The cyberpunk genre seems to be having a moment in video games right now. Watch Dogs: Legion just came out, telling the story of a collection of hackers fighting back against an authoritarian regime with a stranglehold on near-future London. Cyberpunk 2077, one of the year’s most anticipated games, looks to give players a huge set of options to tear through Night City however they want. But sneaking in among these two giants is Ghostrunner, offering a much more focused experience.
You are a Ghostrunner, the last hope of humanity, scooped up from near-death by the Architect to join the fight against the tyrannical Keymaster, who is making a play for Dharma Tower, the last bastion of humanity. It’s a desperate world that’s colored in slowly as you ascend the massive megastructure floor by floor.
This desperation is reflected in the gameplay. One hit kills, for both the player and the enemies, provide a significant challenge as you slice through the Keymaster’s guards with your katana. To meet this challenge, you have a wide variety of movement options. The ability to wall run, dash, and even grappling hook your way around the levels gives you an edge, but requires extreme precision to pull off. All these elements combine to make it feel like a combination of Titanfall 2, Mirror’s Edge, and Hotline Miami.
One of the biggest talking points about Ghostrunner is undoubtedly its difficulty. The game is lethal, and you will die over and over again. Enemies are extremely aggressive and can easily kill you if you’re not precise. Even the useful dodge ability that slows down time still requires great timing to be effective. To give you a picture of how much you’ll be dying, in the first level, my results screen said my playtime was six minutes, and I had died 18 times. This can provide some thrilling moments when you finally pull it off, but also leads to lots of repetition while trying to get it right.
While the game has very generous checkpoints, the save system can be pretty harsh. When you die, you’ll respawn almost instantly extremely close to where you died, but the game doesn’t actually save progress until you complete a level. This was a huge hindrance for me, because the challenge level of the game can make it very exhausting to play. Several times I got frustrated and wanted to walk away for a bit, but forced myself to finish the level so I wouldn’t have to redo the beginning. While some levels were short, others took me upwards of an hour to finish.
In addition to the enemy-infested sections, you have sections of pure platforming. These can be thrilling with all the movement options available, but they can feel very prescribed. The game does a great job of guiding the player with environmental elements, but there aren’t a lot of options available for you to choose how you want to progress. You simply find the path and follow it, if you’ve got the dexterity to pull it off. Occasional puzzles break it up as you hack your way through the systems of Dharma Tower, but these can either be too obvious or not quite signaled enough.
Ghostrunner manages to be a great example of what it’s trying to accomplish, but I personally don’t know if that type of game is for me. It’s beautifully polished and runs like a dream, with smart decisions to keep the scope focused to finely tune the experience they’re creating, but it frustrates me constantly.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I liked the challenge of something like Bloodborne, but wasn’t as excited by the one presented by Ghostrunner. In Bloodborne, when I finished a difficult encounter, I felt a rush of exhilaration. With Ghostrunner, there was some of that, but mostly it was a feeling of relief that I could move on. Part of this may have been from the way the save system worked, but I think a lot of it had to do with the lack of expressivity provided to the player.
In creating such a singular experience, they don’t provide a lot of options. There are some upgrades that can be unlocked throughout, but you’re still pretty much playing the way the developers want you to. With most combat encounters, there technically can be multiple ways to tackle it, but there’s generally a designed path that you run through to kill them all. Wall run, sword slash, grapple, grapple, dash, slash, all along a well-marked path. This makes the challenge of it not necessarily solving the how, but rather just mastering the timing of it all.
The moments you play out can be exciting, but it can be a bit like a rollercoaster that will stop and restart if you don’t press the right button at the right time. When you complete an encounter or platforming section on the first try, it’s a thrilling moment, but it loses its luster upon excessive retries. If you like lethal combat and precision platforming, you’ll find a lot to love in Ghostrunner, but those who like to find their own way will likely find it frustrating.
Ghostrunner code provided by the publisher.
Ghostrunner is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and will be coming to Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X, and PS5 from next week.