I’m a huge fan of PlayStation’s first-party offerings. They’ve come to embody the sort of cinematic adventures I’ve always looked for when sitting down with a controller in my hand, feeling like genuine blockbuster events meant to be savoured. But where in the past this brand of glossy storytelling felt like new ground being trodden, I can’t help but feel that recently it's become the well-worn road. It’s not just that all of PlayStation’s major releases adhere to the now-trademark third-person, cinematic stylings – the stable of developers has become seemingly obsessed with stories that explore the exact same themes: grief and revenge. And I’m starting to get tired of it. As a rule, these games are all impeccably well made, but I’m starting to miss that era when PlayStation’s range felt wider and things were a little more “fun.”
The realisation that so many PlayStation games have explored the same grim story themes struck me when playing through Sucker Punch’s new Ghost of Yotei. While I thoroughly enjoyed it and admire its consistently exciting approach to combat and the genuine sense of discovery it creates through exploration, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been told its story before. As Atsu, you’re tasked with avenging the death of your parents on a blood-soaked journey across 17th-century Japan as you hunt down each of ‘The Yotei Six’. Not only is this tale unfortunately close to the plot of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which I also played to completion earlier this year, but it's the same combination of fiery revenge arc crossed with meditations on what is to grieve that has become something of a hallmark for PlayStation Studios in recent years.
2020’s The Last of Us Part 2 is an obvious trailblazer, with Ellie’s dark descent into a rage-filled embodiment of revenge coming as a result of the death of her father figure, Joel. That, of course, was the sequel to the 2013 original that explored how Joel struggled to cope with the death of his own daughter. At the time, The Last of Us was seen as fuelling a wave of “sad dad” games, including 2018’s God of War, but in hindsight, these were the building blocks for PlayStation’s preoccupation with grief.
2022’s God of War Ragnarok is a story fuelled by the loss of mothers and sons and the anger that comes with them. Insomniac’s Spider-Man series follows both Peter Parker and Miles Morales as they attempt to overcome supervillain threats as well as wrestle with their demons stemming from dead parental figures. 2020’s Returnal is a looping sci-fi nightmare born out of the protagonist Selene’s familial grief-related trauma. And then there’s 2025’s other big PlayStation exclusive, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, which may not technically be a first-party game, but certainly is a verifiable feast of maternal and paternal anguish.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of all of the games listed above, each singular in its depictions of characters and each offering wildly different gameplay experiences. But when viewed as a whole, it's easy to hear that their stories are all being sung from the same hymn sheet. Familial grief is at the centre of all of these stories, and while I certainly feel that mature themes have a place in games, it is all starting to feel like I’m getting hit around the head with the same ideas at this point. The “cycle of violence” is in very real danger of becoming a loop of diminishing returns.
Of course, it’s true that not every PS5 game follows this pattern — Astro Bot isn’t an exploration of generational trauma in deep space — but you catch my drift. I think that’s incidentally what I enjoyed so much about Team Asobi’s ode to PlayStation of old, with its joy and colour standing out from the otherwise morose crowd. It felt like a rarity. But it never used to be this way.
The PS3 gave us Naughty Dog’s Uncharted era, which, although it eventually ventured into more melancholic territory in A Thief’s End, firmly planted its flag in themes of adventure with a tone ripped from the pages of pulp fiction. I’ll always have a soft spot for Insomniac’s Resistance and its World War 2/sci-fi warfare mashup, as well as LittleBigPlanet, which, all the way at the other end of the tonal spectrum, celebrated creativity and community. Yes, these games all contained varying levels of character nuances, but were all fundamentally about different things: treasure hunting, alien invasions, and personal expression. They weren’t all trying to serve the same story, and I can’t help but feel that if a new Jak and Daxter game were to come out today, it would be about an Ottsel’s thirst for revenge against the killers of his blonde-haired friend.
I hope that future PlayStation exclusives can look to this more varied, interesting past for inspiration, even when choosing to tackle more “serious” subject matters. Team Ico’s PS2 classic Shadow of the Colossus took on a mournful tone, but found something truly unique and poignant within it, at a time when such ideas were far less common in games. It stands as a unique masterpiece to this day, telling its tale through vagaries and minimal cutscenes – a far cry from the trademark cinematic style we now expect of PlayStation games. What we didn’t have back in the mid-2000s were five more PS2 releases that took its exact contemplations on love and loss and told the same story in a different wrapping. Every time you played something new from Sony’s studios on the now 25-year-old console, it felt like a brand new experiment with a different story to tell, not just a variation on a theme.
That brings me back to Ghost of Yotei, a game that is superior to its predecessor in almost every aspect, barring its central story. While I connect to Atsu more than I ever did Jin Sakai — she’s a much warmer presence to spend a few dozen hours with — Ghost of Tsushima’s narrative explores different, fresher ground. The story balances the personal struggles of Jin against the backdrop of an invasion of a nation, with themes of honour, betrayal, and belonging striking a chord and making it stand out when it arrived hot on the heels of The Last of Us Part 2 in 2020, before grief seemingly took hold of every Sony storyteller.
Perhaps PlayStation’s interest in grief is a reflection of the state of the world, though. When viewed through the lens of when PS5 exclusives like Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 were being written, that melancholy is somewhat understandable. The COVID pandemic inarguably took hold of our planet in the years 2020 and 2021, and as such, themes surrounding unexpected loss and mass trauma would no doubt have been at the forefront of many minds. It will therefore be intriguing to see if this pattern will continue much further, then, now that the world has (somewhat) settled back into what it looked like beforehand. Will the stories being told in projects that began production post-2022 mirror a different state of the planet, or continue to look inside ourselves at our darkest moments? These are, of course, all valid tales to tell, and I’m a huge proponent of art being reflections of those creating it, but I can’t help but wish for a little more variety going forward.
There’s reason to be hopeful and skeptical, considering what Sony has coming up next. Insomniac’s Wolverine looks to be delivering on all of the gore and decapitation you’d hope to see, but will that mature rating be reflected in its themes? Logan is certainly a character consumed by a lust for revenge; will that see us taken down a familiar path of burying past demons through ultraviolence, or will we get an altogether different story that taps into a different part of his psyche? James Mangold’s Logan already told us a tale that would’ve slotted nicely into PlayStation’s “sad dad” canon, as X23 tapped into the softer side of his adamantium body, so I do hope we don’t just get a rerun of that idea here.
We also know that Saros is on the way from Housemarque in March, and it certainly looked impressive in the most recent State of Play stream. As for Naughty Dog, the ground zero of this long-running era of grief, we know that the studio will be taking on the sci-fi realm next with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Its first trailer was promising, delivering a more fun-filled tone than we’d ever dream of seeing from The Last of Us. Of course, we’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it would be fantastic to see Naughty Dog rediscovering some of that Uncharted levity here. Both of these upcoming PS5 games, incidentally, are stories about people investigating lost off-world colonies. I hope for my sake that they find wildly different stories to tell on each of them, rather than discover reminders of the grief they’ve left behind.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
