Reviews from

in the past


A really good mystery game with fun gameplay, there's not much to improve upon it. The dialogue is great, the story keeps you hooked, and I only really don't enjoy one short part of the game (anyone who's played it knows which)

This is probably the best game in the entire history of videogames. Crazy narrative, good mechanics, well-written characters, it's just perfect.

a very charming game with a surprisingly tear jerking story. didn't expect much when i first started the game, but i'm glad i played it.


What to say about this game without spoiling everything about what makes it great?
It's about being a ghost and doing tricks! Obviously it's about death. About relationships and how each action can affect the other, good or bad. It's about second chances and trying again, no matter how many times it takes.
It's a great game, though it does deal a lot with the death of pets if that bothers anyone. I highly recommend playing it if you're able to.
Anyways, play Ghost Trick.

You know, there are many games on this site that I would've never heard of I did not make a Backloggd account, and this is one of them right here.

I have never really played any of the Ace Attorney games before, and while they did look interesting, they were just never captivating enough for me to put it on a priority list. However, I think I now have a reason to play them, thanks to the fact that Shu Takumi, the person behind the Ace Attorney franchise, has also worked on this game, and he completely amazed me with it.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, for as simple as it is, does a lot for the genre it takes place in. The stylistic art-style which meshes in with the suspense from the storytelling is done very thoroughly, and the way it fits the overall setting just feels right in all ways that it should accomplish. Not only this, but the story twists completely caught me off guard, and it's essentially the "perfect" handheld game with the things it does to go forward as a video-game.

I now know why Shu Takumi gets the praise that he does, and I cannot wait to play the Ace Attorney games when I can.

Loved this game so much!! the pixel rotoscope animations were a delight

Muy buen juego de puzles con un estilo artístico atractivo, una historia curiosa, una mecánica principal llamativa y una buena música.
Me lo disfruté mogollón.

I remember playing this whole game in like 18 or so hours (realtime) while over at my grandparents. I stayed up all night and when I got stuck I followed a GameFAQS walkthrough on how to progress. Definitely one of my favorite game stories of all time, and that music is just unbelievably good.

A very touching and heartfelt celebration of life and connection, with each character arc serving to bring their restless loneliness to a close. Phenomenal plotting across the board, with an incredible ending to make everything click thematically. Sissel is the best.

Really unique and fun visual novel / puzzle game. They take the story places you wouldn’t expect and it was satisfying to figure out the whole time. OST is full of bangers and the pixel art is awesome. An easy casual recommendation, especially for the Ace Attorney vibes.

This review contains spoilers

What a ride.....

First off, mechanics are phenomenal and it keeps you on edge the entire time! Although to complete missions you sometimes had to do stuff which seemed to random to figure out. Nothing too crazy though as i figured out 99% on my own.


Story is fun and enjoyable up until the last chapter. Where it gets too confusing with multiple plot twists thrown together at once. Shame really, as i was on edge wondering how this could all end.

The game is really only playable once, as once it's played you've done it all. It's kind of a visual novel/puzzle in one.

I don't think I can't put into words how insanely cool this game is. Fun puzzles, such fleshed out characters and well-rounded story, all with that charm only Shu Takumi games have. Enjoy it!

one of the best games ever made!! although I played it nearly 10 years ago, it still holds a special place in my heart :3

A logic puzzle game by the Ace Attorney guy that isn't Ace Attorney, but is still pretty dang fun. It's really cool to see him trying something different (even if he did go and just make another 3 AA games after this Xp).

The story is nothing super special, but it's engaging enough to fill the gaps. I just didn't find the characters as engaging as perhaps they could've been in a visual novel that had more text-based puzzles, like in AA. The puzzles though, really fun. In old reviews I'd read, I'd heard that some of the puzzles get really un-fun and difficult, but I never even had to look up a guide once for this game. I feel the difficulty curve is really well done, as well as implementation of new mechanics just as old ones get stale.

I'm not exactly in the mood for Ghost Trick 2, but I would like to see Shu Takumi give other genres (or subgenres of visual novels, I guess) a try, because this shows he can make some really cool stuff if Capcom lets him away from Ace Attorney.

A man dressed in black holds a young woman at gunpoint. He's a hitman, hired to erase all those who possess knowledge about something our unlucky gal has stumbled upon. Between her and the barrel of the shotgun is a man, who realizes what's going on and wants to do something to help. Except... he's already dead, his body lying face down in the ground, and his disembodied spirit just watching helplessly.

Not all is lost: with the help of another ghost nearby, he learns of a spirit's ability to possess and manipulate various objects, as well as, when faced with a corpse, the unbelievable power turn back time to just before that person died. After a bit of trying, he is able to prevent the girl from being assassinated. All is well! Only, he's still dead. Even worse... he has no idea who he is, or why he died. With the girl he saved being the only person who might have a clue about what transpired, he elects to follow her, and the night that follows is a sequence of ever more unbelievable events.

Coming out of several years in a row working on the Ace Attorney series, director Shu Takumi wanted to try something different, creating a new IP that pushed the beloved style character-focused stories of his previous works even further. To achieve that, he planned on using a disembodied spirit as a protagonist as a means to explore multiple locations and connect more intimately with more characters, in a way a person with a physical body wouldn't be able to. This opus took years to come into fruition, and how cruel it was that, in the saturated and piracy-ravaged market of the Nintendo DS's later years, it earned the label "cult classic" instead of the shorter and more deserved "classic".

Ghost Trick is an adventure game unlike any other ever made. Its unique style of puzzle gameplay puts the player in control of Sissel, the amnesiac spirit, whose most basic ability is to hop between highlighted objects in a scene and use them in some way, like moving a cart or turning on a light. In the most basic stages of Ghost Trick, that's just his goal: traverse a certain location to cause something to happen, or to eavesdrop on a conversation and obtain a piece of information.

Everything changes once he finds a dead body and travels back in time to exactly four minutes before that person's passed away. We're presented with the sequence of events that led to that death, and are then set loose in the scene with the goal of altering it and preventing that terrible outcome. Naturally, Sissel cannot talk or otherwise directly interact with anyone in the past, so in case he needs to change someone's behaviour, he must use his powers over objects to induce them into the desired course of action.

These sections are superb puzzles. They force the player to go through the scene several times, understanding what are the pivotal moments in the scene and what tools they have to work with. Sometimes, it's a simple matter of finding the right timing to perform a certain action, or finding a way to gain more time. In other occasions, the paths Sissel can take in a certain location must be thoroughly explored in order to gain more information and act appropriately. There's even cases where more elaborate chains of object manipulations must be enacted -- if the thought of preventing crimes by building Rube Goldberg machines sounds appealing in any way, this is the game you need to play.

More than the puzzles themselves, however, what's most intriguing is their execution. A pitfall games centered around puzzles often fall in is that those get in the way of the narrative, especially towards the end of the campaign where the difficulty is at its highest. Ghost Trick, on the other hand, follows in the footsteps of Ace Attorney, interleaving them with action and character moments. In addition, as the story progresses, the game focuses on offering a larger variety of puzzles through exploring different locations and featuring new characters instead of scaling the difficulty. Both of these decisions confer a flawless pacing to the narrative. The final section of the game, in particular, is so extraordinarily well paced that it doesn't feel like playing a game, but being part of a story yourself.

A story which is in itself, exceptional, and alone worth the price of admission. Shu Takumi was cooking he put forth the idea of a ghost used to explore a large cast: there are many, many characters in Ghost Trick, all of them worthy of being someone's favorite, and the game has the time and means to move between scenes, giving each person time on the spotlight and exploring their personality and motivations. Of note is that Ghost Trick is home to the single best dog in all of gaming: Missile, the Pomeranian, based on Shu Takumi's real life dog at the time, is a standout character whose energy and charm wins over just about anyone who plays the game for a bit. The uncontested best boy.

Each scene in Ghost Trick is rendered in a sidescrolling 2D view, which is in itself pretty rare for a narrative game, but the way the story is presented is what really makes the game shine: the scene direction treats each sideways view of a location as a stage, making heavy use of theater language to convey thoughts, emotions and information to the spectator. This is reinforced by the team's rejection of motion capture, which led them to hand-animate the flashiest, most unique and detailed animations for each character, sometimes establishing a character's entire personality simply from the way they walk into the stage. The game's flat colors and strong shapes may make every frame of it a painting, but seeing it in motion is the truly breathtaking part.

Ghost Trick's only debatable flaw is that the story being told here is so extensive and so complex that it makes the experience into one the player has to give credence to, and has to be willing to stick with to the end. The script very slowly unveils its hand, and it might feel, at times, like certain arcs were forgotten or huge plot holes are being opened. And that's not true: the plot is masterfully paced and paints a complete and concise picture by the time the credits roll, but because that process takes time, it demands a certain openness from the player, a willingness to engage with the narrative and let it unfold on its own time.

Which is to say, its only flaw is being too good for its own sake, a demerit that can no doubt be worn as a badge of honor. Ghost Trick is an exhilarating experience, and it is a blessing that it survived its weak sales performance on the DS and went on to be ported and remade for other platforms. Sissel's supernatural adventure between the worlds of the living and the dead deserves to be seen and enjoyed by more people.

SISSY!!!🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈👨‍❤️‍👨👨‍❤️‍👨👨‍❤️‍👨

Incredible gameplay, thrilling narrative and amazing characters, this game has everything, absolutely one of the greatest games of all time that must be experienced blind.

ace attorney's adopted sibling, with all the wit, charm, humor, and legitimately phenomenal writing and storytelling that is praised and expected of shu takumi and his team. ghost trick: phantom detective will keep you invested in its plot as you experiment with your powers and solve its mystery before it's too late. some people tend to not be a fan of the ending, but honestly i really love it.

Among Takumi’s best. One of the best video game soundtracks out there. Don’t know if the ending stuck the landing though.

has a novel core mechanic that is entertaining throughout and a compelling high concept that sets up the story well. this story did feel like a bit of a slog to get through though, often leaving me in frustrated anticipation of the next puzzle scene—where the game truly excelled. couldn’t help but feel that i would have preferred it to be either a visual novel or a puzzle game, rather than what sometimes felt like a disparate mix of the two. it is very charming though and fits the DS like a glove

Stylish, suave, poignant. An incredible concept executed in an interesting way. Hesitant to even call it a hidden gem, since in my mind it's one of the best DS titles.


DO CARALHO DO CARALHO SHU TAKUMI VOCÊ É UM PAI

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, or GODDAMMIT LYNNE NOT AGAIN

If you thought Ace Attorney was wacky, Ghost Trick is all of the typical nonsense of an Ace Attorney game crammed into one night and on steroids. Every single one of this game's 18 chapters threw me for a new loop and I was so hooked I physically couldn't put the game down. Normally with things like this, they're never able to stick the landing and satisfyingly explain and wrap up everything, but Ghost Trick has a surprisingly graceful dismount. Even the big twist has a ton of foreshadowing peppered in if you're paying close attention.

Gameplay wise, conceptually it's like an old school point and click adventure game where you need to make use of various objects throughout the room to come up with some convoluted solution to your situation, but the execution is extremely unique. I've never played anything else quite like it. The gameplay itself contributes to the racketing tension of this game, and also contributed to me being unable to put this game down.

Do I even need to say the presentation is fantastic? The soundtrack is banger after banger, the art style and character design are excellent, and the animated style through which the game shows events is unique and has a lot of charm. Characters have such distinct, exaggerated ways of moving that stick with you.

The characters, however, are the one thing I'll really fault this game on. Comparisons to Ace Attorney are a little unavoidable, and while characters in those games were silly but ultimately had a very real core and a lot of heart, the Ghost Trick characters feel more like vehicles for the story to take place. I suppose that's a consequence of only knowing them for one night and not being able to see much change or alternate sides to them. When the plot works this well, I can't complain too much. Besides, it's not like they're unlikeable at all. Shu Takumi can keep throwing weirdgirls at me and I'll keep standing there like a dog stands in front of a garden hose.

It's such a shame this game failed commercially. I think this story got extremely tightly wrapped up and there's no need for a continuation, but I would love another game in this world featuring these mechanics.

One of those games that needs a sequel, not connected to this completed story. You just need to pick up and play this divine emerald, which at one time was practically ignored in the West due to zero marketing.

Одна из тех игр, который нужен сиквел, не связанный с этим законченным сюжетом. Надо просто взять и поиграть в этот божественный изумруд, который в свое время практически проигнорировали на западе из-за нулевого маркетинга.

nossa mt bom esse jogo merecia o mundo. designs maravilhoso, musica, personagens, historia quem me dera ser tão carismático. Pura diversão (data aprox.)