’ve never felt the need to.

Last night, there were two fox statues – one on the left facing right, and one on the right facing left. Beside those permanent fox statues were two pedestals, each with a wooden fox statue on it. But oh my, the left pedestal has a fox facing left, and the right pedestal has a right-facing one. The goal here was to open a door – whatever should I do to get this door open? The solution is swapping pedestals by picking each one up with R2 and then placing it with R2. This requires zero effort on my end, and it actually annoyed me that I even had to do it to begin with. If you’re going to include puzzles, at least create ones that push me to think, even just a little.

In other instances, I’m presented with three fox statues I can light a fire underneath, but only one needs fire. If you light an incorrect one, it will explode, lighting Atsu on fire. “Which one should you light to prevent being lit on fire, Atsu?” the game wants me to ponder. Literally right behind these flammable fox statues is a fourth one atop a rock – it matches one of the three flammable statues before me and represents the solution. Again, not much thought required here – I just needed to look three feet beyond the three statues before me.

Elsewhere, two fox statues are rotated facing the correct direction, but the third needs to be rotated into place in order to advance. My cipher theoretically tells me which direction this fox statue should be facing based on the matching symbol beneath it…but the statue can only face four directions, and I save myself the trouble by rotating it until it locks into place. Sure, I’m “gaming” the system here and choosing to use little brainpower to solve this “puzzle,” but it sure would be nice if Sucker Punch had designed this exercise to require some critical thinking.

I catch myself saying the same for every fox statue puzzle I encounter; for every time I have to find something with the spyglass, only for the game to do all the work for me; for every time the game teases I’ll have to find a way to unlock Master Enomoto’s special Kusarigama only for it to, moments later, display a prompt to press Triangle while using my own Kusarigama to grab it; for every time I have to unlock a puzzle box by moving random pieces of wood on the box until it opens; for every time I have to investigate a scene, which just means walking around until the R2/Examine prompt appears.

Maybe this is an insecurity of mine coming out, but I don’t think that’s it. These moments I’ve described above are just a handful of the ways Sucker Punch very deliberately and directly holds my hand, signposting the way forward, as if the game has already decided I’m too stupid to possibly ever figure out any of this myself.

I’m not stupid, Sucker Punch, but Ghost of Yōtei has me wondering if you think I am. 

For more about the game, read Game Informer’s Ghost of Yōtei review, and then check out this spoilery post-launch Ghost of Yōtei interview with Sucker Punch Productions.