Jason Connell, the creative director on Ghost of Yotei, has revealed during a new Creator to Creator interview with Vince Gilligan that the game’s flashback mechanic originally had more depth to it before Sucker Punch Productions ultimately had to scale things back.
[Atsu is] on this lone wolf quest and then you press a button and suddenly she’s kind of feeling the warmth of her past, like what she’s fighting for. To me, that is like, what a great narrative tool, if with a single button [it can] make you feel something that’s on their own volition.
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You are doubling your art – [it’s] twice as long a game, everywhere you go. And so while it’s this amazing feature, it saddened me the day that I had to kill that, to say ‘OK, it can’t be that.’
It was the right choice because it is a very powerful narrative tool. So you can really use it at [Atsu’s] home where the events happened, and it’s not like a mission start, where you go and it does it for you. You can press it anytime, you can put it back and forth.
Ghost of Yotei was released for PS5 in early October 2025, and you can read our full review here. Sony announced during its latest financial results last week that the game has sold 3.3 million units worldwide, and in Europe Ghost of Yotei was the biggest first-party release from Sony since Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
[Source – Creator to Creator via GamesRadar]