Review: Ghost Trick is a welcome resurrection but fans shouldn’t expect changes

When it was originally released on the DS back in 2010, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was destined to be one of those games cursed with ‘cult’ status.

Written and directed by Ace Attorney creator Shu Takumi, the game’s combination of point-and-click puzzling and narrative-driven gameplay meant it only sold modestly despite being critically acclaimed in the east and west alike.

Rather fittingly though, the game (much like its protagonist) has been given one more chance to make a difference, even though those who haven’t played it before – which is almost everyone, to be fair – will get more out of it than long-time fans.

For the uninitiated, Ghost Trick opens with a shot of the corpse of Sissel, a man who’s just been freshly killed. Sissel’s spirit is then brought to life, and it’s up to the player to help him figure out what’s happened.

Sissel is armed with two special abilities. The first is the ability to perform ‘ghost tricks’, phantom powers that enable him to possess and interact with inanimate objects. His other ability is rewinding time – specifically, he can rewind back to four minutes before someone else dies.

The main aim throughout the game’s 18 chapters, then, is to move from object to object and manipulate them in certain ways to prevent these other characters’ deaths, continually rewinding time and reliving their last minutes until the solution is found.

It’s a fun premise and one that plays well, despite the fact that the original game took place over two displays and had a touchscreen-based control system. The change to an analogue stick system works perfectly fine, meaning DS purists won’t have much to complain about here.

While the new controls are very much a ‘not better, not worse, just different’ situation, the same can’t be said for the Games graphics, which are significantly cleaner than they were back in the day.

It’s hardly a shock that the game looks better given that the DS resolution was a mere 256×192 and it’s now being blown up to 4K, but upscales can be handled sloppily and Capcom has done a great job cleaning everything up to ensure it meets today’s high-res standards.

It’s a game that deserves to look this good, too. The crisp comic book style visuals were already striking on the DS and look positively fantastic on modern systems, especially given the fantastic character animations.

The music has also been given a slight upgrade, with each track getting a new arranged version. An Extras menu lets players hear both the original and arranged versions, even giving them the option to switch between them with the press of a button so they can hear exactly what changes have been made in real-time.

The main things that haven’t been changed, however, are arguably the two most important ones – the dialogue and the puzzles themselves. Given that both were widely praised the first time around, there’s very much an ‘if it ain’t broke’ policy in place here.

It’s for this reason that longtime fans of the game may be the one to benefit least from this remaster. While it undoubtedly looks and sounds better than its ancestor, anyone who has already played through the game will find little here in the way of surprises.

The only new content is the aforementioned extras menu, which has galleries accompanying the normal and arranged soundtracks. There’s also an unlockable mode where you play basic sliding puzzles to obtain more artwork that isn’t in the standard gallery.

The result, then, is a game with a compelling storyline and a clever premise, both of which still hold up more than a decade later, but one that doesn’t have much in the way of replay value – something Capcom has seemingly realised by pricing it at $29.99 / £24.99 at launch.