Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective review – Groundhog Day for ghosts

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective – nothing is as it seems (Picture: Capcom)

Capcom’s Nintendo DS classic is remastered for modern consoles, in this cult classic puzzle game from the creator of Ace Attorney.

Capcom really is having a great run of games at the moment. Between Monster Hunter Rise, Resident Evil 4, and Street Fighter 6 all of their biggest franchises are in top form, and they’ve even had time for things like Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection (which we’re glad to see was a surprise hit). There was the weirdly pointless showcase at the beginning of June, but at least it announced more Ace Attorney remasters and, from the same creator, the remaster of Ghost Trick – one of the strangest, and prettiest, games of the DS era.

Ghost Trick was originally released in 2010, but it was not a hit. It’s a very odd game and while its graphics are excellent its main problem, apart from not being part of an existing franchise, is that it’s quite hard to explain and even after playing it yourself, it takes a while for you to get a feel for what it is and how it works.

This remaster, lovingly crafted as it is, does nothing to change that, but it is a very welcome return, and we can only hope that it’s a sign of interest in continuing the series. Because goodness knows, gaming could do with more games where you play as the time-travelling soul of a dead man, trying to solve your own murder, and a bunch of Final Destination style death sequences, with the help of a small dog and a talking desk lamp.

Another thing that makes Ghost Trick a hard sell, and which is conversely also one of its greatest strengths, is that nothing we’re about to tell you about the plot remains consistent to the end. Ghost Trick has some of the most outlandish twists in gaming narrative history, but obviously we’re not going to spoil any of them here.

As far as anything is concerned at the start of the game, you play as the recently deceased spirit of a dead man named Sissel, whose corpse you find sitting lifeless in a scrapyard. Sissel has no memory of their previous life but becomes embroiled in the fate of a girl name Lynne, who is being targeted by assassins and seems to have had some involvement in your death.

There’s a lot, lot more to it than that, as things get stranger and stranger, although perhaps never more so than when you meet Ray the talking desk lamp, who reveals that they’re also a dead spirit. According to Ray you and he are one of a select few souls who can possess inanimate objects and ‘trick’ them to move or activate – from turning on a fan to rolling a tyre.

Sissel cannot move about freely and instead can only jump from object to object, across quite a short distance, and so many of the game’s puzzles revolve around using objects to fashion a path from one part of a game map to the other. Often this involves starting domino effect style sequences where one object hits another and then another, until you’ve opened up a new route.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective – didn’t yu know ghosts could time travel? (Picture: Capcom)

Other times you rely on attracting the attention of living people and animals in order to affect the environment, in what are often very clever puzzle sequences – faintly reminiscent of old school graphic adventures, without being quite like any other game out there.

Lynne, and the aforementioned dog, end up getting accidentally killed multiple times, at which point you can chat to them directly, but you also find you have the power to rewind time by four minutes, allowing you to work out, Groundhog Day style, a means to save them and, ideally, further your own investigations.

When it’s firing on all cylinders, Ghost Trick is fantastic, with a weird sense of humour familiar from Ace Attorney and some truly wonderful animation. We still don’t understand how Capcom ever got it working on the DS, but the fluidity and personality put into the various oddball characters is fantastic. It still looks impressive on the Switch too, even though the only thing that’s changed is the resolution.

It’s a bit of a shame the remaster is still stuck in a 4:3 aspect ratio but we assume that’s because the backdrops are essentially pre-rendered and can’t easily be expanded. Limiting how much you can see on-screen is also key to some of the puzzles.

The other additions are largely limited to unlockable concept art, music, and achievements. There’s also a set of new ‘ghost puzzles’ based on each of the levels, but they’re very obviously just shoe-horned in extras and have little in common with the gameplay from the rest of the game.

Unfortunately, there are intrinsic problems with Ghost Trick, which the remaster cannot fix. The most obvious is that the storytelling and puzzle elements do not mesh well, and the game has an awkward stop/start cadence that never leaves you to concentrate on one thing or the other for long, to the point where the story elements start to feel very intrusive to the puzzling and vice versa.

The remaster does what it can to avoid repetition, with better checkpointing than before, but there’s still a lot of trial and error, as you either can’t work out what to do or mess up the timing and have to restart anyway. All the puzzles have only one specific solution, just like an old school graphic adventure, and we fear the number of people that will play through the whole game without turning to YouTube in frustration are going to be fairly small.

These problems are mild in the face of Ghost Trick’s overwhelming charm and novelty, but if nothing else they help to make the argument for a sequel, which would hopefully be able to smooth out the rough edges and better balance the storytelling and puzzling. Ghost Trick is not perfect but it’s certainly different and has aged remarkably well for a more than decade old portable game. So we advise you to at least try the demo, so you can get into the spirt of one of the DS’s best kept secrets.

Formats: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC
Price: £24.98
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Release Date: 30th June 2023
Age Rating: 12

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Capcom’s Nintendo DS classic is remastered for modern consoles, in this cult classic puzzle game from the creator of Ace Attorney.