Luckily, one of your ghostly powers enables you to zap backward in time and try again if you duff it. Ghost Trick comes nowhere near the heights (depths?) of frustration some of those old adventure games provided, but it’s still, uh, tricky. That’s a real rush, and a lot of that rush comes from the fact it doesn’t come easy. They were puzzles where a precise sequence of manipulations pays off in a meticulous, sometimes ridiculous, Rube Goldberg cascade of cause-and-effect. The memory trip Ghost Trick sent me on was a rush of pure adventure-puzzle goodness - not the snoozy shove-the-cubes puzzles that litter every action-adventure game since Tomb Raider, but the honest-to-goodness graphic adventure juice, the stuff that made games like King’s Quest (and all the Quests) and Broken Sword and the old text adventures so great. So, with your limited poltergeist-type abilities, you will nudge, flick, bump, drag, switch and rattle the world around said living beings, in order to create a lattice of accident and coincidence that will lead them to uncover the answers - even the questions - you seek. You need living beings to do your legwork. You are insubstantial and immaterial, however.

You don’t know why you’re dead or how you got dead - you don’t know much of anything - but you know you want to know, and you know you have until morning to do it. I want to be as spoiler-free as possible, here, so I’ll keep the premise-sketching to a minimum.

That’s my experience with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I mean in a way that has you nodding and smiling in recognition even as it gives you all-new fun. I don’t mean this in the stale way that has you rolling your eyes at another shooting-gallery warehouse full of crates and dumb henchmen, another moody pretty-boy protagonist or another match-the-shapes puzzle mechanism. When you’ve been intimate with video games for a good long time, every so often you’ll get your hands on a title in which every nook and cranny echoes with games you’ve played before.

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