Ghost of Tsushima Cinema Mode Endorsed by Kurosawa Estate

Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, the last major first-party exclusive for PS4, is complete and will release on July 17. As we learned back in May during the game’s State of Play stream, it will ship with a special mode that adds more intense wind, film grain, and black and white coloring to make the game look like a classic samurai film. It turns out that this mode will be named after legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who directed Seven Samurai and served as a major inspiration to the game’s development team.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Sucker Punch creative directors Jason Connell and Nate Fox explain how big of an influence Kurosawa was on the studio’s new game. The filmmaker was one of the team’s “reference guides” during development, and they used a variety of his films to help inform the game’s tone. Once the special cinematic mode started coming together, Sucker Punch reached out to the Kurosawa Estate “to get the official blessing” to name the mode after the director himself. As a result, gamers will now have the option to play Ghost of Tsushima in Kurosawa Mode when they pick up the game next week.

Connell also adds that the color treatment in Kurosawa Mode is “not just a black-and-white filter.” The team at Sucker Punch “did some research on the curves that may have existed on that kind of film that [Kurosawa] might’ve used,” which will make the whites and blacks as accurate to a Kurosawa film as possible. Additionally, when Kurosawa Mode is enabled, the audio will be modified to sound like it’s coming out of a 1950s TV. Sucker Punch clearly isn’t messing around with Kurosawa Mode, and wants to use it to deliver the most authentic samurai gaming experience we’ve ever seen.

Back in May, Connell told IGN that Ghost of Tsushima is Sucker Punch’s biggest game “by a landslide.” The studio’s last game, inFAMOUS First Light, was released in August 2014. First Light acted as a standalone story expansion for inFAMOUS Second Son, which released five months earlier.