Ghost Trick Hands-On Impressions

The reason Capcom’s popular Ace Attorney series is undergoing a spin-off this year with Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is the head writer of the series, Shu Takumi, has been spending all his time on a brand new IP titled Ghost Trick.

It's being labeled as a "mystery adventure with puzzle elements" for the Nintendo DS, and Ghost Trick is a heavily story-driven game about a dead guy who gets the chance to investigate his own murder. We had some hands-on time with the title at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, but we warn you: It was all in Japanese.

Who’s Making It: Ghost Trick is being developed and published by Capcom. It's being produced by Hironobu Takeshita and directed by Shu Takumi (Ace Attorney series).

What’s It Look Like: Keeping in mind the people behind the development of this title, Ghost Trick is very reminiscent of the Ace Attorney series, save a few key differences. There is a lot more going on that you have to pay attention to, and the animations feel a lot more complex and polished. The game is also played in two modes: normal, which plays out in a third-person view, and the Soul mode, in which the colors are reversed almost like X-ray vision, highlighting your soul (which glows blue) and the objects with which you can interact.

What’s There to Do: The point of Ghost Trick is to interact with objects around you and solve puzzles to ultimately uncover clues about your death. The game stars Sisel, who gets shot to death in the opening cinematic and has been robbed of all his memories. He is allocated a few hours in that lull between life and death where he must use his soul to "possess" objects and re-create his death in order to find out who killed him and why.

As can be expected, dying has given Sisel some very big advantages, including the ability to time travel in the general time frame of his death. In the demo we played (in Japanese), we were taken through a quick tutorial in the opening level where we were first shown the usefulness of our soul. A quick tutorial in Soul mode revealed that you cannot possess any item you wish--the items you can touch are highlighted in blue, and you must travel from one to the other in accordance with the proximity of each object. For example, we were given the task of possessing a ladder in order to reach a table so that we could reach and turn on a lamp.

This quick tutorial proved useful in the last part of the demo where Sisel travels back in time to the moments just after his death when we see that he was not alone with the killer. After doing away with Sisel, the killer turns his attention to a girl standing over Sisel’s body. As Sisel’s soul, you must prevent the killer from harming the girl; we did this by turning out Soul mode, then possessing a ladder, which unfolded and knocked the killer’s gun out of his hand.

How Is It Played: The game is played using the DS stylus. The bottom screen will serve as the action screen, and the top screen will display dialogue and cutscenes. There are two options that are permanently displayed on the bottom screen: The "possess" button, which will bring up Soul mode and a "manipulate" button, which will allow you to control objects. To move from one possessed item to another, you simply touch the glowing soul and drag it along the screen with the stylus.

What They Say: A Capcom representative told us that Shu Takumi loves making mystery games because he is a big fan of the hit TV series, Columbo.

What We Say: This being a story-driven game, it was hard for us to really get acquainted with that side of the game because it all took place in Japanese. But the gameplay aspects were easy to follow and proved quite creative in the end. We look forward to seeing more of this game later this year.