Sucker Punch Productions, the Bellevue-based video game company that created the “Infamous” series and “The Sly Collection,” announced Thursday it will be releasing its next game, Ghost of Tsushima, on June 26.
Ghost has been six years in the making and will be the biggest game Sucker Punch has ever released, according to Andrew Goldfarb, the company’s communications manager.
The game will feature a “vibrant, diverse, open world” that players can explore.
Set in Tsushima Island, Japan, in the year 1274, the game is played from the perspective of Jin Sankai, one of the last surviving samurai warriors after the first Mongol invasion of Japan. The invasion was a slaughter because the samurais, trained to fight with bows and arrows and swords, were no match for the Mongols’ gunpowder and catapults. The samurais found themselves outgunned and outnumbered, leaving the island in ruins and mainland Japan vulnerable.
Jin now has to decide how he is going to defend his country against these ruthless attackers. Does he stay true to the samurai practices his uncle Shimura instilled in him as a child? Or does he go “the way of the Ghost,” employing the tactics the Mongols used to defeat his comrades?
Sucker Punch’s co-founder Chris Zimmerman told GeekWire that Ghost is less a video game and more “an attempt to make a time machine,” explaining that the developers went to great lengths to accurately depict feudal Japan. Players can explore this war-torn countryside and learn real samurai fighting techniques to try and defeat the Mongols.
The game will be released in three ways. The first is a special edition ($69.99), which includes a SteelBook case, a director’s commentary feature and several in-game extras like a mask and sword skin. A digital deluxe edition (also $69.99) includes a mini artbook and some more in-game items. Finally, the collector’s edition ($169.99) comes with a cloth map of the game’s world, a war banner, an artbook and a polyresin replica of one of the samurai masks Jin wears in the game.
Ghost is expected to be one of the last games released on the PlayStation 4 before Sony debuts its new console later this year.
