Who doesn’t love three-minute mysteries? The answer is nobody. Game designer Shu Takumi, realizing this, tapped into the universal appeal of simple whodunits to create the brilliant “Ace Attorney” series, in which you peruse clues, grill witnesses and present your case in court.
And what’s the only thing more exciting than examining crime scenes? Being at them when the crimes are actually committed, so you can prevent them — right?
Well, almost.
| ‘Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective’ |
| » Price: $29.99 |
| » Rating: 4 out of 5 stars |
Takumi’s newest creation, “Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective,” casts you as a spirit who has lost his memory, but certainly recognizes that body lying there in the street as his own. Our hero can’t even remember his own name, but it might as well be Poirot, because everywhere he goes on his journey to solve his own slaying, someone in his proximity happens to die.
Luckily, this ghost has a trick, and that trick is to flash back to four minutes before the murder and use his ghostly powers to invisibly alter the victim’s fate. Thus you might possess a crane, releasing its payload onto a hit man right before he fires his fatal shot (don’t worry, parents; the death scenes are no more violent than what Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote are routinely subjected to), and in this manner save everyone from a dog to a certain pretty redhead who makes brief visits to the spirit world over and over.
If you make a mistake and your sweetie ends up dead, don’t worry — you can rewind to T minus four minutes as many times as you need. Altering the scenes, which are set up as elaborate Rube Goldberg devices, is a novel twist on the point-and-click adventure genre. But even when they star characters like a white-clad, dancing detective who seems to think he’s Michael Jackson in the “Smooth Criminal” video, these scenes don’t pack the humor and drama of “Ace Attorney’s” courtroom confrontations.
Still, “Ghost Trick” is the rare game experience that stands in relief against everything else out there, and with a story that surprises from beginning to end, it’s also the rare game you will for certain complete if you start it.
