There’s an art form to executing the perfect stealth take-down, to deceiving even the most eagle-eyed of guards. But it’s not only up to the player to do this well.A good stealth game is born, first, from good level design.
Luckily, the PS4 has a plethora of well-designed games to choose from, including some PS exclusives. Whether you’re an assassin, a spy, or just trying to stay alive unnoticed, these games are more than happy to oblige. So slip into the shadows and test your skills.
You play as the last surviving samurai defending yourself from invading Mongol forces. Fighting at a disadvantage, you abandon your standard, honorable methods and retreat into the shadows. While this doesn’t mean you’ll abandon swordplay, it does mean you’ll work with distraction tools like smoke bombs and ranged attacks like archery to complete assassinations.
Even withmixed reviews on how well the mechanics and story work, this is one of thebest-selling titles on the PS4, and takes place in an absolutely gorgeous historical setting. If you enjoy balancing sword-fighting with stealth techniques like focused hearing, you might enjoy this.
Developer
Ubisoft Montreal
The Assassin’s Creed seriesis one of the best known in video game history, and for good reason. Though all the titles have their strengths, this collection makes the list for having the most content. It includes Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
You play as the assassin Ezio in Renaissance Italy. As you might expect, the game features levels built around stealth kills, going as far as to fail you if you’re detectedat allin some of them. The stealth is mostly environmental, encouraging platforming out of sight or blending in suddenly with a crowd after using a weapon designed to be undetected.
Alien: Isolation is a game thatre-definied the way developers approached horror titles. You play as Amanda Ripley, trapped on the space station Sevastopol with a Xenomorph. Your only option for survival is to hide. And we meanonlyoption.
What makes this game so scary, and the stealth sections so tense, is how little control you have over the thing hunting you. Your weapons are useless against it, it can hear your interactions with other antagonists, and it’s also an intelligent enemy that learns from your moves. It’s a game that requires the patience to move slowly, quietly, and keep an eye at all times on your environment.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is not a game for the faint of heart.You play as Amicia, looking to find a cure for your estranged younger brother, Hugo. The French countryside is not so idyllic in this adventure, beset by the Inquisition and ravaged by the plague, making environmental stealth necessary.
The only weapon you have is a sling, so you’ll be doing a lot of hiding behind objects and avoiding enemies' lines of sight as you creep across the world if you want to keep everyone alive.
Dishonored 2 is set 15 years after the events of Arkane Studios' first game. You can play as either Empress Emily Kaldwin or her royal protector, Corvo Attano. Either way, you’re responsible for getting your throne back from Emily’s aunt, who’s staged a coup.
Both characters, who are wanted due to the coup, have to disguise themselves or hide in public. And the game is designed to make this difficult. Enemies will notice if you leave windows open, if they see a distraction has been thrown, or if you don’t hide the bodies as well after doing a stealth take-down. Luckily, the game does not require perfect stealth, and as you advance, you gain supernatural powers to aid you.
IO Interactive, Feral Interactive
This game plunges you into a world of international intrigue as genetically enhanced spy and all-around mystery man Agent 47. He works for the International Contract Agency as an assassin, completing various missions across the globe.
Each mission is a puzzle you creatively solve, prioritizing infiltration of secure areas and stealth take-downs of opponents. Part of the fun of this game is the additional layer of social stealth to standard environmental stealth, meaning that you need to know how to convincingly blend in with and manipulate NPCs and when to hide from them.
Mimimi Games
Desperados 3, describes itself as a hardcore tactical stealth game, so you know it’s ready to challenge your skills. Taking place in the wild west, you play gunslinger John Cooper andcontrol his gang of colorful characters, each with unique strengths and weaknesses.
This opens up a whole new world of game play where you need to understand and balance your team members, making the game’s environmental stealth more complex to navigate than it would be alone. Even though it’s a real-time game, you can also line up a number of actions in a slowdown mode, and this flexibility encourages domino effect solutions to problems.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a difficult game, but it isn’t without reason. You play as a warrior named Wolf, who must infiltrate an enemy castle to save his master. It’s treated realistically, and you are alone in taking on entire hordes of enemies.
As a result, you’re forced to really think about your limited resources and how to best utilize them, especially when the fights require near perfection to beat, and controlling your interactions between them becomes essential. When you sneak around the various environments, you rely on avoiding detection via sight and sound, using tools such as a grappling hook and skills such as the deathblow to remain undetected.
2The Last Of Us: Remastered
The Last of Us is a survival horror game about a man named Joel who ends up transporting a girl across the country. A unique zombie game, the world is filled with varied antagonists, both human and inhuman, who each require a different approach to successfully sneak past.
This leads to a number of challenging stealth-based combat sequences, complicated by the environment and its sparse resources. You’ll have to be clever about how you manage yourself and the girl, tracking antagonists and then moving objects into their path, for example. Also, using your weapon is complicated by enemies being attracted to sound and limited ammunition.
Kojima Productions
It can, and has been, argued thatMetal Gear Solid 5 is the greatest stealth game ever made. This game is part resource management, part tactical stealth game, part open-world exploration, and part FPS.
The fun of the game comes from the freedom to execute missions, recruit people, and find resources, however you’re able to think to do so, whether that be with meticulous stealth, poorly-placed explosives, or with only a dog by your side. Contributing to the creativity of this game is the large arsenal you can customize for each objective. No two playthroughs are going to look the same.
