Ghostrunner (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch)

Brian Rejack, Contributing Editor

Before you start playing Ghostrunner—an impressive and enjoyable game that may also at times make you want to throw your controller across the room—it’s worth shifting your perspective significantly. Even though you play as a badass cyberninja who can wall-run like a champ, dodge bullets in slow motion while floating in the air, and effortlessly slice through enemies with a sword, the titular Ghostrunner is by no means indestructible. In fact, he’s quite fragile. A single bullet from one of the many armed enemies, who all have annoyingly good aim, will put an end to his mission. In other words, although you will play from a first-person perspective, this game is not at all a combat game. It is a platformer through and through, and if you make one slip-up—whether it’s messing up a jump or failing to avoid enemy fire—be prepared to reload from a checkpoint and try again. And again. And again.

Yes, you are going to die a lot. Once you reach the more difficult levels, you may die hundreds of time in the course of completing them. Mercifully, the checkpoints are frequent and the load-times nearly imperceptible. The comparison that kept coming to mind as I played Ghostrunner was Super Meat Boy. The two games have basically nothing in common with respect to mood, aesthetics, or design. But both offer similarly pleasing cycles of repetition—try, die, learn, try again. And they both work beautifully because the rapid rhythms of play leave no time for frustration born of delay. Frustration is definitely a part of the experience, don’t get me wrong! (More on that below.) But at its best, Ghostrunner creates a fun and deeply rewarding first-person platforming experience. The difficulty is high, for sure, but the game is mostly well-balanced in this regard, and it doles out pain and pleasure in a fair manner.

The trials and tribulations of being a cyberninja play out against a visually impressive urban wasteland of the future, with a narrative fitting for the environs. As you progress farther and farther up Dharma Tower, the last vestige of humanity after an unexplained global calamity called “The Burst,” you’re faced with an evolving cast of enemies working for Mara, also known as the Key Master, the Tower’s tyrannical leader. Guiding you along the way is an AI called “The Architect” (once a human named Adam who ruled alongside Mara), and a human named Zoe, one of the last of the Climbers, and maybe the last after the rebel group was wiped out by Mara’s forces. Story is filled in through the conversations with Zoe and The Architect/Adam (they are never seen, but only heard). It’s fairly typical cyberpunk fare, but really the narrative is not where Ghostrunner places its emphasis.

As Christian Haines noted in his Impressions piece on Ghostrunner, the game checks all the necessary cyberpunk boxes with its narrative, style, and gameplay. Post-apocalyptic fragments of humanity just barely hanging on to existence? Check. Brutalist architecture and lines of neon light receding in every direction? Check. Ambiguous moral and philosophical questions raised? Check. Nothing about Ghostrunner’s cyberpunk-ness is particularly interesting or probing, but it’s appropriate for a game so focused on velocity and forward progression that it never takes too much time to dwell on anything all that deeply. There are enemies to slice apart, ramps to slide down, walls to run on, and grappling points to swing from. Should humans evolve into mindless cybernetic slaves (as Mara desires), or should they (as Adam would have it) maintain more of their humanity while still submitting to a fascistic leader obsessed with his own “iron will” shaping the nebulous future? Meh. The game posing such questions feels like checking another box, adding a dash of philosophical contemplation only so that the platforming has the appropriate generic background upon which to play.

And play really is key here. Even when you’re failing over and over again, the game works best when it encourages playfulness with how you engage with its world. It sets you up to observe the space and the objects in it. You try out a few moves, see which ones backfire. You start again and try out some others. Eventually you stitch together a sequence of moves and all of sudden you realize that you’ve choreographed your way through the situation. You are the dancer and the dance. Or rather, you plan the dance through trial and error, and eventually you’ve practiced enough to become the dancer able to put on a successful performance. As was the case for the cyberspace cowboys and console jockeys of William Gibson’s founding cyberpunk fictions, “jacking in”—appropriately, the Ghostrunner’s nickname is “Jack”—and getting all the patterns and sequences just right can feel euphoric. As far as this reviewer can tell, he has to this point avoided addiction to the high that Ghostrunner offers, but its addictive nature has certainly been glimpsed.

Of course, bad trips occur now and then in this consensual hallucination of balletic violence and velocity. As already mentioned, Ghostrunner is a difficult game. Players unaccustomed to rapid navigation through virtual space from a first-person perspective won’t find progress an easy task. Likewise, those with little predilection for repetitive practice of rhythmic, sequential movements through such spaces will also find little to enjoy here. Even seasoned players of platformers may find the difficulty a bit steep from time to time. Some of the challenge proceeds from the inherent difficulty of moving about with precision and accurate timing when one’s virtual spatial orientation is hampered by, you know, not seeing or sensing the body you’re supposed to be inhabiting. There is a reason, after all, that first-person platformers are mostly not a thing, with Mirror’s Edge the most prominent exception. Like that spiritual first-person ancestor, though, Ghostrunner manages to make it work really well most of the time.

Here’s why I keep hedging on that claim, though. Until you spend a decent amount of time in the game, enough time to learn how to play competently, the enemies that you need to slay can be extremely irritating. That’s why I opened this review by suggesting you devote some mental energy to dissociating this game from typical first-person combat experiences before you play it. It helps a bit if you think of the enemies and their gunfire as akin to moving spikes or other dangerous things that you must avoid or die. The problem is that these enemies don’t operate exactly as such mobile obstacles do in traditional platformers (i.e. the enemies in Ghostrunner don’t behave with the exact same patterns over and over again—they move and shoot via different paths, just like enemies in a shooter).  

The other platforming elements can be challenging at times, but almost uniformly they’re reasonable challenges that one can study, learn, adapt to, and ultimately overcome. The only exception, to my mind, comes in the game’s final level, which felt unnecessarily (and arbitrarily) punishing. After completing the last level, I was just glad it was finally over. Happily, though, with most every other hard sequence, my eventual success immediately transformed into eager desire to complete them again on a second playthrough, precisely because I’d honed my moves and mastered something difficult.

So if you’re prepared to take on a high-difficulty platforming challenge, you’ll certainly find one in Ghostrunner. Most of the time it’s exhilarating to meet those challenges, study them, and playfully figure out a solution. It may not be the most original or innovative cyberpunk world. It may sometimes make you want to scream with rage as you repeatedly fail (although even the failure is at times delightful and hilarious). But after ample experimentation and practice, it sure does feel good to get those cyberninja dance steps just right.

Check out the first episode of the Gamers with Glasses Show on our website and on Apple Podcasts. Enjoyed this review? Well, why not read our reviews of the Netflix docuseries High Score or indie meditation on loss and storytelling Welcome to Elk.