Like a cool glass of water on a summer afternoon.

I’ve tried getting into Ghost Trick a few times, but I never managed to stick with it for very long. I don’t really know why this is; Shu Takumi’s earlier Ace Attorney trilogy gripped me at a fairly young age and never let go, so I can’t really fathom why I kept dropping Ghost Trick not long after finishing the tutorial. I think it’s just because I hate timing puzzles. That’s a petty reason, but it’s the best I’ve got. After some consistent prodding from my good friend Chef033, however, I decided that I was gonna get all the way through Ghost Trick once and for all.

I did, and it ruled.

It’s the kind of game that’s hard to talk about without getting too deep into spoilers — it’s a murder-mystery, after all — and it benefits heavily from unearthing its secrets as you play. While some of the twists and turns are incredibly obvious (perhaps intentionally so), others will only become apparent about ten seconds before they happen. These latter moments are obscenely hype, and I wouldn’t dare dampen anyone’s experience by giving them away. If you know, you know; if you don’t, you should experience them for yourself.

The cast is full of colorful, larger-than-life characters, and you’d be hard-pressed to forget a single one of them by the time the credits roll. Each of them are given so much personality purely through these lavish, indulgent animations; Cabenela’s little Michael Jackson-inspired dance that he does when he enters a room reportedly took a month to animate, and it shows. Ghost Trick loves to keep crossing a line from “that’s impressive” to “how the fuck did they even manage to do this” pretty frequently, and it’s nothing short of a visual treat. The incredibly crunchy, pixellated models sell a strong visual identity, and it’s a style I vastly prefer over the remaster’s smooth, high-LOD variants.

And goddamn, the music is good. "GHOST TRICK" — the theme that likes to play at the end of chapters — is one of the best “you did it” songs of triumph I’ve heard in a game. From what I’ve read, a lot of the music was composed without Masakazu Sugimori nor assistant Yasumasa Kitagawa having context for what was actually going to be happening in the game, which is shocking. Everything fits together so neatly, and finding out that it was mostly just the product of “I’ve got a vibe in mind and I’m going to just make things that fit it” almost seems unbelievable. It’s like accidentally creating the final missing piece to a puzzle you’ve never seen before.

It’s an immensely, immensely impressive game, and the only foibles I can find are that having to loop through a lot of the same, slow events when you make a mistake can be frustrating. My emulator let me fast-forward through a lot of the repeated downtime, and I imagine I would have been a lot more annoyed if I needed to sit through it all in real time, every time. Even so, what’s here is still wonderful, and it deserves your attention. It took me far too long to get around to actually finishing it, but I’m very glad I ended up seeing it through to the end.

It’s “Missile”!