Review: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS and iOS. It was developed by Capcom.

The ghost detective, Sissel, musing on his current situation while two policemen and a doctor look over his body.

In a junkyard at the edge of town, a man is shot by an unknown assailant, with only a young detective as a witness to what happened. The man, Sissel, comes back to life as a ghost with magic powers, but no memory of who he is. Now Sissel must team up with the detective, Lynne, to find out who he is, and discover that he is part of a much bigger mystery.

You take control of the ghost of Sissel. Sissel has two powers: he can make some objects operate on their own, and, more importantly, he can travel back in time to four minutes to before a person’s death so he can save them.

Sissel uses his first power as a form of transportation. He can only travel to objects that are near the object he is currently possessing, but when Sissel turns on some object, they move a little, creating a bridge to the next object. For example, Sissel can dislodge a piece of paper hanging on a board so it floats to the other side of a room. It almost feels like playing a complicated game of connect-the-dots.

Sissel’s second power drives the plot forward. When Sissel travels back in time he, and the ghost of the person he is saving, first see the last four minutes of the person’s life. Then the minutes rewind again and the player has to figure out how to prevent the death using Sissel’s powers. It is usually a matter of getting the victim to move out of the way or disabling who or what kills the victim. You can rewind the last four minutes as many times as possible to see what you need to do. After the person is saved they usually do or say something to Sissel that moves the story along.



Sissel travelling between two objects.

Saving people’s lives is the only real challenge in Ghost Trick, and it is a really easy challenge. There are normally only a few objects that can be manipulated, and can only do one function, so it boils down to trying all the objects until you find the one that does something beneficial. Sometimes you have to wait until a person or object is in the right place to save a person, or you cannot do something until a certain amount of time has passed, but that is the only difficult part. The game holds your hand a lot too; it will tell you if you have reached a dead end and have to restart, and give you lots of hints along the way.

Sissel can also travel through phone lines, which is how he investigates different places.

The game is really story heavy. You can spend minutes listening to people talk to each or talking to Sissel, then travel to another place and listen to more exposition. The dialogue is interesting though, as long as you are interested in the story you will be fine. A lot of the game is funny too, despite revolving around a giant conspiracy.

Watching the mystery unravel is the best part of the game. Characters and plot points are introduced early on and come back later in a shocking way. There are several plot twists, but there is plenty of buildup to them so they do not feel like writers pulled unexplained crap without precedent. The rules of the time travel and ghost powers remain consistent, so there is no cheating in the mystery. The cast are all quirky and memorable, and nobody is boring or annoying.

All the characters are fun to watch.

The ending is kind of off though. It wraps things up a little too perfectly and abruptly, and ignores some plot points in an effort to wrap things up quickly.

The game is in 2D, but the characters are in 3D, which look unusual, but not necessarily bad. The characters can look blocky, but they have really detailed animations, it almost looks like they were rotoscoped in. They can dance, throw objects up in the air and catch them, and look like they are pushing each other out of the way in 3D.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is not a great game in terms of challenge, but it a great use of the video game medium to tell a story. I am not sure if that justifies the price, but it is disappointing that more people have not played this game.