The city streets are empty, strewn with discarded shopping bags and unattended bicycles and cars. But this city isn’t uninhabited. Around the corner of every neon-lit storefront and lurking in gloomy alleys and shrub-bordered parkettes are ghosts and ethereal creatures of all kinds. Pale blue figures float in the air, ghostly apparitions still muttering mundane complaints about daily life though their bodies have disappeared. Teenagers in school uniforms mill around deserted intersections, their missing heads only becoming apparent when they wander into closer view. A splash of water from a sewer ditch, if studied carefully, reveals a turtle-like monster wading in circles just beneath an overpass. Floating cats with forked tails doze behind convenience store counters, waiting for customers to notice them before waking and floating upright in the air.
At the margins of normal perception, Ghostwire: Tokyo’s seemingly abandoned Tokyo is actually humming with all kinds of activity. Though the city’s human population has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind piles of rumpled clothes as makeshift grave markers after an otherworldly fog absorbed their corporeal bodies, ghosts and creatures from Japanese folklore have begun to make themselves readily apparent everywhere protagonist Akito Izuki turns.
Courtesy of Bethesda
