I got early access to the PS4 version of the demo.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a murder mystery puzzle game from Gyakuten Saiban writer and director Shu Takumi. Originally released on the Nintendo DS 13 years before him, the game is something of a sister game to Gyakuten Saiban, with much of the same humor, style and charm. Any fan of the Gyakuten Saiban story should feel right at home here, but what really sets this game apart is Rube Goldberg, who manipulates in-game events in the style of his machine, allowing objects to bump into each other and collide with each other. It has a unique focus on triggering a chain reaction that It’s common to press a button to wake up the device and get in the way of hapless villains and bystanders around the crime scene.
If you’ve already played Phantom Detective on DS, the new remaster (I played the demo on PS4) is pretty mediocre. The original touchscreen controls were simple enough to map neatly to the analog sticks, and since the game barely utilized his two screens on the system, I found an old video on YouTube to remember what the second screen was doing. I had to search for the video. in the original game. It’s a pretty easy port, with very few upgrades other than HD visuals and rearranged soundtrack options. Although bare-bones, the game’s simple cel-shading style lends itself better to higher resolutions than other recent games with poorly upscaled AI.
If you’ve never played Phantom Detective, this port is a great way to do so. Highly recommended to play. The game centers around Cissel, a recently deceased man who discovers that he has strange ghostly powers that allow him to possess objects and move them, as well as destroy the environment. He can jump between nearby objects, but has a limited range and must find clever ways to manipulate his surroundings to reach his desired location.
However, just moving around and haunting places isn’t all Sisel can do. He can also possess the body of a recently deceased person to rewind time to four minutes before his death and perform ghost tricks to change his fate. Each death scene is a puzzle that must be solved to manipulate the right object at the right time to indirectly save someone’s life. Solutions are rarely simple. You can glide your spinning cart around the room, but you can’t defy physics to float it where you want it, so you’ll have to be smart about how you jump between multiple objects. Just move.
Knowing where you need to go isn’t enough, because these puzzles take place in scripted time. You also have to pay attention to how your characters behave in the scene to be where you want them when you want them. This setup adds quite a bit of tension to figuring out the right moment before it’s too late, but sometimes, even though you already know things, your character just keeps getting to the right part of the script. You may be forced to sit and wait. outside.
Phantom Detective’s most notable feature, which works just as well in HD, is the high quality of its character animations. Every character is animated with charm and personality that goes well beyond that, taking advantage of the limited hardware capabilities of his DS version of the original. It took a lot of big, flashy movement to convey the character on such a small screen, but that talented work looks just as beautiful on the big screen at twice his frame rate. It’s the same quality we’ve come to expect from his 3D-animated Gyakuten Saiban games, and in fact, every character animator whose name appears in the original game’s credits has at some point done Gyakuten Saiban’s work. It is clear how influential it was. This game was in its sister series.
The demo I played is now live on Switch, PlayStation, and Steam. If you have never played “Phantom Detective” and are even slightly interested, please try playing this demo version. It’s been over 12 years since I played the original game on my DS and I’m still impressed with it. I look forward to refreshing my vague memories of ten years ago when the remaster is finally released. Because every memory I have of this game says it’s one of the best and most unique story games I’ve ever played.
