➤ Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective, the review of the remaster of Shu Takumi's adventure 🕹

13 years after its debut on Nintendo DS, Shu Takumi's puzzle-based adventure returns with a splendid remaster: the Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective overhaul.

We often talk about how Nintendo has been able to innovate and stand out with its consoles and how some talented developers have been able to exploit these peculiarities to put them at the service of experiences full of brilliant ideas. Here's Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective, the signature puzzle-based adventure shu takumi, certainly possesses these characteristics.

Originally published in 2010 in Japan and arriving in the West the following year, the game used the Nintendo DS touch screen to offer us particularly fresh and appetizing gameplay, inevitably given over to trial and error, but capable of providing great satisfaction and, above all, , to serve a truly particular and attractive narrative.

That's why we're very happy that, thirteen years later, one of Capcom's greatest and least known adventures has been revived as part of a remaster really well done, capable of enhancing the splendid design of the characters and settings, the animations and the music: we tell you everything in our review of Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective.

Story: the night of secrets

Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective, the review of the remaster of Shu Takumi's adventure — Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective, the first sequence

A man lying on the ground, a red-haired girl and a hitman armed with a rifle: the iconic opening sequence of Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective immediately introduces two of the main characters of the history, that is, the young detective Lynne and Sissel, the dead man who "awakens" in the form of a ghost and discovers, after talking to a mysterious desk lamp, that he has special abilities.

Well yes: despite being reduced to a spirit, the protagonist of the game has the power to take possession of some of the objects present within the scenarios and operate them whenever possible, as long as he can reach them by moving his soul within them. That's not all: he can travel along telephone lines to get from one place to another, even over great distances, and above all can rewind time of four minutes in case of coming into contact with the body of a recently deceased person.

Having no idea who he really is and why someone killed him, Sissel decides to exploit his capacity shed light on what happened and help those in need; Firstly, Lynne herself, who seems to have a terrible habit of dying in the most disparate ways and who somehow became entangled in a situation bigger than herself, witness to a secret that she should not have discovered.

La plot Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective starts, therefore, from a truly captivating beginning, continues a narrative with undoubted Japanese features and introduces characters and situations truly notable for their absurdity, without sparing us powerful twists and unexpected revelations in the context of a campaign composed of eighteen chapters, which will keep you busy for at least twelve hours.

Gameplay: Spectrum, spectrum of my desires

If at the story level the title written and directed by Shu Takumi manages to be terribly effective, reiterating phrases and concepts so that they remain well recorded in the mind and create that harmony that is only found in great stories, also in terms of game The formula developed by the developers at Capcom has a strong personality and is still a lot of fun today.

On Nintendo Switch you can use the touch screen to control Sissel's powers, exactly as in the original for Nintendo DS, but also through the use of analogue joysticks and physical buttons, the solidity of the experience remains well preserved, in a curious and successful mix of intuition, gaze, synchronization and imagination - these are the ingredients you will need to solve various challenges and move forward.

The first sequence, for example: there is a hitman pointing a rifle at Lynne and he will kill her if we don't find a way to stop him. The closest object to Sissel's corpse is a bar, and by "possessing" it, by transferring our soul to its core, we can extend it to momentarily disarm the criminal, allowing the girl to escape. Do you understand the mechanism?

During the course of the campaign we witness a very gradual and thoughtful progression, the situations gradually become more complex and multifaceted, and thus in practice the component trial error It becomes an integral part of the experience: you need to make mistakes to see how certain events unfold in the four minutes you have and understand how to change things.

Extra content

Capcom has not limited itself to remastering the graphics and sound of Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective, but has seen fit to add some to this reissue of the game. extra content, in this case an encyclopedia with all the characters in the game as they are introduced, a gallery of really interesting images and artistic works, a player for the songs from the soundtrack and finally a nice minigame, Ghost Puzzle, which is Unlocks once the campaign is over. it's complete .

Graphics and sound: a fantastic remaster

If it is true that the concept of remaster applied to graphics Polygonal does not always give excellent results, highlighting for example the angularity of the geometries conceived when the computing power of gaming machines was substantially lower than today, when we talk about rasterized materials the situation is obviously different and the latest technologies can be of great help.

In the case of Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective we started from resources originally designed for a screen with a resolution of only 256 x 192 pixels, something that Capcom somehow managed to scale to 1080p without losing quality, or rather find it again like when you dust off a precious object. Thanks to the original materials, with superior definition, or a resampling made with artificial intelligence?

Whatever the Answer, It Doesn't Matter: The Adventure of Shu Takumi shines in a new light in this reissue, the extraordinary character design with its multiple tributes to Osamu Tezuka is substantially improved and the same goes for the character animations, even more fluid and hand-drawn like in a cartoon, as well as with the multiple scenarios that we will have. opportunity to live. visit in the game.

Wanting to be picky, I regret that a way was not found to add some graphic elements when necessary to "widen" the view and abandon the 4:3 aspect ratio of the Nintendo DS version in favor of 16:9, instead to opt for the side bands: a frankly ugly solution, only partially compensated by the presence of the double soundtrack, original or rearranged by Yasumasa Kitagawa.

Conclusions

Tested version Nintendo Switch digital delivery Steam, playstation store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop Price 29,99 € Holygamerz.com 8.0 Readers (20) 8.1 your vote

Ghost Trick: Ghost Detective has stood the test of time brilliantly, which is funny considering that it is an adventure whose protagonist has the power to rewind the hands of the clock four minutes, in addition to possessing some inanimate objects to influence the events in your favor. The quality of the story, the splendid characters that populate it and the excellent artistic direction shine thanks to a remastering that seems miraculous when you think about it, and that will finally allow a whole series of new users to experience Sissel's long night in search really.