Persona 5 review: Imaginative game takes a wild journey

In Persona 5, you’re cast as a teenager in Tokyo who discovers a creepy app on his phone that he deletes before going to sleep. He awakens in a striped prisoner’s uniform, shackled behind bars. Seated at a desk outside the cage is an old man named Igor, the master of the Velvet Room — a place between reality and dreams that’s also a projection of your heart. Igor offers you a chance at “rehabilitation,” which entails casting off your distorted perception of reality and embracing your latent potential. Soon after the app reappears on your phone, the game turns into a heist adventure, with encounters with scantily clad female warriors and demons, and much more. Persona 5 is an absurdly imaginative game that is also about how people can be led astray by their knack for projection and fixation on distorted desires.