I had more fun exploring Ghost of Yotei than I have in any other open-world game – not just this year, but ever

Despite not writing our Ghost of Yotei review, I have played a staggering amount of the game. Me and Atsu spent a little over 70 hours together before the PS5 game even released. I've now done everything there is to do in Ghost of Yotei except for the last couple of Ainu items. 61 altars, all the wolf dens, every last hat and mask – all of it. Even before I could talk with anyone else about the game or search the internet for answers, I was missing just three collectibles in the Growth section of the menu.

This isn't because I had a single-minded obsession with finding all of them. Well, OK, it's not just because I had a single-minded obsession with finding all of them. Despite the fact that Ghost of Yotei doesn't have anything resembling a minimap, the developers went out of their way to include so many different methods of pointing you toward something interesting that it never, ever felt like I was lost, nor did it ever feel like I was wasting my time.

Wandering around Ghost of Yotei is always purposeful, even if you don't realize it.

Designed for exploration

Figuring out where, exactly, to go in Ghost of Yotei boils down to map markers. The big map in the menu has points of interest marked on them, and you can track those points or fast travel to them if you've already discovered them. If you track them, the wind blows across the map in the direction you want to go. It's extremely effective and intuitive; by my third hour in Ghost of Yotei, I'd basically forgotten that there wasn't a minimap.

The blowing wind is far from the only example, just the most obvious, of how Ghost of Yotei tries to surface points of interest. The entire world is designed around this, to be as unobtrusive as possible while also effectively still pointing people in the directions they'll want to go before they even know they want to go there. There are literal signposts dotted around the map to the nearest inn or landmark, but most of what Ghost of Yotei is doing is sneakier than that.

The Golden Bird, for example, is a "Wolf Pack" member that only appears whenever you're near a major collectible landmark such as an altar or hot spring. It chirps and flies around and generally leads players toward any such landmark that's within roughly 100 meters. You can similarly receive an armor upgrade later that does something similar for Ainu items, except it's fireflies instead of the Golden Bird, and they glow and your controller vibrates as you get closer.

More generally, the design of Ezo is actually built around this. The hills and mountains, especially the ones you can climb, are designed to allow Atsu to look out from their summits with a spyglass to spot and mark undiscovered locations on her map. Steam or smoke rises into the sky, clearly indicating something is going on in its direction. Even the white flowers spread across much of Ghost of Yotei that have you speed up on horseback are laid out in a way that if you simply follow them, you're almost certainly going to be led somewhere meaningful rather than a dead end.

When it comes to open-world games, that's the best possible outcome. More often than not, they can feel like wandering around to meaningless task after meaningless task simply because they're there on the map. And when it's all said and done, there are plenty of markers on Ghost of Yotei's map. But the way it piecemeals them out over time, constantly hinting at something just beyond the horizon without inundating the player, is tremendous, and I hope basically everyone else is taking notes.

Ghost of Yotei is now available for PS5. Check out our guide to other games like Ghost of Tsushima if you want even more sprawling open worlds to explore or katanas to wield.