7 Video Games That Aren't About What You Think

Over the years, the Assassin's Creed franchise has become shorthand for when people want to describe other open-world games. Remember how Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor was often referred to as 'Assassin's Creed in Middle-Earth'?

While this works as a broad overview of what people can expect from this kind of game (stealth kills, enemy camps, a map with too many checkmarks, that sort of thing), labelling games in this way does a disservice to those open-world titles that try to do things differently - which is exactly what happened with Ghost Of Tsushima.

Right up to its July 2020 release, people referred to this game as 'Assassin's Creed in Japan', a perception that was only proliferated by a May 2020 State of Play demo, which showed an Assassin's Creed-style camp takedown. And since that was right before Ghost's release, that's the last impression that many gamers have of it.

But the truth of the matter is that Ghost Of Tsushima - while of course similar to Assassin's Creed in a general sense - smartly reworks some of the most stale aspects of the open-world formula we've all been playing for well over a decade. The belief that it's 'just another Assassin's Creed' undercuts all the things that Sucker Punch do far better than Ubisoft's long-running series.

The biggest of these is the fact that Ghost doesn't clutter your HUD with too much information, and that it emphasises exploration over ticking off checkboxes. You must use the environment - the direction of the wind, distant pillars of smoke - to navigate the world, which allows the game's impeccable art direction to shine, and doesn't make you feel like you have a million things to do at once.

Ghost Of Tsushima does have its flaws (dull mission design being one of them) but contrary to what you might have heard, a more apt label for the overall package would be 'Assassin's Creed: Evolved', rather than 'Assassin's Creed: Cloned'.