#oneaday Day 769: Tricks of the Dead

I finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on iOS last night. I never played the DS original, so when I heard it was coming to iOS, I snapped it up without hesitation, played through the free chapters and immediately handed Capcom and Apple the £6.99 it took to unlock the rest of the game.

Ghost Trick, for those who are unfamiliar, is a puzzle/adventure game from the team at Capcom previously responsible for the Ace Attorney series, one of my favourite story-based franchises of all time. Rather than being heavy on the “visual novel” style gameplay a la Ace Attorney, in Ghost Trick you take a much more active role in proceedings.

To reveal too much would spoil some of the game’s excellent twisting, turning plot, but suffice to say this: You are a ghost. You wake up next to a corpse in a junkyard on the edge of town. Understandably, you assume that the corpse is yours, but you have no memory of who you were or what you were doing in a junkyard. You also have no memory of who the panicked-looking redhead in the short skirt and kinky boots is. Thus begins a lengthy adventure as you struggle to unravel the mystery of your own identity while piecing together the events of the night which led up to your death.

The gameplay primarily revolves around the use of the titular Ghost Tricks, which are where you possess an object and then manipulate it in some way. You’re limited in your power, however, so you can only manipulate small objects (such as opening cupboards, rocking baskets, making candles flare up, that sort of thing) and in order to possess things, you can only move a short distance at a time, hopping from object to object. Thus part of the challenge becomes determining how you can make use of the environment to get to where you need to be.

There are two basic types of puzzle in the game — sedate puzzles where it’s clear you need to make something happen when you can but there’s no time pressure to do so; and puzzles where you have a strict time limit as you strive to use the objects in the environment to save someone’s life. The latter tend to involve not only working out which objects to manipulate and how, but also timing your moves carefully to ensure things happen when they are supposed to. Failure isn’t disastrous, however, as one of your ghostly powers is, conveniently, the ability to rewind time to four minutes before a person’s death and try again — often with the ghost of the dead person in tow to offer advice or sarcastic comments along the way.

The game mechanics are relatively simple but the sheer variety of creative puzzles which they are used to create make up a considerable proportion of Ghost Trick‘s charm. The remainder of said charm comes from a truly loveable cast of characters, second only to Ace Attorney‘s motley crew in their appeal. The cast is small and introduced gradually over the course of the game’s narrative, which means you get to know them all very well. They all have their own skeletons in the closet, however, and this allows for the biggest strength in the game’s plot: surprise.

There are tons of surprises over the course of the whole story. The game uses its supernatural angle well to allow for uncanny things to happen, but never strays too far into the realm of total absurdity. Towards the end of the game, the sheer number of narrative threads and time-bending nature of the plot may seem a little convoluted, but sitting down and thinking about things for a moment makes it clear that it’s a game which has been thoroughly planned and, within the laws of the game world set out by the story, makes sense.

£6.99 may seem somewhat expensive for an iOS game, but it’s time people stopped thinking like that. £6.99 is a perfectly reasonable asking price for the amount of enjoyment you’ll get out of this game, and considerably less than it cost upon its original Nintendo DS release.

So stop hesitating and just go download it now. It works on iPhone and iPad and even uses iCloud to let you transfer your save from one device to another. Grab a copy, sit down, relax and enjoy one of the best adventure games in recent years.