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Thanks to update 1.12, Ghost of Tsushima now boasts New Game+ — a way to replay Jin's epic adventure with all of your skills, equipment, and cosmetics from a previous playthrough intact. New Game+ was pretty much the community's most requested feature, and we're happy to report that Sucker Punch has done a brilliant job of implementing it.

Starting New Game+ is as simple as picking the option from the main menu. Instead of having you play through the rather lengthy prologue all over again, New Game+ jumps straight to the fantastic title crawl, as the world opens up to you for the first time. This way, you're able to equip all of your favourite armour, charms, hats, and masks right from the word go.

And from there, the game plays out as it did in your original run. The missions and various activities are the same, except you're now rewarded with 'Ghost Flowers' for a job well done. This new currency can be spent on armour, charms, dyes, and hats that are exclusive to New Game+. You can buy them from Baku the Voiceless — an ominous merchant who you'll find dotted around the map.

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The new charms in particular are worth checking out. Some of them actively make the game much harder — perfect for players who are looking to seriously test their skills. One such charm makes it so that Jin will die in a single successful hit, while another prevents enemies from dropping resources, like arrows and kunai. Of course, Baku also peddles the good stuff — powerful new charms that can really spice up your style of play.

Indeed, there's a borderline broken charm that makes Jin's Ghost Stance even more effective, as well as a charm that has a chance to call down a bolt of lightning on a nearby foe whenever you attack with the Heavenly Strike technique. There's certainly some creativity at play here, and this kind of thing can make another 40 hour playthrough that much more interesting.

But what really helps make New Game+ compelling is the overhauled difficulty. You can still choose between Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lethal, but enemies have more health than before (you won't be killing bosses in just a couple of sword swings), Mongol war camps are better defended, and the invaders patrol Tsushima in larger, more dangerous groups. If you're a master samurai who found Jin's journey a little too easy by the end, you'll definitely come to appreciate these changes.

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All in all, New Game+ presents the perfect excuse to play through Ghost of Tsushima all over again. We still think that this is one of the best open world games of the generation, and the effort that Sucker Punch has put into New Game+ should be commended. And let's not forget: Ghost of Tsushima will run at 60 frames-per-second on PS5. If you're still not sold on another PS4 playthrough, New Game+ may end up being a perfect fit for Sony's next-gen system.