Ghost Trick Hands-On

Ghost Trick is a game about death, the nature of existence, time traveling, and using your disembodied soul to open refrigerator doors in trash heaps. I know this might be old news to some, but I hadn't played the game until a recent event, and its combination of style and interesting puzzle mechanics could make for a very entertaining experience.

When you start out the main character Sissel, is dead. Yet he's still conscious. He's contacted by a voice, and right away he's forced to make some critical decisions. It seems a fellow in black clothing carrying a gun has cornered a young lady, and it's up to you to stop him. Since Sissel has no recollection of what he was doing before he died or what's really going on, he does what the voice says to try and stop the potential killer.

This introduces the soul possession mechanics of the game. The action plays on the bottom DS screen, and by tapping a 'Ghost' button you transition into Ghost World. This freezes time and highlights any objects that can be possessed. During this opening sequence the game explains that only inanimate objects can be possessed, so you can move your spirit into guitars or bicycles or fans to move across the screen. The catch is you can only move so far from your soul's current position, so you can't just hop into any object you want. You need to be close by.

As it turns out, the first time through you can't do anything about the girl. She gets shot and dies and tumbles down to the ground far below. Don't worry, that's not really a spoiler, just a part of the introduction. In Ghost Trick one of the mechanics is your ability to time travel right up until four minutes before a person's death. Once you possess the girl's corpse on the ground, this mode can be initiated, at which point you have a limited amount of time to move your soul across the screen to save her.

It's not an easy task, and one that requires some brainpower and reflexes. To save the girl, your soul is placed far below on a junk heap. To get up to her position you'll need to navigate between various odds and ends, but the problem is none of them are very close to one another. This is where the 'Trick' part of the title comes in. After you possess an object, you can return to real-time where you can initiate a 'trick,' or in other words cause an object to perform an action. If it's a folding chair, you can cause it to unfold. If it's a fridge, you can cause it to open. In some cases, like the chair, you extend the range of the object, letting you get close to another so you can make the jump. In the fridge's case, things get a little more complicated.

When the fridge is opened, a blender drops out and rolls across a platform. By switching back into Ghost World mode you can hop across various objects with your soul until you've possessed a fan. The fan sits next to a flat, which sits next to the blender. The girl is directly above all this, so it seems the sensible thing to do would be to somehow run the flag up the pole to put you in a position to save her. The process of doing all this requires a little creative thinking, but eventually the solution becomes clear. You need to trick the fan into turning on, but before it does you need to quickly reenter Ghost World mode to hop over to the flag. Being fast on this transition is necessary because once the fan starts blowing, the flag billows out in away from it and out of the soul's movement range.

After switching to the flag you now need to quickly hop to the blender and turn it on. It'll start churning up the rope attached to the flag pole, so before that's taut you'll need to move back onto the flag so you can ride it up to where the girl and the guy with the gun are standing. Remember that wouldn't have been an option unless you'd already opened the fridge to drop out the blender.

This may all sound a little complicated, but it's actually really easy to play around with thanks to what appears to be an intuitive interface. It's also a tense experience, since every time you switch out of Ghost Mode to trick an object, the clock starts running. It's also got some stylish, slickly animated visuals that make experimenting with how the objects interact with one another more interesting. If the rest of the game's challenges are like the opening bits, this could be a really cool experience reminiscent of old-school adventure games.