Podcasting is a criiiiiiime, baby!
Welcome back to NOCLIP! Today, we’re dusting off our DS to play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, an underappreciated adventure game by the team responsible for Ace Attorney. As a very narrative-driven game, Ghost Trick comes off as wordy at times, particularly since the game uses no voice acting, but with the dialogue comes a lot of wit and charm that give the game its personality. The counterpoint to these sequences of dialogue are the actual puzzles, which see you manipulating objects in the environment to change the sequences of events leading to someone’s death. Due to your limited range of motion, only being able to jump between objects that are a short distance away, it gives a sense of urgency to the game’s sort-of-timed gameplay segments and creates a mechanical experience that is genuinely unique. The combination of these factors gives you a game that is exceedingly weird coming from a developer like Capcom, but also one that is interesting for all the right reasons. We’re going to be talking about the strange narrative conceit, expressive animation, and why your oral fixation could cause you to lose several DS styluses.
Thank you for joining us today for the first full episode in this year’s Mystery May replacement series Nancy June. We’ll be back at the end of the month, assuming the stars align, with Kentucky Route Zero, a game we’ve been waiting literally years to finish.