At one point in Ghost of Yotei, the game’s protagonist Atsu finds herself within the torchlit courtyard of a fortress where one of her enemies is preparing to stage a play. This production is meant to recreate the worst moment of Atsu’s life, when her family was brutally murdered in front of her as a child and she was left for dead. Throughout the game, Atsu has trekked across an early 17th-century Hokkaido, part of a region then known as Ezo, in search of the Yotei Six, the group of killers responsible for the slaughter. Her hunt has led her to find one of them now planning to relive her tragedy in the form of a night’s entertainment. A backdrop is painted with the image of her family’s ginkgo tree, where she was left for dead. Soldiers mill around, waiting for the show to begin. Their leader, one of the masked killers from her past, orders his underlings to get the details of the massacre correct. He shouts for more fire, louder music, to capture the excitement of the night.
Seeing her past reimagined in this way sends Atsu into a blind rage, expressed in-game as a new ability that drenches the screen in a dark, bloody red, and drives her into a violent frenzy. She slices through enemy after enemy, leaving the would-be stage strewn with corpses and fallen weapons. How her history is represented matters deeply to her. Its distortion makes her furious.
Imperfect Fictions And Partial Realities
Alongside Ghost of Yotei, a number of this year’s other highest-profile games have taken place in the past. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, sequel to a 2018 action RPG, is set in 1403 Bohemia, amidst the turmoil of wars fought between forces loyal to King Wenceslas IV and King Sigismund. Assassin’s Creed Shadows brings the long-running series to late 16th-century Japan, during the latter part of the country’s Sengoku period—an era defined by decades of civil war. Mafia: The Old Country, for its part, follows fledgling mafioso Enzo Favara as he enters the world of Sicilian organized crime in the first decade of the 20th century.
Each of these games takes a different approach to design and storytelling, but they have a lot in common beneath the surface. All of them are about characters seeking some form of revenge against those who have wronged them in their youth, from the mine bosses who controlled young Enzo’s life in The Old Country, to the leaders who have ripped apart the lives of the protagonists in Deliverance 2, Shadows, and Yotei. Apart from The Old Country, they all feature real figures from history as allies and enemies. Most importantly, they all invite a modern audience to enter virtual versions of history by setting their action in lavishly imagined depictions of a bygone world, each using advanced technology to make the past seem alive on-screen.
Historical video games typically gesture toward realism, with “realism” used as a catch-all term for the reproduction of detail. As in a period movie, TV show, play, or novel, these details often involve recreating the look and sound of a previous era by using primary sources, like contemporary writing, art, and preserved artifacts, as reference. The design of a soldier’s armor, the architecture of a Japanese or Bohemian castle, or the make of guns and cars available in 1900s Sicily—video games are often very good at capturing these kinds of details. In storytelling, too, Yotei, Shadows, Deliverance 2, and The Old Country all place their protagonists in narratives punctuated by actual historical events, like wars and peace agreements, the development of new governments and technologies. How these details are used in portraying a recreation of the past, though, is just as important to a game’s outcome as the narrow accuracy of its set dressing.
The telling of history—and the creation of historical fiction—is always a process of interpretation. As much as we like to imagine history as a clear record of what’s come before us, our knowledge of the past develops through an imperfect process guided by what evidence is available to us, and how that evidence is understood by the perspectives of the people studying it.
The late Hilary Mantel, a British author best known for her trilogy of novels centered on Thomas Cromwell, spoke about her approach to historical fiction in 2017 for the BBC’s Reith Lecture series. It’s an essential listen (or, transcribed here, read) for anyone interested in Mantel’s work, historical fiction, and the study of history in general. One selection from it in particular is worth quoting at length here.
“Evidence is always partial,” Mantel says. “Facts are not truth, though they are part of it—information is not knowledge. And history is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it—a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It’s no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It’s the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
Given the added layer of remove that historical fiction involves, the genre requires something like an interpretation of an interpretation to function. “Historical accuracy” is only possible in a pretty slight sense, in games like Ghost of Yotei, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Mafia: The Old Country, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Because of this, it’s usually more worthwhile to consider what a game’s interpretation of history tells us about its artistic and dramatic priorities, rather than to get mired in examinations of whether a game is “realistic” or not. There’s more value in figuring out what, consciously or not, a game says about the time period it’s set within—and what that might mean for how we imagine our present-day reality.
When you take this approach, one aspect of this year’s historical video games that sticks out is how much they’re invested in nature. Though built and played on computers, each of the above games is obsessed with translating the experience of inhabiting the natural landscape of the past.
Deliverance 2, for instance, involves a lot of walking and riding around storybook Central European landscapes, from densely wooded forests and rolling green fields, to pleasantly burbling brooks. Shadows and Yotei both take a kind of maximalist approach to their landscapes, cramming as much Japanese iconography as possible into their sprawling maps. In their visions of the 16th and 17th centuries, bamboo forests grow thick just a few minutes’ horse ride away from snow-covered cliffs or stands of trees dropping fiery red, orange, and yellow autumn leaves. Cherry blossoms twirl on the wind in one part of the map, while winter arrives with gusts of freezing wind and iced-over ponds a stone’s throw away. In The Old Country, the sun bakes grassy fields, with purple flowers blossoming in punctuation, and valleys dip down into riverbeds, all with Mount Etna smouldering on the horizon.
There’s a sense, in each game, that the past is a place of greater beauty than the present — that the Kingdom of Bohemia, Japan, and Sicily were better, in some fundamental sense, during a time long before us. This is true, in some senses. Before industrialization, the landscapes of every one of the regions featured in these games would have been more vibrant. The Old Country, taking place in the early 20th century, shows this in alternating vistas of unspoiled rural landscapes and those blighted by the growth of factories, their smokestacks and machinery cutting across what might have been a picturesque canyon. There are also, of course, battlefields in each game. The Old Country’s are smaller in scale, consisting of burning warehouses and ancient ruins strewn with newly killed bodies, but the others are grander. Shadows, Yotei, and Deliverance 2 feature castle sieges and swordfights, with dozens of soldiers rushing at one another to struggle and die on ramparts and in fields, leaving their corpses to fill ditches or lie unburied in courtyards.
And yet, The Old Country aside, the ugliness of these battlefields still possesses a romantic element, as if the dead bodies and breached fortresses are tapestries and paintings showing a time when war was waged with something like dignity. The guns and explosions are primitive, their effect nothing like the city-annihilating rockets and automatic fire of latter eras. Their battles, like their natural world, seems better than ours. There’s a romance to their brutality, a heroism to their killing.
The Kinds Of Stories We Tell Ourselves
The downside of this romanticism is that it has a way of obscuring our picture of the past — of its fantasies overtaking reality to present something easier to imagine. In the 19th and 20th centuries, an idealized historical image gave rise to the romantic nationalism of regions across the world, pulling from old epics and folk traditions to create newly narrowed visions of ethnic belonging. It’s not hard for the cultural imagination to move from praising the beauty of a region’s landscapes and the valor of its ancestors to applying an exclusionary outlook to its possible citizenry or promoting a vision of ethnic supremacy within and outside of its borders. A version of this thinking led to the fascist governments of countries like the Second World War’s Axis Powers: Italy, Germany, and Japan. It lives on today, in the national romance of countries across the world whose governments appeal to an ethnically or religiously homogenous past in order to justify discriminatory or violent policies at home and abroad.
Because a people’s history plays such an essential part in this process, historical fiction, like all historical art, can be a fraught genre. The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance revolves around what’s depicted as a foreign invasion, resisted by its virtuous Czech characters. Along with its creator’s insistence on an all-white cast of characters, it presents a version of the past with unsavory implications for the present. (I wrote about this more back when the game came out, in a piece I’m linking here to avoid repeating myself). Its sequel maintains certain issues from the first game, but it also complicates its portrayal with a greater emphasis on the prejudices of its era and the universal horrors faced by those living at the whims of their society’s upper classes. Ghost of Tsushima has problems similar to those of Deliverance. Like the sequel, Yotei, its late 13th-century Japan is an idealized abstraction of cultural iconography, its contortions of another foreign invasion presenting a story of honor-obsessed, movie-influenced samurai fending off Mongol conquest. (At the time of Tsushima’s release, Kazuma Hashimoto dug into this issue, as did Andrew Kiya, and me, too.)
By moving the setting from an era of nationalist mythmaking to the beginning of the Edo or Tokugawa period, Yotei sidesteps some of the thornier issues that its still-romantic vision of Japan presents. The main conflict in the game is between Japanese characters, with Atsu’s hunt for the Yotei Six focused on personal tragedies borne not of foreign interference but of civil war. Like Deliverance 2 and, in a much weaker plot, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Yotei is mostly concerned with the ways in which ordinary people’s lives are torn apart by wars waged by the rulers of feudal societies. Atsu and the villains who killed her family are all driven to further violence by the aftereffects of the civil wars that wracked Japan until the consolidation of power under the Tokugawa shogunate, which takes place shortly before the events of the game begin. The Yotei Six’s leader, Saito, controls Hokkaido as the informal, fictional “Shogun of the North” at the time the plot starts, but his massacre of Atsu’s family takes place while he was a bandit leader, living in desperation as an exile who fought on the losing side of the Battle of Nagashino. Rather than portray its main characters as people possessing some intrinsic cultural heroism or villainy, Yotei brings its drama down to a more human level.
This choice goes a long way toward sidestepping the implications of Tsushima’s romantic view of history. But the game’s setting, in early 17th-century Hokkaido, introduces other wrinkles. Though the Ainu, a people indigenous to Hokkaido and nearby islands, are represented in-game, they’re largely ancillary to the plotline—a bit of local culture to spot between the greater focus on mainland Japanese characters, like the real-world Matsumae clan, who are represented in Yotei as fighting to emancipate Hokkaido of Saito’s rule. In the real world, the Matsumae were instrumental in the early process of colonizing the Ainu, which would continue for centuries until the 19th-century formation of Imperial Japan increased the brutality of the project, emulating the horrific European model to subjugate and assimilate the Ainu people.
Ghost of Yotei’s representation of Ainu characters is, in some ways, commendable for the fact that it exists at all. The presence of characters like a saddle maker, bemoaning the arrival of immigrants who bring new violence to his land, or traders selling crafts and clothes, is important because it offers a corrective to the usual erasure of the Ainu people in popular depictions of Japan. But their marginal participation in the game’s main plotline makes the Hokkaido of Yotei too similar to the first game’s Tsushima. It creates a romantic feeling of Japan based on a gloss of history that’s not always inaccurate, in the sense of detail, but misses the complicated texture that a less mythologically inclined story might have embraced.
Embracing these complications, as all of 2025’s historical fiction games show, often results in the most compelling narratives, too.
The inclusion of Yasuke, an African samurai, as one of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ two main characters offers one example of these complications. Shadows isn’t a great game, and its storytelling is largely too flat to make good on either of its protagonists’ plotlines, but Yasuke’s personal story arc is more engaging than the otherwise thin revenge story that takes more precedence. Rather than the totally isolated country depicted in so many games set in a similar time period, Shadows reminds its players that Japan, a country whose samurai stories often take place within the isolationism of the Tokugawa era, was always part of a larger world. Just as Mafia: The Old Country couples Sicily’s pastoral beauty with the bloodshed of organized crime and industrialism, factories like engorged ticks feasting on the landscape, Shadows features Portuguese slave traders disrupting a romantic vision of Japan with the intrusion of the global politics of the time.
Elsewhere in her Reith Lecture, Mantel states that “readers are touchingly loyal to the first history they learn—and if you challenge it, it’s as if you’re taking away their childhoods.” She could as easily be talking about the aggrieved internet reaction to Yasuke’s inclusion in Shadows as any other work of historical fiction that challenges a culturally dominant vision of the past. Some audiences might be comforted by samurai stories that deny the influence of the outside world on a bygone Japan, just as the inclusion of the same broader scope prompted backlash to Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s sequel. Others might find themselves intrigued to discover new dimensions to their understanding of an historical era. Or, as Mantel puts it: “For a person who seeks safety and authority, history is the wrong place to look. Any worthwhile history is a constant state of self-questioning, just as any worthwhile fiction is.”
At its best, historical fiction is able to capture just how alien the world before us might have looked to our eyes while reminding us, too, that even the most unfamiliar stories from our past are part of a universal human narrative, interconnected and complex. History, in all its forms, isn’t simple, because humanity isn’t simple. The Middle Ages and early modern period weren’t stage plays. They, too, were times when people were perpetrators and victims of violence and dislocation, the recipients and providers of courageous and kind acts. How the past looks varies from person to person, culture to culture, nation to nation. It’s a vast expanse, with known and unknown territory alike to explore. It is, essentially, a story we tell about ourselves, sometimes through the plots of video games.
Ghost of Yotei and the other games mentioned above are entertainment, but they’re also recitals of these stories. They’re one of the many stages on which we make sense of everything that’s led to our present day. It’s worthwhile to want what happens in them to reflect the complexity of the lives that have come before our own.
