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Hands on with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on DS

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Hands on with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on DS

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the new game by Pheonix Wright creator, Shu Takumi. That was enough to get me leaping on the game cabinet at Nintendo’s recent London event and giving the demo a whirl.

To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect from the game going into it, and I’m still a little uncertain what to expect coming out.

Trick of the light

It starts off with an intriguing set-piece. A hitman is threatening to kill a woman in a junkyard, gloating about how he shot your character, who lies dead on the floor next to her.

As his disembodied spirit, your job is to possess various objects lying strewn around the junkyard and ‘trick’ them so they perform a related action that can save the woman’s life.

It’s presented on a two-dimensional plane, with well-drawn and smoothly animated characters that move with an almost rotoscoped feel.

The possession of objects happens while time is temporarily frozen between key moments in the plot - like when the lady’s about to be rather brutally murdered, for instance.

Seeing red

These moments of downtime send the screen red and start a ticking clock in the top corner of the screen. The game then turns into a strange variation of join-the-dots, in which every object represents a point that your soul can be dragged to with the stylus.

As your soul is restricted in the distance it can travel, picking the correct route to reach the correct object within the time limit is the order of the day.

Once you possess your selected weapon of choice (like an old guitar), you can then ‘trick’ the object into performing an action in order to influence the real world. In the case of the guitar, this means plucking at a string and distracting the hitman for a brief moment.

In the demo level there was around 20 or so separate objects that could be manipulated, with some only accessible if others had been tricked previously – opening up routes that weren’t possible beforehand.

Black humour

As you’d expect from a title that has Pheonix Wright heritage, Ghost Trick is a funny game to play.

Even if you don’t get the correct object or solve the right sequence of ‘tricks’, the effects and conclusions of your meddling are often amusing enough to not worry about repeating a section.

There were also witty meta-jokes in the demo version, including one of the characters claiming that the only reason I didn’t know how to perform a certain action was because the demo didn’t cover it beforehand.

What the demo also doesn’t cover, though, is how far Ghost Trick will go to keep the gameplay interesting. While my time with the game was enjoyable, I did come away wondering how on earth it would sustain interest over a full length title.

We’ll have to see if Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has a few more tricks up its sleeve when it launches in the winter.

Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).