Doing Ghost Tricks

Ghost Trick is a heavily story based game and it is a prime example of how games, like many other forms of fiction, work better when they are showing, not telling. The principle of show, don’t tell is fairly simple: convey a story by character’s actions or thoughts, not narration. Ghost Trick is a story about the mystery of death and discovering what is after. And a mystery is something that needs to be shown. More often than not gameplay also benefits from showing. You aren’t told the mushroom in Super Mario Bros. makes you larger, you’re shown, because the level is well designed in a way that makes missing it nearly impossible.

Ghost Trick unfortunately, doesn’t start out that way. The first character that really strikes up a conversation is a red lamp, named Ray. He essentially explains outright the rules of this ghost world they are in, removing so much of the mystery of what exactly one can and can’t do. In the context of a game, what one can and can’t do are the verbs for interaction: jumping between inanimate objects and manipulating said objects. In some cases, the game shows what happens but it first explains everything shown. For instance, there is the rule that one day old corpses can be interacted with to see the last four minutes of their life; instead of just showing this rule, the game prefaces it with an explanation. The game can be a bit redundant, slowing things down too much for telling, when only showing is necessary.

It occasionally tells more than it needs to in the story as well. Two villainous looking characters say something about a “deal” but the player character doesn’t know what they are talking about. The player character speaks up saying, “A deal, eh? What could that be all about? Just what exactly was I up to, I wonder?” He continues to explain the situation that we just saw: that these villain characters know him somehow and that there is a connection to the girl in the junkyard that is saved by the player at the beginning of the game. It is all unnecessary; by showing me these things I am already forming these thoughts. However, telling is not always inappropriate and on many occasions Ghost Trick gets it right. The game glosses over the details when one character is telling something to another that the player has just seen, or when the game needs to move from one place to another, while not being slowed down by too many details that would’ve been had in conversations.

After the tutorial section is over with, the game’s storytelling really takes off. There is a certain tone that the game carries with its dialogue that has a tinge of humor on it, not so much that it feels like it isn’t treating the sometimes heady topics properly but enough to make things feel lighthearted at times. It shows this with not only dialogue but in the beautifully fluid animations of the characters. One character, a detective named Cabanela, speaks in a smooth, 60/70‘s-like slang and literally dances around a room in an equally suave manner. Then there are the two guards at a prison, each with distinct personalities, one being a worry wart and the other feeling like they are at a dead end. These traits and their lovably adversarial relationship to each other are developed solely though overhearing their conversations and how they carry themselves in their animations.

Once Ghost Trick finds it’s flow, it gets so hard to put down. It stops telling so much and begins to feel far more natural as the mystery slowly unfolds and eventually comes to a surprising end. Like with many great mysteries, revisiting it with the knowledge gained at the end (in this case, who the player character is) really shows off its brilliance: it is stunning all the hints there are that one completely misses the first time around. The game may occasionally repeat its earlier minor missteps by telling just a bit too much but when it shows, it shows better than any game I’ve experienced in quite a while.