Ghost of Tsushima’s Kurosawa Mode Isn’t Just a Black-and-White Filter

Ghost of Tsushima is a love letter to Japanese culture from Sucker Punch studio. The game will feature a special black-and-white mode inspired by the works of famous movie director Akira Kurosawa. The developers talked to Entertainment Weekly about how “Kurosawa Mode” came into being.

Among Sucker Punch’s most obvious sources of inspiration were Sanjuro (1962) and Seven Samurai (1954). In fact, the list is much longer (for example, there’s a game called Karateka and a comic book called Usagi Yojimbo), but the creators emphasized Akira Kurosawa.

So, this is the reason why the studio started working on Kurosawa Mode, a system of filters that will make Ghost of Tsushima look even more like the works of the great filmmaker.

Kurosawa Mode isn’t just a black-and-white picture. According to the developers, this filter also increases the wind. Also, there is an effect of film grain and a little change in sound — it becomes more like audio from a 1950s television. “Our audio team have an internal tool that mimicked sounds of old TV and, specifically, megaphones, radios, TVs back to the ’50s,” creative director Jason Connell told EW.

Black-and-white overlay is not that simple as well: Sucker Punch has studied Kurosawa’s films carefully to get the right balance between black depth and white brightness.

Ghost of Tsushima releases July 17 exclusively on PlayStation 4. Kurosawa Mode will be enabled right from the start.