Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective Review
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a DS game in which you play the spirit of a dead individual who has the ability to manipulate inanimate objects around you. You will quickly meet Ray, a desk lamp, well a spirit like you who is fascinated with inhabiting a lamp. You only have until sunrise to figure out why you were killed, who killed you, and answer the most important question of all, who are you.
Graphically you're going to get to experience a comic book type style. You'll see that some characters are a bit over the top, and if they have blue skin, they're probably bad guys. There are other characters interacting with the world of the game and it definitely gives you an anime sort of vibe, with their models. The game is 2D.
The sounds of the game aren't too impressive, the game can be played as well with the sound off as with the sound on. Sure you'll miss the stimulating sound of a phone ring, but I think you can brave through it.
The controls are going to be all about the touch screen of the DS. You're going to be tapping the Ghost Mode button to allow your character to move from object to object. You'll also have the trick button which will perform the objects action, if it has any.
This game is all about timing, and patience. If you try to rush through a level, with out a FAQ, you might find that you missed a step and now you're going to have to let the scene play out before you can try again. You're going to find that you're going to be stopping the murders of several individuals, one who seems to keep getting killed, but she's you're only hope, so you're going to have to continuously bring her back. That's right, there's a way to witness death, other than yours, and then rewind time to 4 minutes before it happens, and try to change the outcome. If you succeed the story moves on, if you fail, well you'll get the option of trying the level over again.Now to keep you from flying all over the level you'll notice that you're only able to stretch your soul so far from an object, so you'll also have to find ways of using an objects tricks to get you from point A to point B, and change the course of time.
To be completely honest the first couple of levels are intriguing, you're going to want to figure out what is going on, and you're going to find that there's a lot to the levels. The problem is that there comes a time in the game where you're going to hit certain levels where unless you trial and error it about 15 times you're not going to be able to breeze through it. There's a lot of near misses that you'll find in the game that will cause you to have to replay a level over and over again. There's also the dialog bubbles. The first time through you're going to have to suffer through what the game thinks is the correct speed for displaying the bubbles, which slows down the flow of the game to a crawl, and personally severally pissed me off. Thankfully the second time around you are allowed to hold down a button and the dialog will fast forward through.
For a novelty game this might be an interesting pick up. I'd really recommend borrowing it from a friend or renting the game before buying. Then again if you do that you can probably beat the game in a couple of sittings. Either way this game misses the mark, even if it is ever so slightly. This game gets a 6.7 out of 10.
