Ghost Trick is the weirdest game I’ve ever fully understood.
need to know
what is that? solve a murder case. surprise! it’s yours
release date: June 29, 2023
Expected payment: £24.98 / $29.99
Developer: Capcom
the publisher: Capcom
Reviewed for: i7-10750H, RTX 3070 (laptop), 16GB RAM, SSD
Multiplayer? no
Link: vapor
In Ghost Trick: The Phantom Detective, a puzzle-game-style murder mystery from creator Takumi Shu (Gyakuten Saiban, Dino Crisis 2), he habitually says things like, “Speaking of which, the desk lamp.” The dead are the main characters. After conversing with the possessed inanimate object, yes.” And the lamp was right! In the world of Ghost Trick, even light sources can help solve cases.
The recently deceased amnesiac hero Sisel has just been announced to be able to travel back in time for four minutes to save a young woman from being shot by a myopic assassin who combines a bicycle, a flag and an old guitar. again somewhere. And Sissel would save her life then too. and then again.
Instead of finding keys, reading scribbled notes, and choosing what to interrogate in the usual mysteries, you use your ghostly powers to get everything from umbrellas to phones, and unfairly. It transforms lives in the final crucial moment of the destined death. . In doing so, you will be on the path to uncovering so many secrets behind your own death.
Ghost Trick’s cast-iron internal logic keeps this time-twisting bizarre phenomenon from spiraling into supernatural chaos. The script takes time to directly answer questions like, “If you can haunt things, why can’t you haunt your own corpse and get out of here?” Do it early on and preempt all the other “hey, why can’t you…” situations that come after that.
Another really elegant puzzle design from Ghost Trick: you can’t examine or manipulate anything that isn’t useful. No matter how bizarre Ghost Trick is, it’s one of his little details that make a big difference. oh boy Is this a very strange game? You never sullenly jump from one silly object to another, wondering what on earth you should do with a refrigerator and a blender.
More than just ghost tricks hope You really put in the effort by cheering me on to solve the mystery of layered onions. Sissel knows his current situation exactly as well as I do, so I always feel like he’s working out this whole “sudden death” thing together. And when I’m with my ghostly companions, I can almost certainly guarantee they’ll be eager to tell me something positive when I’m trying to solve another problem, The simple placement of the final piece of each puzzle turns into an exciting climax. And what if you make a big mistake at the last minute? I don’t mind ghost tricks. Sisel’s ability to rewind time means failures and retries are literally baked into the plot, and there’s a good chance she’ll find out exactly what went wrong in the process anyway.
This chipper attitude feels out of place in a game where no one gets killed for five minutes, but Ghost Trick knows how to keep things light. Your spectral activity has always had a heavy dose of ACME-like logic, and you’ll find yourself rolling donuts and owning Christmas ornaments like an old Looney Tunes cartoon star. Knowing this absurdity has allowed me to immerse myself in posthumous life without feeling creepy about it. It should be stupid. Besides, all the victims of this long, dark night are perfectly fine, if you can find a way to save them.
Even as I struggled and exhausted every snippet of dialogue I could find, the gorgeous, artistically exaggerated animation with a stylishly textured cast kept me going. I’ve never seen a woman with a wine glass stuck in her perfectly manicured hand lighting a match in her ass, but her memory of her will forever be mine. will remain inside I swear, no one in this game can do better than sitting in a chair without making it look like an event.
Besides being beautiful, these gorgeous decorations offer a glimpse into each character’s personality. You can immediately see the contrast between the tight security guard and the one silently hunched over the back of his chair. His gun-for-hire expertise is evident in every precise move he makes. The junkyard overseer casually slides down the railing of the office’s stairs, silently demonstrating his familiarity with the building.
No matter what screen resolution, windowed/windowless mode or aspect ratio you choose from the game’s fairly narrow range of graphics options, Ghost Trick will always appear within the 4:3 play area of your pillarbox window. You’re probably wondering why Capcom didn’t add fullscreen 16:9 support to HD remasters of old DS games. Isn’t that the bare minimum? But it quickly becomes apparent that every interesting puzzle and every revelatory cutscene was designed with this very specific vision in mind. . Asking for more feels just as wrong as asking the AI to draw something just outside the Mona Lisa frame.
“Ghost Trick” is so beautifully made that I’m glad I called it that. art, no zoom trimming the top and bottom of the art, no stretching, no inventing new things to wrap around the edges (except for modest wallpaper where ghost tricks have a healthy choice). However, it’s a shame Capcom didn’t include better aspect ratio support. There is no way to take advantage of the extra space on the Steam Deck’s 16:10 screen. And strangely, when I lower the resolution to 640 x480, which is perfect for his CRT, I lose a ton of space due to pillarboxing. and A letterbox is displayed instead of a play area that fills the entire 4:3 window.
But this is the game’s equivalent of a must-see crime novel, where every answer leads to three more questions, a gripping mystery that connects ten seemingly unrelated people and places in unimaginable ways. To be honest, I couldn’t stop watching until the end. All I wanted to do was go back to the damn deadline and pick every line, poke every object, and see what more I could do. You can discover the treasures of this story.
Ghost Trick is simply better in my PC game library. And so will your PC game library. Especially since the game’s Steam deck is validated, you can (and should) enjoy this unforgettable adventure on the go.