
You need living beings to do your legwork. You are insubstantial and immaterial, however. You don’t know why you’re dead or how you got dead - you don’t know much of anything - but you know you want to know, and you know you have until morning to do it. I want to be as spoiler-free as possible, here, so I’ll keep the premise-sketching to a minimum.

That’s my experience with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I mean in a way that has you nodding and smiling in recognition even as it gives you all-new fun.

I don’t mean this in the stale way that has you rolling your eyes at another shooting-gallery warehouse full of crates and dumb henchmen, another moody pretty-boy protagonist or another match-the-shapes puzzle mechanism.

When you’ve been intimate with video games for a good long time, every so often you’ll get your hands on a title in which every nook and cranny echoes with games you’ve played before.
