I still can't figure out how to think about Ghost of Yōtei. And, honestly, its predecessor, Ghost of Tsushima, even four years on. I enjoy these games - I enjoy these kinds of games, even. I'm a sucker, if you'll forgive the pun, for the Sucker Punch style of open world. A kind of Diet Assassin's Creed: even lighter; even shallower; even simpler to grasp and follow around, sword in hand, air in head. Sometimes with video games and their often unfathomable complexity and depth, these games feel like just about all I can handle. Sometimes you just need Love Island, Emily in Paris, an infinite, blue-lit bedtime scroll. And sometimes you snap out of it. The thing that keeps me in the camp of the first option here, the camp of willing lobotomisation, is a desire to try and meet this game on its own terms. Forget what Ghost of Yōtei is for a second - and especially forget what it's saying it is - and instead just focus on what it's actually trying to be. In this sense Ghost of Yōtei is more like a success. It's trying to be a breezy hell-yeah action game, wrapped in the aesthetics of hell-yeah samurai movies - less Kurosawa, more 13 Assassins, more "mud and blood", more explicitly Western-style samurai movie. It's also not trying to be clever about this, or at least I really hope not. Western movies are in the most reductive way about lone wolves imparting justice on the land; in Ghost of Yōtei there is a whole mechanical system built around, well, a wolf. Your allies - actually just vendors, let's be honest - are called your Wolf Pack. We're not aiming for subtlety here. The setup this time, as it is with just about every don't-think-too-hard action flick, let alone triple-A action video game, is a good ol' tale of revenge. As a child, Atsu's family was brutally murdered by a group known as the Yōtei Six, led by the villainous Lord Saito. With her mother and father slain before her, and her brother never found again, Atsu was left pinned to a tree by her own father's sword, that tree subsequently set alight and Atsu left there to die. This, and a fiery, immaculately staged Western scene where, amongst some deft tutorialisation, you ride into a rotten town, flush out some drunks from a building and scythe down the Snake, the first of the Six, make for a cracking opening. Your savagery and blunt refusal to die in this prologue earn you the nickname of Onryo, a vengeful ghost returned from the dead, and quickly that legend overtakes you. First hell yeah: achieved.