For most people, being dead is a pretty significant hindrance to their future endeavours, but in the case of the Phantom Detective, it’s resolutely not. In fact, it’s actually a fantastic opportunity. The original Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective manifested onto the Nintendo DS some thirteen years ago, and while the dual screens of Nintendo’s handheld have grown dull, Capcom’s death-obsessed puzzle game still has some life in it yet, setting out to haunt PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC at the end of this month.
Being dead you discover that you have access to the Ghost World, the land of the dead – this is less Coco and more a supernatural game of join the dots. Here you can possess different objects, your soul able to leap from point to point, as long as there’s a nearby core for you to inhabit. You can then manipulate those objects using a ‘ghost trick’ – see what they did there? – that might just affect the way the narrative plays out. Sometimes you might have to jump between objects to reach your destination, reaching out with the analogue stick and jumping with a push of a button.
While that’s relatively straightforward, you don’t just hop from point to point and hit a button at the end. Some of these objects need manipulating: bicycle bells need ringing, ladders need extending, wrecking balls need dropping. They’re all part of your journey, and at times you’ll have to combine these actions together, and time them correctly in order to progress.
This isn’t the only trick you’ve got though, and the alternatives are potentially even more useful. If you possess a corpse – not your own corpse though, for… reasons – you can travel back in time to four minutes before that person’s death and attempt to change what happens. This only works on fresh corpses though, so if they’ve been dead for more than one day you’re flat out of luck and they’ll be left to a future of pushing daisies.
Time rewinds, and you then have to try and prevent their death, all the while learning more about the mystery surrounding their death and the larger narrative at play. These four minutes play out in real-time, though everything freezes when you cross into the Ghost World. There’s a handy timer on the right hand of the screen which shows you just how long you’ve got left to make some meaningful change, and with the seconds ticking down your Ghost Tricks get ever more frantic as you try to solve the environmental puzzle that will lead you to a successful rescue.
Ghost Trick has a wonderful sense of humour, with the dry expulsions of the Ghost Detective and his cohort sure to raise a wry smile or two. The opening beats do a great job of drawing you into the story, with the various assassins and their nefarious employers consistently shocked by your life restoring antics. While the loss of touchscreen and stylus controls changes how the game feels to play, the characterisation and overarching mystery feel as though a return via more traditional means will still be worth your while.
The remastered visuals certainly look bold and vibrant on a 4K screen, though they remain in the DS’s original 4:3 aspect with borders along each side. The game does at least pop some useful information here to make up for it, but I would have liked to see the image extended across the entire view to really make it feel as though it had been brought into the modern age. In an age of ground up remakes, it’s a touch jarring to have a remaster taking this direction.
It’s great to see Capcom reaching into their back catalogue and it can only bode well for the return of more unusual outings like this one. It’s clear that Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective still has a task to complete, with a new generation of players sure to be swept up by the supernatural secrets and ghostly goings-on.
