Ghost of Tsushima review: An open-world haiku of honor, stealth, and revenge

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Like clockwork, certain friends of mine text or IM when a big video game is about to launch. I'm the guy they know who gets games like a new Smash Bros. or Half-Life before the general public, and they love to push my embargoes to the limits with questions like "does it live up to the hype?" or "no spoilers: should I buy it?"

With Ghost of Tsushima, likely the last major new first-party game for Sony's PS4, I got a surprising number of these questions over the past few weeks. You might say they were surprising because Tsushima is an entirely new game series, not a hotly anticipated sequel. But the surprise came in a different form, as all of my friends came out of the woodwork to essentially ask me the same question: "Is this new Sony game hopeful?"

PS4 fans are likely still reeling from the console's last major exclusive, June's brutal Last of Us Part II-a game that revolves around the biological and social devastation following a global pandemic. TLOU2 is a brave, challenging, and compelling game, but the consensus I've gathered is that people are hungry for a different kind of adventure right now.

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