Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

If there's one thing I've gotten quite bad at as I've grown older, its finishing the games I've bought. I'm not sure why that is, though no doubt laziness has something to do with it. However, proving that miracles occur from time to time, I did recently finish a game and that game (as you can tell by the title of this post) was Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (which I will refer to as simply Ghost Trick from now on) is an adventure game created by Shu Takumi of Capcom, which was initially released on the Nintendo DS in 2010 and then ported to the IOS. Its the later version of the game which I've played.

Ghost Trick opens up in a junkyard, where a man has just been killed. You, the player, is the ghost of said man. As a ghost, you suffer from that most common affliction among video-game protagonists: Amnesia. Fortunately,you soon meet up with another ghost, Ray, who informs you that  in your current state, you possess a variety of new abilities, such as; being able to possess objects, travel through phone-lines and finally, turn back time to four minutes before a person's death. Using these abilities, you save the life of Lynn, a young detective who was present at the junkyard and so, the two of you team up to solve the mystery regarding your identity. The first thing you learn is your name: Sissel. Better hurry up though, because you only have until dawn to find out the truth about yourself.

As one would except from a game by the creator of the Phoenix Wright series, Ghost Trick is filled with colorful, memorable characters, ranging from the instantly likable Missile (who is the best dog in all of gaming) to the flamboyant and suspicious inspector Cabanela and many others. Of course, like any mystery-story worthy of the genre, few of these characters are who they truly appear to be, including Sissel himself. Story-wise, Ghost Trick is also very good, with a plot that takes many twists and turns and never failed to keep me engaged, wondering which new development would wait around the corner.

When it comes to the actual game-play, Ghost Trick uses the iPad's touch controls excellently. When I played the Ubisoft WWI game, Valiant Hearts on my iPad, I sometimes got annoyed with how the game controlled, but this was not an issue here. Puzzles vary in difficulty, though I wouldn't call any of them really hard. The only time I found myself getting frustrated with the game was during the ninth chapter, in which you have to help a prisoner escape from death-row. This part of the game was quite tedious and I soon resorted to a walkthrough, in order to get past it as quickly as possible.

All in all, I highly recommend Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective to anyone who wants a great adventure game. In my opinion, it stands as one of the best representatives of its genre.