I couldn’t sleep last night (in fact I finally got to sleep at 9am) and none of the games I’m currently playing were working out for me, so I decided to try something new. In hindsight, playing something entitled Ghost Trick at 3am in the morning may not have been the brightest idea, but luckily it’s not that creepy. Lux-Pain was creepier, I couldn’t stand that game. I really hate creepy stuff, but Ghost Trick
I haven’t gotten very far though, just started chapter 2. The premise is that you’re someone who just got killed and you have one night to find out whodunnit and why before you vanish in the morning. Somehow you find out that you’ve got special powers that enable your soul to inhabit and operate inanimate objects, so for example you can turn a fan on or roll a tyre, and this helps you save people’s lives and find clues about your life. You press “Ghost” to go into the ghost world and possess something and “Trick’ to use whatever ability that thing has.
It’s an interesting dynamic, but it’s very stressful sometimes. That’s because when you have to save a life, there’s usually an hourglass counting down the minutes until they get snuffed. I see the need for one. There’d be no tension at all if you had all the time in the world to make your move. But I still find it stressful because I’m a laid-back kind of gamer. I don’t like to be rushed in any way (which is part of the reason why I don’t like RTS and Action RPGs). Plus some of the puzzles involve an incredible string of coincidences like those machines… Rube Goldberg machines?… I’ll have to check wiki. Anyway, that thing where one object hits another, which rolls onto another, which startles a mouse so it drops cheese onto a trap, which triggers X, which triggers Y, and then it all works out in the end. It’s great fun and all but I still go “Good grief!” at the end.
In any case, I’m only an hour or two into it, so it’s still fresh and somewhat funny. I like a good whodunnit mystery, and I like the fact that neither the hero nor the villains take themselves too seriously and the dead people don’t come over all weepy and depressed. I’ve got like 4 other games going on right now, but I’ll probably drop FFCC: Echoes of Time and give up the second playthrough of Tactical Guild and possibly pause playing Saga 3 in order to focus on this. It shouldn’t take long.
