So, you like a good mystery, eh? Ghost Trick is a mystery visual novel/point-and-click adventure game, developed by the Ace Attorney team and originally released in 2011, near the end of the Nintendo DS’s lifespan.
I played the 2023 remaster on Steam, which is the version I’ll be reviewing here.
(Haz click acá para leer esta reseña en español),
This is a beloved cult classic, often named as one of many “hidden gems” in the DS’s library.
How good is it?
A Heart-Pumping Premise
You wake up and see your dead body lying on the ground. A redheaded woman is held at gunpoint by a mysterious assassin. Music starts pounding in your speakers.
The vibes? Immaculate. You feel like a great ride is about to start.
Ghost Trick starts off strong. You’re dead, and you quickly realize you can manipulate objects in the world around you. There’s an assassin pointing a gun to a woman, and you likewise don’t know why she is being chased.
You just care for one thing, though.
Who are you, and why did you die?
This premise grabbed me immediately. In a couple of minutes I had an established world, clear goal, and a compelling mystery. There is not yet enough for me to be impressed, but I am already hooked.
The woman gets killed. You rewind time—four minutes before her death— to save her. It turns out she’s more connected to you than you thought, and she might hold the answers you’re looking for.
Just what the hell is going on?
A Master Class in Pacing
Alright let’s cut the theatrics now. What I’m trying to say is: this game pulls you in hard almost instantly. It really does start with making a deal with you: it says “suspend your disbelief enough. Trust us, and you’ll be grateful for it”. The story is told is a nonchalant, direct way—through simple dialogue and clean exposition—which makes it incredibly bingeable.
A lot of things are established right away: you have ghost powers (including time travel) and you are somehow important and worth knowing about. You don’t know anything about yourself. That’s already a big ask in terms of suspension of disbelief. Characters often speak cryptically or withhold information for arbitrary reasons, and amnesia is a tired cliché by now.
But it works because of two key things:
Style and pacing.
The original release was on the DS, and the team behind the HD remaster did a great job preserving the game’s stye and making it look crisp. It’s wild to think this was once a DS game—it looks pristine, with animations that are surprisingly high-quality for a console known for its limited processing power.
But the bigger deal here is how well Ghost Trick handles pacing.
There is no downtime. There is only the mystery, and the mystery needs to keep unraveling. Each of its 18 chapters has some sort of significant shake-up on the status quo. New characters constantly get introduced, often inexplicably tied to you, and the mystery of your identity just keeps piling layers. I couldn’t help but think, “who the hell is this guy and how is he in everything?”.
That’s 18 changes to the status quo of the game. A lot happens—just as one question gets answered, two more take its place. “Why did this character act this way?” “Why does it seem to be that I’m tied to government conspiracies?” “Is there anything more to the ghost world?”.
Sissel, the player character, briefly gives his thoughts with brief interludes at the start of every chapter, hyping the story up even more.
It doesn’t end there. Character sprites reflect mood with charm and energy, and the soundtrack knows exactly when to kick in to make every twist feel more impactful.
I am not exaggerating when I say this might be the best well-paced game I have ever played. It just absolutely nails it in tone, style and direction right from the get-go, and it doesn’t stop there. After a couple of chapters, I was so drawn in I was losing sleep from it. I just needed to know, dude.
And how did the gameplay portion of this visual novel help with this?
Ghost Tricking
I think a very strong reason that video games can feel more immersive is that they often let you literally perform the canonical actions of the story. Sometimes, that doesn’t work so well—but thankfully, Ghost Trick does a perfect job in integrating your actions into the world of the story. You will start by jumping from object to object, and by doing certain actions at certain moment, you will be able to move to another side, where you will usually encounter a dead body—someone you need to save in this chapter.
Go back to 4 minutes before their death, and then do certain actions to change this fate. That is the basic gameplay loop.
At first, the puzzles are really not anything to write home about—but they get more complex as the game progresses. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I just want to say that you will be doing a lot more than simply shaking an object so that an umbrella falls off.
My favorite part about this is how some cutscenes take in-game elements and use them for the cutscenes. That’s real gameplay and story integration.
That said, I have to admit that not everything about the gameplay works smoothly. First off, moving between objects to manipulate them feels clunky—you need to first press a button to get into the ghost world, move into an object that you want to manipulate, press the button again to go into the physical world, manipulate it, then go back into the ghost world to keep moving, with every step taking a brief pause. It can get very tedious when you are expected to do a lot of it in quick succession.
Here is a video with an example of that. It’s far from the worst case in the game, and it never really gets too egregious, but it is something that I found annoying about navigating its world.
The bigger issue, though, is the lack of a “fast-forward” feature, which seems very obvious in retrospect, especially for a remaster. See the previous click—you have to wait for the guard to move to a certain place, go into the ghost world, then continue. Most puzzles are time-sensitive, so there’s a lot of waiting.
That means that, when you fail, you will need to redo a lot of segments and wait again for the same cues again and again. It gets kind of obnoxious in the later parts of the game, where some puzzles feel pure trial-and-error.
Still, the surprising amount of gameplay shake-ups and great integration with the story of the game make gameplay an overall positive, despite its problems.
So, what happens when you combine a masterful pacing and good story-integrated gameplay?
Almost Too Good to be True
Let’s slow down for a moment. As I mentioned earlier, Ghost Trick is laser-focused on its central mystery, and not much else. The characters are fun, sure—but none of them are especially deep or developed. The whole game takes place over a single night, and most motivations are simple. There’s little in the way of nuance, foreshadowing, or thematic weight.
The entire impact relies on how much you buy into its premise and let it cook.
Games like AI: The Somnium Files might have repetitive sections or pacing issues, but if its main reveals fail, there is still a lot more to enjoy there, with very strong character work in a gameplay loop that is almost designed to dig into them.
My earlier point—that Ghost Trick is almost entirely focused on its mystery—is not meant as a criticism. It’s totally fine to just deliver a compelling, fun mystery. Ghost Trick has an almost perfect presentation, with great art, a compelling hook, and an incredible soundtrack that I am listening to as I am writing this article.
That is to say, I really wanted it to stick the landing.
Did it deliver, though?
What Counts as a Good Plot Twist?
Let’s zoom out for a second.
I will try to be vague and not spoil much, consider this your mild spoiler warning.
When building intrigue, a story will present seemingly contradictory events and ask the audience to reconcile them. So, for example, one could enter a closed room, see that the killer had no way to escape, and try to reconcile both facts. Or a player would see an otherwise trustworthy character hide something from you, then the audience wonders: what could possibly make this otherwise transparent person act that way?
Likewise, when a character does something mysterious or that defies our understanding of them, we naturally ask, “what could possibly make them do this?”. A satisfying answer would include something that reconciles our understanding of their character with some other trait we might not have paid as much attention to.
Another possible, far less satisfying answer is, “They were mind controlled”. Most of the time, that just doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t make me learn anything more about the character—in fact, it feels like a cheat code. If I’m invested in understanding this person, and their surprising actions turn out to be meaningless, it’s a narrative rug pull. Any character could do anything if “mind control” is the answer.
This game also brings up a few plot threads—like a character mentioning government secrets or a high-security prison—that hint at a larger conspiracy or deeper forces at play. So it’s pretty unsatisfying when none of that actually matters and it’s just a plot beat to introduce you to another character.
When powers are well-established and constrained, suddenly pushing them to eleven in the final moments of the game can really stretch out the already demanding suspension of disbelief. Time powers get a lot more impactful in the very last chapter, which makes it feel more convenient than believable.
And, honestly, in retrospect, the reveal of Sissel’s identity just isn’t interesting. All the build-up and hype feels very unearned when the actual answer is so mundane. It might have worked better as a mid-game twist, rather than being held until the final reveal.
There are a few other plot twists like this. Do they necessarily kill the story? No, but looking back into the entire game, it almost makes me regret being as invested as I was.
Ghost Trick tells a very simple story, told in a very novel way. It’s mildly anachronistic, with the “4 minutes into the past” mechanic used to reveal character actions or move the plot forward. It is a great way to get invested in the mystery.
And look, I get it. Delivering on expectations can be hard. But that doesn’t change how I feel about the overall story. Like I said, I want to love this game, but I can’t. Too many botched developments in the third act made me wish I hadn’t gotten so invested. The answers just aren’t that interesting, and there is nothing else for it to lean on.
The Background Noise of Gender
This is more of a tangent, but a smaller issue with the game is its portrayal of women. It’s not misogynistic. It’s not even that bad. It’s just… kind of uncomfortable sometimes.
While there are women driving the plot—like Lynne and Beauty—it seems we can’t go more than a few scenes without a random flirtation, a throwaway line about “a woman’s heart”, or someone casually crushing on Lynne.
It’s not super egregious, but it happened enough times that it took me ever so slightly outside of the story. In its first half especially, it is impossible to escape these moments.
Of course, it is not surprising—this is a game written in Japan, where gender roles tend to be stricter. But if we never call this stuff out, we won’t get better representation—or better stories.
Final Verdict—The Feeling That Lingers
I can totally see why people consider Ghost Trick a hidden gem or why it has a cult following. Its strong visuals, sharp pacing, excellent music, and accessible writing style make it incredibly bingeable, packed with fun puzzles and compelling intrigue.
But when I sit with it, I’m not processing awe—I’m processing disappointment.
Disappointment that something with these many good elements did not pay off, or that all the layers of intrigue were unveiled to reveal something… almost mundane.
Does a game need to stick the landing to be worth playing? No. I’d still recommend Ghost Trick. I don’t love it, but it has so many great elements that it would be a disservice to call it a waste of time. At worst, it’s a masterclass in how to pace a story to keep an audience hooked.
But in the end, I am not left with satisfaction, just with something that I wish was as good as I wanted it to be.
THIS COMMENT CONTAINS FULL SPOILERS
“There’s little in the way of nuance, foreshadowing, or thematic weight.”
I’m really surprised you say that. Ghost Trick has such an obvious core set of themes to it, and its mystery is so masterly foreshadowed consistently throughout the game, that my main takeaway was the exact opposite.
One of the core themes of Ghost Trick is how our lives are inexplicably connected. Every character and event in the game is core to the narrative. Each chapter pushes the mystery forward, often times without the player actively knowing that relevance yet. What first may seem as an unrelated intrusion in a novelist’s apartment, or an unimportant excursion to two weirdos in a park, or a stint in a restaurant, end up being pivotal scenes in the grand interconnected web of mysteries that the game’s narrative revolves around. And it’s not just the locations and events that are interconnected, but the people inhabiting those places and their actions that constantly push the mystery forward. A concerned politician alone in his office late at night hunched over his desk, a woman trying to make her writing deadline during that same night, her neighbor on her way to a rendez-vous point carrying an item of interest who is intercepted by a curious moped driver, said rendez-vous point being the target of a police stake-out, which in turn is supervised by an inspector who aims to save the life of his wrongfully convicted colleague, and unbeknownst to him said item of interest would be the smoking gun to prove the innocence of the unjustly incarcerated convict, yet said item was lost in a park kerfuffle involving the previously mentioned kidnapping and a park environmentalist who was present in the same park 10 years ago during a very peculiar event, said event was the start of a chain of events that would lead to the discovery of extraordinary powers, leading to multiple incarcerations, a grand set of investigations by the police, a covert espionage mission by a foreign government, and an un-authorized intrusion into the conspiracy by an ex-police coroner posing as junkyard superintendent, the same junkyard where the protagonist loses his life and the game starts. A single thread connects all. The fates of many people are intertwined during this one night in this grand web of connections. Every scene is directly relevant to either Lynne or the protagonist, of which the connection and cooperation of these two character is pivotal at the core of uncovering this narrative web. Interesting results arise from this connectivity, like how Lynne and Cabanela end up having the same goal to save the same person, but due to their difference in professional standing they end up resorting to tactics that get in each others way.
This theme of connectivity isn’t just narrative, but also mechanical. The gameplay is about bridging the gaps between inanimate objects, using their isolated and strewn about position, and connecting them in a mechanism that can save lives. The player exploits the connections of these objects to construct elaborate Rube Goldberg machines to enact some sort of change onto the world of the living. One thing I read during an interview, which was especially striking, was how the maximal length of travel that the player can perform with their soul jumping from one object to the next is the exact length of a person stretching their arms out sideways to evoke the image of an embrace. Every object in the game is one embrace away from the next object, and especially with our powers of tricking said objects and traveling over a connected web of phone lines, these seemingly distant elements all become part of one and the same world.
The theme of connection is further established by the game exploring the connection between the living and the dead. It’s our desire to enact a change into the world of the living in the limited time we have. We later find out that other entities with similar powers as us also try to achieve their own goal by pulling on threads from beyond the grave. These connections with the dead are then noticed by the living, like Lynne or Commander Sith, who respectively attempt to work with the afterlife or abuse the power of the afterlife for their own good. Other connections between the dead and the living can be seen between Kamila/Jowd who had to grieve the death of their dear Alma, and Yomiel who’s grieving the death of his fiancé and is unable to sever that bond that would allow him to pass on from said grief for over ten years.
Another theme of the game is the despair of a ticking clock portending a seemingly inevitable dead end. Our soul will seemingly vanish by dawn. We only have 4 minutes to save each life. Jowd’s execution is mere minutes away once we find out about it. The exchange at point X is the final chance of intercepting the plan of the foreign espionage crew before they indefinitely leave the country. On a smaller scale, this idea of deadlines is echoed throughout the game as well: the novelist has a deadline for that night, the sinking submarine has a limited window where we can take action before all is lost, and mechanically our actions are constantly on a timer or involve exploiting overlapping timings of people and objects in the scene. This impossible idea of fighting against the fundamental nature of time is the engine that drives this game’s narrative and gameplay, and ties into the final core theme.
The final core theme of the game is how far we are willing to go to change the fate of the lives that we treasure. Some of us are willing to undo death and bend time if we could only to prevent one small mistake let alone save a life. Jowd is willing to be executed to save the life of Kamila, as he believes her to be guilty of Alma’s death. In turn, Cabanela has spent 10 years going up the ranks to achieve a position from which he can save the life of Jowd. Lynne aims to prove Jowd’s innocence in another way by proving it from the bottom up with evidence rather than from the top-down like Cabanela. And of course, we the player end up travelling from here and there, ultimately travelling 10 years into the past in order to save the lives of the people affected. And then there’s Ray…
These 3 themes of connection, deadlines, and fate come together incredibly well during the final 2 reveals of the game: the reveal that two pet animals were responsible for saving all these lives. As I said, a concept core to the game is exploring the idea of how far any entity is willing to go to change fate and save a life. It was a stroke of genius to express this concept through the loyalty of a puppy and the curiosity of a cat. How far is a loyal dog who has lost it’s life willing to go to save the life of the two mistresses he loves so much? How many lives is a curious cat willing to save in exchange for his own truth? The game makes the statement that a dog like Ray (original Missile) is willing to wait ten years for their master to return, paralleling the story of the real-life Hachiko. The game makes the statement that the efforts of a cat like Sissel includes saving exactly 9 lives, a number certainly not used at random giving its significance. At the end of the game, the cat is struck by the same meteor that caused so many deaths in the alternate timeline we came from, and as a result the cat lives as a spirit inside their own puppeted corpse that is infinitely regenerating, a cat that is both dead and alive. If only we had the power see every outcome, undo the Bad, and make the Good possible.
The ultimate connection we all strive for is to be with the ones we love. We want to be with those we treasure, we want to return to those we have lost, we want to reconcile what drove us apart, we seek comfort with our family, friends, and pets. If we are willing to go that far, are they willing to go that far for us? If deadlines could be infinitely revisited to ensure the best outcome, we would twist fate in such a way to never lose connection with the world around us. Ghost Trick is about indulging that fantasy.
On top of that, there is a meta-thematic layer to the game of being an outsider looking in: The outsider (being a ghost, or a cat, or an audience member watching a stage play, or a video game player playing a game) is granted limited time and limited means to accompany and interface with the lives of these people. From Sissel’s pre-credits monologue: “It suits me just fine to curl up and watch the strange and beautiful patterns of their lives as they unfold. And it looks like I’ll have plenty to watch here for quite a while.” From interviews we know that this was a deliberate conceit from the beginning of the game’s development: the game started development as an espionage game where you would be audience to the antics of the lives of your targets, before the identity of the protagonist was decided to be that of a ghost and a cat to further stress the idea of an outside audience member looking into the theater stage of the living (with spotlights and all).
All in all, the thematic core of Ghost Trick is very strong in my opinion, and given the game’s relatively short runtime and generally quirky tone, it does an exceptionally impressive job of exploring the substance of its themes in more layers than one would initially expect. Ghost Trick is still quite fantastical and saccharine in exploring its themes, but enough of the emotional core of its characters is sufficiently explored to compensate the game’s sentimentally happy end. Characters like Ray and Jowd suffered immensely to make this happy end happen. The ultimately happy end was only possible as the reverse side of the coin that is the ultimately bad end where Sith stole the meteor fragment and Kamila, Lynne, and Jowd drown at the bottom of the ocean. And finally, within the ultimately happy end of the game there are caveats to that happiness: Yomiel was incarcerated for many years as a karmic form of punishment of his wrongdoings, the memories and positive outcomes of the alternate reality were erased, and the cat protagonist is kept alive in their own carcass and will outlive everyone as an immortal cat unless they have their meteor fragment removed.
In the fifteen years since originally playing the game, its story and characters have lingered and provided plenty of reason for me to return to the game. It’s upon returning to the game that the true quality of its mystery narrative shines. I am very surprised to hear you say that the game lacks in foreshadowing, as Ghost Trick has some of the most impressive foreshadowing I’ve encountered in the genre. The main identity of the protagonist is constantly foreshadowed cleverly throughout the dialogue. Specific lines of dialogue are sprinkled throughout the game that a naïve player won’t pick up on on their first playthrough, but that will have you grinning on a repeat playthrough. I would recommend replaying Ghost Trick in a few years time, to give yourself enough time to forget about some of its smaller twists while remembering its bigger unforgettable revelations. Doing so will allow you to (re-)discover all breadcrumbs of clues sprinkled throughout the game. Alternatively, if you don’t see yourself replaying the game even in a few years time, you can have a look at the following list of foreshadowed clues from the game to catch what you have missed: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Foreshadowing/GhostTrick
The first half of that page is concerned with the main reveal of the protagonist. There are many, and I thought of recapping them here, but this comment is already too long. The rest of the page cover the game’s remaining mysteries, but I want to note that the page isn’t comprehensive and is missing some clues that would only become apparent on repeat playthroughs.
For example, the whole “rock of the gods” thing is foreshadowed in the game, but only if you go to the park during the game to unlock optional dialogue with the environmentalist. This happens a lot in Ghost Trick: if you travel to a location you’re not supposed to, you can unlock additional scenes that reveal extra hints for players that took the time to explore. If you go to the Chicken Kitchen during certain times, you will see the exact timeframe where the chef left the restaurant to go to the park. If you go to the superintendent’s office and investigate his desk, characters will comment on research being done on suspicious glowing rocks. If you return to the prison, the guards will give extra tidbits of lore.
Some people think the “rock of the gods” is a deus ex machina, but the game HAD to give a reason why you as a ghost have powers while Lynne or other people that die don’t get powers. The game uses the circumstances under which a person dies as another tool to build mystery, by making you wonder where and when the relevant ghosts had to die to get their powers. Similar rules apply for what some characters forget upon death and when they regain their memory, until you break down each instance of amnesia in the game and realize they work under consistent rules that are in service of making the main protagonist’s mysterious identity twist work. As for the protagonist’s twist, I appreciate its thematic strength, but more than that I appreciate that the game is a compelling work of fiction in spite of this twist. This twist isn’t earth-shattering, but with proper foreshadowing and thematic relevance the twists becomes part of a bigger whole rather than the ultimate point of the story. I’d would rather have a twist in service of a story than a story in service of a twist. It’s funny you mention AI The Somnium Files, as Kotaro Uchikoshi’s writing tends to be in service of a twist first and foremost rather than a satisfying completed vision. In the case of 999 on the DS or Ever17 back in the day, this worked incredibly well, but not so much for the AI series, where the game is more concerned with throwing too much at you to keep track of rather than being traditionally satisfying.
The one mystery from Ghost Trick that remains poorly foreshadowed is the true identity of Ray. He could have been many other characters from alternate timelines. Some foreshadowing to his real identity include the significance of Ray and Missile using the word “Welcome” and Ray coyly addressing Lynne when she recognized Ray’s voice as that of an old man, but this doesn’t narrow things down effectively. Though, in the end, Ray’s identity is thematically very satisfying as I hopefully got across earlier, and thus works for me.
The game isn’t high literature by any means, and there are plenty of things I would have liked to see improved (it’s kind of convenient Lynne lives next to the wife of the minister; it’s kind of convenient that Yomiel called Lynne to come to the junkyard that happens to be superintended by the man investigating Yomiel; the game constantly takes away control from the player to show non-interactive cutscenes that cannot be interfered with yet if the player got to intrude during those scenes certain bad outcomes could have (more easily) been prevented, etc.). Yet these flaws seem as limitations of the game being a constrained puzzle game on the DS. Under those constrains, I’m kind of blown away how elaborate and unique of an experience the game managed to convey given the game’s limited budget and scope.
And that’s what I would like to end with: Playing this game completely blind on a dinky DS having no idea what was in store as a naïve teenager was likely big part of the reason why this game resonated with me as much as it did. The game blew me away in ways I never managed a DS game could. It’s high production values, gorgeous artstyle and animation, impressively unfolding story with superb pacing, on top of its completely original yet elegantly intuitive “Ghost”-and-“Trick” gameplay was something I never thought would works so well on this platform. Replaying it years later gave me completely newfound appreciation for it. Every line of dialogue, every frame of animation, every sound effect, every carefully painted background, every twist: this game was a conduit for the developer’s immense talent and passion. The developer’s love for the game exuded from the screen during every second I spent with the game. On top of that, this game was a bastion of originality among Capcom’s offerings, which were limited to Resident Evils, Street Fighters, and Monster Hunters. Ghost Trick remains Capcom’s latest attempt at a narrative-focused game with a completely original universe and a completely original ensemble cast. 15 years later and they have neglected to give their teams the same level of unbounded creativity to do crazy new things. And in those 15 years, some of Ghost Trick’s identity was lost: It was ported to modern platforms that, while preserving the game for future generations, don’t manage to replicate the intimate experience of playing the game on a 192p DS handheld screen; the game got a cult hidden gem status in the intervening years, preventing people like you to experience the game blind like fans like me managed to back in the day; and in those 15 years, the indie boom happened, giving people many ground-breaking games that make Ghost Trick a bit too quaint by comparison. While in 2010 Ghost Trick really was a game like no other, these days it’s one of many fleeting diversions. Perhaps that can frame our difference in experience with the game, at least somewhat. Yet, I stand by the fact that when comparing it to its predecessors or even its contemporaries, Ghost Trick remains a timeless classic.
Thank you for your nuanced and honest perspective on this. It’s exactly this sort of conversation that I’d like to have over Quest and Roam, and I think you have some valid points to raise.
I read through the foreshadowing TvTropes page and I have to admit that Sissel being a cat, or at least not the blonde guy we impersonate for most of the game, is a lot more foreshadowed than what I initially caught on. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I believe that he being a cat all along is a satisfying endgame twist, I still think that it’d be better to discover this during a mid-game twist, maybe around the time where we see Lynne shoot ourselves, and have less intrigue over the manipulator twist. This would mean that we can focus on other mysteries that don’t have an unsatisfying conclusion quickly, without all the buildup that they took from the game, without needing to heavily rewrite it.
Of course, whether something is “satisfying” or not is ultimately subjective, but this is how it felt to me at that moment.
This goes the same for the game’s themes. While one could argue that death and identity get a bit of focus, I think that ultimately Ghost Trick is not interested with being thematically rich. We can actually cite Ace Attorney for this: there are a few cases with very important thematic undertones, such as “what it means to be a lawyer” in 2-4, or the ideas of a revolution in 6-5, but thematic richness is almost always a backdrop in Ace Attorney. This is, again, not a dig at it, Ace Attorney has very satisfying character arcs and twists in its good cases, but it’s just kind of like the writing style of Shu Takami. I wouldn’t expect this game to have heavy ties to what love means for its characters like AI: The Somnium Files, or profound reflections on how people process grief in Firewatch, and that’s okay. Stories can be fun, and for all its flaws, Ghost Trick is a fun mystery.
I also don’t think that we needed any explanations for the ghost powers. Honestly, my review is pretty long, and avoiding spoilers while trying to give meaningful critique to both newcomers and veteran players is a bit hard, but I think the thrust of the mystery being around this meteorite is completely unnecessary and only adds fluff. When asking me to suspend my disbelief around why someone has ghost powers, “it’s just how the world works” and “it happened because of a radioactive meteorite” are not meaningfully different, but when the meteorite comes at the third act of the story to give an “explanation” for something that the player should be comfortable with, I think it drives the mystery into somewhere that is not really interesting to go to.
Lastly, I’d like to mention that just because something is old or was formative to someone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the experience holds up. In this very blog I have reviewed Sonic Heroes, which I liked as a kid, but I’m trying to see it through modern, adult eyes. I could do similar critiques of games like Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, which were an extremely important part of my teenage years, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go easy on it if (or when) I eventually review it. I can totally understand the awe of playing this earlier in your life, in inferior hardware, and with less indie games that could deliver on a unique experience like Ghost Trick, and we can recognize its historical significance with that, but that doesn’t mean that we should not critique it fairly or not examine its execution.
Thank you again for the time you took for your comment.