I’ve been meaning to play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective pretty much ever since it originally came out for the DS over a decade ago and By George I’ve finally managed it. I knew this game had become a cult classic, but I think it deserves to be a classic classic. Ghost Trick is straight-up fantastic.
As a detective game, Ghost Trick is compelling for a similar reason to its Estonian cousin Disco Elysium, which is that it has an amnesiac protagonist. The story is pulled along by the increasingly confusing question of who the protagonist even is, let alone how they got into this situation. Unique to Ghost Trick is that the protagonist is, wait for it: dead. You play as a poltergeist with two actions: “ghost”, which lets you move around and possess objects; and “trick”, which lets you manipulate those objects to trigger Rube-Goldberg-esque situations to solve puzzles. Thus, “Ghost Trick” 🥁. The other thing you can do is rewind time four minutes before the death of the recently deceased, and this is how you affect the plot. The general structure of each chapter is that you arrive at a new location after possessing the phone lines, discover that someone there is dead, and then turn back the clock to try and prevent their death.
Ghost Trick is one of those games that people tend to not want to explain in too much detail because it would spoil all the twists and turns. After playing, I totally get it, but also I don’t know where I would even begin with all of the crazy twists and turns the plot takes. Ghost Trick was written by Shu Takumi, the same guy as Ace Attorney series, and you can tell. The cast of characters is vibrant and has actual depth. Each chapter introduces new absurd wrinkles to the plot that repeatedly nuke your expectations of where the story is going next. What I think I can say without spoilers is that Ghost Trick ends up telling this wonderful story about how the snap decisions we make can affect the rest of our lives, and how the right person being there for you when you need it can make a massive impact. It’s also about the love between humans and their pets. Takumi even put his own real-life dog in it!
CONTENT WARNING: does the dog die? Yes! But he’s fine.
The final thing I have to say is that this game is gorgeous. You can really feel how much love the animators put in to creating this cast of characters, even on the dinky little DS screen.
I’ve never seen animation this smooth in a DS game! It’s not like these are pre-rendered cutscenes either (believe me, you can tell when those happen because the DS’s video compression does them no favors). Big shout out to this old Let’s Play for all these gifs, by the way. The 3D animation coupled with the 2D x-axis-locked camera leads to this really neat theatrical effect which I think is very cool. My biggest regret playing Ghost Trick is that I opted for the original Nintendo DS edition instead of shelling out for the 2023 remaster which is all up-scaled and remixed. Go play that one!
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