Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

About the Game

Ghost Trick: Phantom detective is a 2010 puzzle adventure game. It was developed by a lot of the same / similar people that were involved with the Ace Attourney Franchise, but this is no game about Lawyers. The story features the Recently deceased Sissel and his Journey to recall who he is after waking up dead with no memories of who he was in life, as well as unravel how exactly he wound up dead in the first place. It is a very well written murder mystery with some very fun twists, and to explain any more of it would spoil the game, and this page is written to avoid spoilers, so it's recomended that you play the game yourself if at all possible to do.

It's been released several times. It started life as a game for the DS and utilized the touch screen featuers of the DS very well. Despite positive reviews, the game remained a bit of a cult classic up until very recently due to the fact that despite it's initial release as well as it's re-release as a mobile port, not a whole lot of people played it. It only recently gained a lot of traction with the public after a very successful Remaster Launch for Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in 2023.

The whole thing is good, the sprite animations, the writing, the pacing of the writing, the Music, that one person's walksprite, the whole thing.

Story Primer

A little Primer, with no major spoilers about what happens in roughly the first hour or two of the game (as you really should play it yourself but sometimes "just play it" by itself is not a good hook to play a game).

You get a few things right at the start of the game

You start as Sissel, who doesn't really remember much besides his name.

You and Sissel see a young girl getting threatened and then murdered by a strange assailent with a gun.

You and Sissel also see that Sissel is dead.

Neither of you can do much about the situation, but after some poking around, you meet Ray, another spirit in a Lamp. He is quick to tell you two things

Sissel, as a spirit, have some "Ghost tricks" to do things in the world despite being dead.

Sissel also has the unique ability to go to a Person's dead body and go Four Minutes into the Past* Before that person's death. This combined with Sissel's Ghost Tricks means that Sissel can avert the Girl's death.

*(Japanese Number Superstition, much like how 6 is considered to be "of the devil" and generally a bad omen in english cultures, the number Four / 4 has a pronunciation "shi" which is also how one pronounces the word for Death and is considered to be like a bad omen if you get into numbers lore)

Through this, he gets some information that Lynne, the girl who's death he averted, was there to solve a mystery that Sissel may have been involved in as well in life.

Ray warns him however that he's gotta figure out his past tonight; His ghost will dissapear come sunrise so he can't just wait until tomorrow to ask Lynne about what she was doing at the junkyard.

Ray asks Sissel to simply figure out the truth, and that the mystery of his past and the mystery that Lynne's involved with are one and the same, so should he figure out Lynne's Mystery he should also (in theory) find out about his past.

With Time not quite being on his side, He pursues Lynne into the night, as she's his only lead for the mystery, and Lynne is in fact trying to solve a mystery of her own.