It begins like any good mystery, with a murder, yours. As a recently departed spirit, you have the uncanny ability to jump between objects, move small objects, and travel through phone lines. It doesn’t seem like much but it’s all you got to figure out how you died, who killed you, and most importantly, who you are.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a brilliant adventure game developed by Shu Takumi, the man behind the Ace Attorney series. The style is distinct, the gameplay is fun, and the story is excellent.

A Bit Of Background

At this point, the game is over 13 years old. It was first published in Japan in mid-2010 for the Nintendo DS. It wasn’t published abroad on the same platform until 6 months later.

At the same time, it was ported to iOS in Japan in December 2010. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective only came to the Apple App Store in the rest of the world in 2012.

Most recently it was announced that the game will be remastered for the PC, PS4, XboxOne, and Switch in mid-2023.

Just like the spirit you play in the game, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has the tenacity and there’s a good reason for that.

Thoughts On The Game

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has style. Each character is unique in design, and the world in which they inhabit is gorgeous. The mixture of 3D and 2D elements combines the vibrancy of a Saturday morning cartoon, with the sharpens of vector graphics and detailed animation of an anime.

But how it looks is just icing on the cake. The story in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is riveting, full of unpredictable but well-thought-out twists that all get nicely tied off in the end. More than the gameplay, it was the story that kept me playing the game till the end.

The Rube Goldberg-like puzzles in the game start tame and logical. But as the end draws near, it required more trial and error with elements of timing and leaps of logic. There are branching parts to each puzzle. Some would add footnotes to the story. However, each set piece has only one solution. So in the end the game is quite linear.

Sure, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective can be boiled down to a visual novel with extra steps in between. Still, it is a story that’s worth experiencing, especially for fans of adventure games, puzzle games, and good narratives.

You can find Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on Apple Play Store for .