Ghost of Yotei
Sucker Punch
My life has changed. I’m older. I’m married. I have a toddler and a newborn. I have entered the “wow gaming is tough to manage” phase of my life, albeit bolstered, at least, by the fact that this is my job. Though Ghost of Yotei has really been an interesting, an welcome, experiment for this new era of my life.
I am positively crawling through this game. The reason being is that it is something I must play on console, rather than on PC, given its PS5 exclusivity. While I can do that for part of the afternoon given my job, after my kids go to bed, I am always gaming on my PC when my wife takes over the couch to watch something after a long day’s work. I have almost no time to console game on weekends anymore. So my time for Yotei has been cut in half, at least, compared to the old days.
It’s just a much different experience, and the forced console play combined with the forced time crunch combined with the nature of Yotei has made me take my time in ways I don’t with ultra-grinds, especially for all my beloved live service PC games.
The result is that I have played Yotei for an entire week, and I have killed exactly one member of the Yotei Six, the gang you’re meant to get revenge on. And that one member is someone you kill in the prologue to the game. So, things are not exactly speeding along.
It’s nice. I’m distracted by literally everything. Villagers yelling for help. Smoke from campfires. Map pieces directing me to skill point shrines. Foxes and birds and now wolves leading me places. Granted, this shares many similarities with Ghost of Tsushima, but that was back in my pre-kid, loads of time days, and as such, this feels like a totally different experience.
I don’t know what these “time to beat” sites are talking about. 20 hours to beat the main questline, 40-50 to Platinum the game. No. False. Lies. Even if I’m not that far, I’m seeing plenty of other people with at least double that in each category, and unless you are just speedrunning the entire game, I don’t see how you would get anywhere close to that.
Ghost of Yotei won’t take me any 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’re counting my four different V runs in Cyberpunk or something like that. I purposefully saved this to play after the likes of Borderlands 4 and Hades 2, and with not all that much interest in most other games for the rest of the year (Battlefield 6 looks great, but that’s just not my thing these days), I have the breathing room to give it the attention it clearly deserves.
So, am I gearing up to award it GOTY, given how much I like it? Sorry, it’s not beating Expedition 33. But it’s not always a contest, Yotei exists on its own terms, and it’s a great follow-up to what was my GOTY at the time, Ghost of Tsushima. I really couldn’t ask for more, given what I’ve experienced so far. And what I will experience for many weeks to come, it seems.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
