Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was officially unveiled in the Capcom Spotlight Event, with an HD rerelease coming this June.
Originally released on the Nintendo DS and iOS in 2010 – 2011, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the brainchild of Capcom developer Shu Takumi. Takumi was also the creative head of the Ace Attorney franchise, and was director of the first three Ace Attorney games.
If a game where you lawyer around by making connections to evidence in court seems far out, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is an even wilder game idea. You play Sissel, who is already a ghost at the start of the game.
Sissel has a demented set of powers, but seem to be suited to someone seeking to solve his own murder. First off, he can stop and turn back time to change outcomes of events.
To do this, Sissel swaps between the real world and the Ghost world, where his powers are at their strongest. Sissel can also move across inanimate objects for limited distances. Using his “Ghost Tricks”, Sissel can make those inanimate objects interact with the real world, to change something that happened or is about to happen. Sissel can repeat this as many times as he can, prompting a Rube Goldbergian puzzle gameplay to emerge.
Sissel can also possess the bodies of other dead people, and even talk to them, if that person is conscious at the point they died. He can go as far back as four minutes before the person died, to use his bag of tricks to save their lives.
For this rerelease, Capcom has increased Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective’s resolution and framerate. Changes have also been made, of course, so that the game can now be played with controllers, though I imagine the PC version will let you approximate the DS/iOS gameplay as close as possible on Windows tablets. A mouse and keyboard will probably be fine too.
All 37 original tracks are newly arranged, but the originals are also included. One additional track comes from Masakazu Sugimori, the original composer.
The songs and production art get their own Collection section, and a Challenges mode gives players more reasons to keep playing, as you have to meet certain conditions to earn each challenge.
Capcom is even bringing back the Ghost Puzzles that were only playable in the iOS version.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective HD will be released on June 30, 2023 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam. You can preorder it now from the official site, as well as each platform marketplace, to get four backgrounds and 2 BGM tracks, available on all versions.
You can watch the official trailer below.
