Ghost Trick Hands-On Impressions

Developed by some of the big names behind the Ace Attorney series, Capcom's upcoming Ghost Trick is a puzzle-adventure hybrid that scoffs at death. Instead, it takes that familiar catalyst for failure and builds an entire game around it. You begin shortly after the protagonist, Sissel, has been shot and killed. Slumped over on the ground in a grim scene that contrasts with the game's colorful 2D visuals, you regain consciousness as Sissel's ghost and quickly learn how to possess objects and rewind time in order to unravel a mystery involving paid killings. We recently played through the game's introductory level to see what this thoroughly unique DS game is all about.

Ghost Trick is presented as a 2D side-scrolling adventure game whose colorful sprites manage to feel cartoonlike and film noir all at once. The intro level opens in a junkyard with you dead on the ground and a dark figure in a suit holding a shotgun to an obviously frightened young girl. Without giving too much away, you fumble through a crash course in possessing inanimate objects to attempt to save the girl (for example, taking over a crossing gate that knocks the gun out of the man's hands) before ultimately failing and seeing the poor girl shot point-blank in a blood-free death.

This blunder serves as a means to introduce you to the time-rewinding mechanic. If you possess a recently deceased corpse, you can turn back time to four minutes before that person's death. (In case you couldn't tell, this is a game that deals very heavily in fate and how much one person can alter it--albeit in a very lighthearted and self-aware kind of way.) This mechanic basically presents each crime scene as a potential blank slate for you to rewind and alter to save the lives of others. The quick and short of it is that you use the stylus to drag your glowing blue spirit from one object to another, having them interact with the rest of the environment to allow you to move toward a key point of interest. (The game cheekily explains away the possessions as the "Ghost" half of the title, and the interactions as the "Trick" part.)

The twist is that you can only move between objects within a small range of each other, so you have to trigger the sole function of whatever you've taken over to help move from one thing to the next in an elaborate chain of possessions. A simple example: You've got a folded ladder on the left and a bicycle on the right. You possess the ladder and tap the trick button to extend the ladder so you can reach the bike. Ta-da! You've successfully ghost tricked. But a more complicated example has you at the bottom of a pile of junk that you need to quickly get to the top of. This was the case for us in the intro level, and to succeed, we had to activate a blender, then jump over to a fan and turn that on, which blew the rope from a nearby flagpole into said blender, twisting it up in order to raise the flag (which we naturally possessed a moment earlier). And with that, we made it to the top of the pile. When you solve the situations that are this elaborate, they have a chain-reaction, Rube Goldberg-puzzle feel to them. However, the act of possessing a demolition crane to drop a wrecking ball on the would-be killer was a lot simpler--and quite satisfying.

Ghost Trick is a tough game to wrap your head around without playing it, but the big things to take away are that it has an interesting cartoonish film noir look and it uses a unique mechanic to tell a mystery story. Really, how many games have you played where you need to think hard about everyday objects in order to solve a conspiracy from beyond the grave? Not a lot, we're guessing. At any rate, we're eager to see how the rest of the game plays out. Ghost Trick is due out for the DS this fall.