Ghost Trick

My only problem with trying to keep up with a blog every day is that my life is fairly boring. I literally manage to do nothing but work, video games and anime. It's sad to say, but such is life.

So, on days nothing really exciting is happening, I'm going to write a review/impression post about a game - whether it will be a newly released game, or an old game that I'm just now getting to playing - or an anime series I'm currently watching.

Today, I'm going to do a review about Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. It was originally released on the Nintendo DS in 2010, but I'm going to use the iOS port for the purposes of this review.

The story is fairly simple. The character you play is dead. Specifically, he died immediately before the game begins. The main conflict within the game is figuring out who you are, and how you died. If that sounds strange - how can you begin a game after you die, after all - the game explains that very simply: your character possesses special Powers of the Dead, which allows you to possess inanimate objects and interact with them in some way.

Half the game is a Visual Novel, in which you read through the story, and the other half functions as a puzzle/platformer. Each chapter revolves around you preventing deaths of fairly important characters. You generally find the characters immediately after they die, but you're able to rewind time to 4 minutes before they die and prevent the death.

So the gameplay is easy and completable in quick bursts. The story segments take a bit of time, but the puzzle portions can either be completed quickly, or easily paused and continued later. I haven't encountered much issue with any of the puzzles, and if you can't complete the puzzle in a certain timeframe, you can rewind time again to try again, so there's no true game over (at least not in the early game).

On the DS, the game will run you thirty bucks brand new (fifteen preowned) and the iOS port has the first two chapters free, with the rest of the game for ten bucks. Considering how hard it is to find the DS version, it's a fantastic deal for the iOS (playable on both iPad and iPhone, or so the App Store page states). Fun game, interesting plot, and intriguing characters. For ten bucks, you can't go wrong.

Posted with Blogsy