I am a big fan of the offers of the first parts of PlayStation. They came to embody the kinds of cinematographic adventures that I have always searched by sitting with a controller in my hand, feeling as real successful events intended to be savored. But where, in the past, this brilliant narrative brand was like a new soil being tracked, I can’t help but feel that recently, it has become the road well used. It is not only that all the major outings of PlayStation adhere to the cinematographic styles of the third person now third – the stable of developers who have apparently become obsessed with stories that explore exactly the same themes: sorrow and revenge. And I’m starting to get bored. As a general rule, these games are all impeccably well made, but I am starting to miss this era when the PlayStation range felt wider and things were a little more “fun”.
The awareness that so many PlayStation games have explored the same themes of dark history struck me by playing through the new Yotei Sucker ghost. While I really appreciated him and admire his constantly exciting approach to the fight and the real feeling of discovery that he created by exploration, I could not help feeling that I had already told his story before. As IEU, you are responsible for avenging the death of your parents during a trip soaked in blood through Japan of the 17th century while you track each of the “Yotei Six”. Not only is this story unfortunately close to the intrigue of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which I also played by completion earlier this year, but it is the same combination of arc of ardent revenge crossed with meditations on what is to cry that has become something of a brand for PlayStation Studios in recent years.
2020’s the Last of Us Party 2 is an obvious pioneer, with the dark descent of Ellie in an incarnation of revenge filled with rage following the death of his paternal figure, Joel. This is of course the continuation of the original of 2013 which explored how Joel had trouble facing the death of his own daughter. At the time, the last of us was considered to supply a wave of “SAD DAD” games, including God of WAR of 2018, but with hindsight, these are the constituent elements of PlayStation’s concern with sorrow.
The god of the 2022 war Ragnarok is a story fueled by the loss of mothers and sons and the anger that accompanies them. The Spider-Man series of Insomniac follows both Peter Parker and Miles Morales as they try to overcome the threats of supervillain as well as to fight against their demons from dead parental figures. The return of 2020 is a loop science fiction nightmare born from the family trauma of the grief protagonist. And then there is another big game of Big Playstation of 2025, Death Stranding 2: on the beach, which is perhaps not technically a first party game, but is certainly a verifiable party of maternal and paternal anxiety.
Make no mistake: I am a fan of all the games listed above, each singular in their characters’ representations and each offering extremely different gameplay experiences. But when considered as a whole, it is easy to hear that their stories are all sung from the same anthem. Family sorrow is at the center of all these stories, and even if I certainly think that mature themes have a place in the games, it all starts to have the impression of making me hit my head with the same ideas at this stage. The “cycle of violence” is very real in danger of becoming a loop of decreasing returns.
Of course, it’s true that not each The PS5 game follows this model – Astro Bot is not an exploration of generational trauma in deep space – but you catch my drift. I think that is what I appreciated so much in the Ode of Team Asobi to Playstation of yesteryear, with its joy and color standing out from the crowd otherwise gloomy. It was like a rarity. But it was never like that.
The PS3 gave us the Uncharted era of Naughty Dog, which, although it ends up venturing into a more melancholy territory in the end of a thief, firmly planted his flag in adventure themes with a tone torn by the pages of paste fiction. I will always have a weakness for the resistance of Insomniac and its mashup of science fiction war of the Second World War, as well as Littlebigplanet, which, at the other end of the Tonal spectrum, celebrated creativity and the community. Yes, these games all contained different levels of nuances of character, but were all fundamentally on different things: treasure hunt, extraterrestrial invasions and personal expression. They did not all try to serve the same story, and I can’t help but feel that if a new Jak and Daxter game was to be released today, it would be a thirst for Ottsel to take revenge on the killers of his friend with blond hair.
I hope that future PlayStation exclusives can turn to this more varied and interesting past for inspiration, even when choosing more “serious” subjects. The Ps2 Shadow of the Colossus of the ICO team took a sad tone, but found something really unique and poignant in it, at a time when such ideas were much less common in the games. He is a unique masterpiece to date, telling his story through minimal whims and kinematics – far from the film style of the brand that we are now expecting from PlayStation Games. What we had no return in the mid -2000s were five other PS2 outings that took its exact contemplations on love and loss and told the same story in a different packaging. Whenever you play something new in Sony’s studios on the now 25 -year console, it looked like a whole new experience with another story to tell, not just a variation on a theme.
This brings me back to Ghost of Yotei, a game superior to his predecessor in almost all aspects, except his central history. While I connect to ATSU more than ever Jin Sakai – it is a much hotter presence to spend a few tens of hours with – Ghost of Tsushima’s Narrative explores different and cooler grounds. History balances Jin’s personal difficulties in the context of an invasion of a nation, with themes of honor, betrayal and belonging by hitting an agreement and bringing out when it happened hot on the heels of the last of us, part 2 in 2020, before the sorrow had apparently seized of each Sony storyteller.
Perhaps PlayStation’s interest in sorrow is a reflection of the state of the world. When seen through the objective of when PS5’s exclusives like Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 were being written, this melancholy is somewhat understandable. The cocovated pandemic unnecessarily seized our planet in the 1920s and 2021, and as such, themes surrounding an unexpected loss and mass trauma would undoubtedly have been at the forefront of many minds. It will therefore be fascinating to see if this model will continue much further, so now that the world has (a little) installed to what it looked like before. Will the stories told in projects that started production of the post-20122 will reflect a different state from the planet, or will they continue to watch our darkest moments inside ourselves? These are, of course, all of the stories valid to tell, and I am a great supporter of art which is reflections of those who create it, but I can not help wishing a little more variety in the future.
There are reasons to be full of hope and skeptical, given what Sony came after. The Wolverine of Insomniac seems to deliver on all the gore and the decapitation that you hope to see, but will this mature note reflect in its themes? Logan is certainly a character consumed by a thirst for revenge; Will this see us take a familiar path to bury the demons passed through ultraviolence, or will we get a completely different story that draws from a different part of its psyche? Logan de James Mangold has already told us a story that would have placed in the cannon of “Sad Dad” of Playstation, while X23 typed in the softer side of his body of Adamantium, so I hope that we will not only get a replay of this idea here.
We also know that Saros is on the way to Housemarque in March, and he certainly seemed impressive in the last flow of games. As for Naughty Dog, the zero ground of this long era of sorrow, we know that the studio will face the Kingdom of science fiction with intergalactic: the heretical prophet. His first trailer was promising, offering a more fun tone than we dreamed of seeing it from the last of us. Of course, we barely scraped the surface here, but it would be fantastic to see a bad dog rediscover part of this unexplored lightness here. By the way, these next two PS5 games are stories about people investigating the far -looking world colonies. I hope that for me, they find extremely different stories to tell about each of them, rather than discovering reminders of the sorrow they have left.
Simon Cardy is the editor -in -chief of the IGN which can mainly be found moving to the games of the open world, to engage in the Korean or desperate cinema in the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the Jets of New York. Follow him on Bluesky in @ cardy.bsky.social.
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