Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Ghost Trick is an adventure game in which players control Sissel, a ghost that must use his powers to save lives.

During gameplay segments, players can swap at will between the Land of the Living, where time flows naturally, and the Ghost World, in which time is stopped. In the Ghost World, Sissel can travel between objects within a certain radius.

These objects are represented by blue cores, and in the Land of the Living, Sissel can animate these objects to perform actions, known as Ghost Tricks, that open new path or influence the characters around him.

For example, moving a tray of donuts will prompt a character to change where he or she is currently seated, as well as giving Sissel access to new areas.

Much of the plot is driven by Sissel's ability to possess corpses. When he does this, he can return to the time four minutes before the corpse's death.

In these four minutes, Sissel can attempt to use his Ghost Tricks to alter the situation, and ultimately change the future by saving the person's life. He can also communicate with the ghost of whomever he is saving, but only if the ghost is conscious.

If the player fails to save the victim in time, he may choose to go back to the beginning of the four minutes, or return to a checkpoint created when the player manages to alter fate a little. Later in the game, players can switch control to Missile, the ghost of a small dog.

Missile's spirit has a longer reach than Sissel, and has the ability to swap the position of two objects that are of the same shape.

The majority of Ghost Trick's gameplay segments consist of the puzzles that make up these scenarios.

The game starts with the player coming to consciousness with no memories of his past. He sees a corpse of a man on the ground in a junk-yard, and believes he just recently died.

Another spirit named Ray tells Sissel about the nature of spirits, and his special abilities known as ghost tricks. He demonstrates the ability to inhabit objects and manipulate them.

Ray also tells Sissel that he can use ghost tricks to go back four minutes before the death of a person and attempt to save their life. Sissel does so to save the life of Lynne, a young detective, from an assassin.

Sissel wishes to recover his memories, He then learns Lynne had come to the junk-yard to get information from him. Being the only lead to his past, Sissel decides to follow her.

Ray warns that Sissel's spirit will dissipate at dawn.

As the night progresses, Sissel and Lynne work together to save others, as Sissel learns pieces about the past. Ten years prior, Detectives Jowd and Cabanela had arrested Yomiel, a man believed to be a spy for Sith, a foreign intelligence agency. Yomiel escaped and fled into a nearby park, taking young Lynne hostage.

Jowd gave chase and before he could shoot Yomiel, a meteorite struck nearby and fragments from its impact struck and killed Yomiel. Jowd adopted Lynne into his family, including his wife Alma, daughter Kamila, and pet dog Missile.

Five years prior to the present, Alma was inadvertently killed by a complex contraption that Kamila had built as a surprise for her birthday.

Jowd hid the evidence and took responsibility for Alma's death to protect Kamila, going to prison under Cabanela's watch.

In the present, Sissel and Lynne discover that Sith has been behind the assassination attempt on Lynne, and is blackmailing the Minister of Justice into pushing for Jowd's execution, having claimed to have kidnapped his daughter, unaware that his subordinates mistakenly kidnapped Kamila instead.

Sissel uses his ghost powers to help Jowd free himself from prison, though Cabanela recaptures him shortly thereafter. Without Sith's coercion, the Minister stays Jowd's execution, and tells Sissel and Lynne his fear that some spirit known as "the manipulator" is behind many of the recent events, including the death of Alma.

Cabanela is killed while investigating Sissel's body at the junk-yard, but Sissel, with help from Missile, now a spirit with his own ghost tricks, undoes his death.

Sissel is surprised to see that the manipulator used his corpse, which had yet to show signs of decomposition, to shoot and kill Cabanela while vowing revenge on Jowd and Lynne.

Cabanela reveals that the body Sissel's spirit assumes is that of Yomiel, which had gone missing shortly after he was pronounced dead, likely taken by the manipulator; Sissel is confused by this revelation.

The body showed traces of the same radiation in the meteorite, which they suspect is preventing it from decomposing.

Sissel, Missile, Lynne and Jowd follow the manipulator (who is still using Sissel's body) to board a submarine belonging to Sith. They find Kamila and corner the manipulator before he can kill Lynne, but Sith then turns on Yomiel, extracting the fragments of meteorite still in Sissel's body and sinking the submarine after he escapes.

Yomiel reveals he had been working with Sith's organization to bring the meteorite with its unique restorative powers to them, and had been taking steps to eliminate all those that knew about it, including Jowd, Lynne, and Cabanela. Yomiel had come to work for Sith as a spirit after finding his fiancee, also named Sissel, had committed suicide following his apparent death, having been promised the means to live a normal life by Sith once he had the fragments.

With apparently no escape and dawn approaching, Sissel realizes that Yomiel's corpse died ten years earlier and they can use their ghost tricks to travel four minutes before that point to try to change events.

Sissel, Yomiel, and Missile all return to that point and are able to prevent Yomiel's death from the meteor fragment while keeping Jowd and Lynne alive. A new timeline is created.

During this transition, Sissel comes to discover that he was actually a cat adopted by Yomiel after his fiancee's suicide, whom he gave her name to.

Sissel had been in a cat carrier near Yomiel at the junkyard and struck by a bullet and killed. Further, Sissel finds that Ray is actually a long-existed version of Missile who had tried to go back in time to Yomiel's death without Sissel's help to prevent his death but had failed, and ensured that Sissel would help out to fix events.

As a new timeline is written, Sissel has now been adopted by Jowd, Alma, Lynne, and Kamila, while Yomiel happily waits out his prison sentence to rejoin his waiting fiancee.