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Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - One To Watch

Cult hits are quite common on the Nintendo DS, with its massive catalogue of titles bringing a diverse range of gameplay styles to its touchscreen. Many of these don’t really shift as many copies as they probably should, but these titles have a tendency of making their way into my DS game drawer. 2011 seems to be continuing this trend, as I stumbled upon two promising demos of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, the latest brain child of regular big cult hit developers Capcom.

Capcom, of course, are the developers of the massively popular Ace Attorney series, and appear to have stuck to a winning formula in the development of Ghost Trick. With its development overseen by Shu Takumi, creator of Ace Attorney, the game appears to feature the same kind of crazy characters and informal, very funny dialogue found in the courtroom franchise. To provide a definitive example of this, the tutorial in the first demo version is provided by a desk lamp.

Ghost Trick shows its Ace Attorney roots through its blend of crime-solving and the supernatural, with the amnesiac titular ‘detective’, Sissel, actually being dead throughout the game, asking the player to control his ghost to rewrite the deaths of other characters while finding out what happened to himself. Being a ghost naturally has its perks, and in Ghost Trick, the perks for Sissel include the ability to manipulate inanimate objects by having his soul ‘possess’ them, and reversing time to a point four minutes before a person’s death, where he can act to save the previously dead person’s life.

One demo shows a woman being killed and Sissel’s spirit is charged by the woman’s spirit with undoing the damage, and doing this involves the use of ‘Ghost Tricks’; the perks I mentioned earlier. The game will take the character back to 4 minutes before the victim’s death (and can do so as many times as required), and must possess items in the area, within a certain radius and utilise them to change the victim’s fate, with a time limit in place to create that added tension. Each item has one function; a step ladder will unfold, a guitar will tunelessly strum or a crane holding something will unclench, promptly dropping its cargo. Some of these are more useful than others, while some items actually have no functions at all, simply there to serve as stepping stones to move Sissel’s soul from one item to the one you actually want to use; it’s fun to consider the possibilities, especially if the full version of the game allows the player to complete puzzles using different items around them, rather than having just one answer.