Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective playtime!

Sissel found himself in a very difficult position. First, he was murdered. He lost both his memory (where did I hear this before?) and his body, but not his wits. At the location of his body he planned to engage the help of a woman called Lynne to at least understand who he is, why and how he died. Lynne would eventually get murdered like Sissel was, but there’s a twist to it. A lamp possessed by a dead person, called Ray, informed Sissel about his newly acquired ghost powers. With the help of these powers, called ghost tricks, Sissel’s able to possess inanimated objects to alter crime scenes and manipulate scenarios.

As players, we control Sissel’s powers by traversing and manipulating the environment. At the start of the game we had to make use of those powers to help Lynne and find out about Sissel’s predicament. Lynne eventually shares with Sissel that she’s investigating an apparently solved case. She thinks an innocent person is held behind bars and that there’s a great mystery behind the conviction. Sissel decided to help Lynne investigating her case and in exchange Lynne would help Sissel solving his “mystery of me” as he so well put it. Before Sissel died, Lynne told him that he asked to meet her and arranged a meeting place at the junkyard. The problem’s that, at the time Lynne arrived, Sissel was already dead. After some progress was made, we find out that the events didn’t exactly develop that way.

Lynne, who works as a detective, was eventually considered a suspect of Sissel’s murder. As if this wasn’t troubling enough, she’s also getting targeted by hitmen, contracted by mysterious people. Sissel was in for some striking revelations when he went into a prison, as requested by Lynne, to see the schedule of a prisoner. He finds out that said prisoner knows him. What could this all mean?

Before and after puzzle sections, the Trick Time and Rewind Time, there’s story development which I won’t describe here. During Trick Time we either have to investigate something further by manipulating objects in order to clear an objective, or by jumping between locations by getting hold of a phone to travel between different areas through the landline. In order to prevent murders from happening, we have very limited time – 4 minutes to be exact – to possess objects around us and position them in a certain way, unleashing a domino effect that conditions the actions taking place after the timer runs out. The game points us into the right direction with several tips and dialogue bubbles that pop up between actions.

Some puzzles require good timing to pull off. For example, if someone throws an object in the air it draws a trajectory. Our objective is to catch it at the right time in order to gain access to a previously inaccessible object. All scenes can be replayed in case something fails, however there’s achievements for those who are fast enough to do perfect puzzle solving in certain chapters.

I haven’t finished the game yet but I didn’t notice any difficulty spikes. I think it depends on the player, whether a scenario is more or less difficult to figure out. During puzzle sections without a time limit we can solve and try everything at our own pace. During time limited events the game requires us to think fast when the action is set in motion. We can always take a breather if we make use of our ghost powers because the time stops when they’re active. The puzzle design is very clever and all the over-the-top characters are memorable within their unique personalities and traits, like Cabanela.

The version I’m playing is the HD remaster released in June 2023. Originally the game was released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS. It was directed and designed by Shu Takumi who works for Capcom and created the very well known Ace Attorney series. This reminds me that I’m yet to play it, but for the time being I’ll be enjoying the many chapters Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has in store for me.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code

A director calls a number of artists to a meeting. No one knows anything about the next project they’ll be working on. After coffee is served and everyone has gotten their share of cake, a commission is laid out along these lines — create a cyberpunk setting in the form of a city isolated from the outside world; a bit less cyber and a bit more punk. Insert stylish anime characters in it, sporting urban and comfortable clothing, wearing artsy makeup and piercings. With everything else, please go absolutely wild. No limits to the imagination, especially inside a dimension called the Mystery Labyrinth. If you want to defy space, time and gravity, you can. If you want to insert random elements in space disconnected from each other, you can. If you want to play with colors, textures, structures and use those assets you didn’t know what to do with, you also can. This game will be your canvas and we will be here to bring those ideas into fruition. In the city, where the story takes place, neon lights must be everywhere, except in shady areas. The color palette must be pink, pink, yellow, pink, purple, blue and pink. In this city it will rain constantly, which is a great opportunity to make the colors blend into the shimmering water covering the ground.

Kunai Ward, the neon city

Inside the Mystery Labyrinth

This is pretty much how I imagined a meeting taking place inside the developer’s headquarters. Since I live in a city where it rains at least once every day of the year, I’d give anything for those neon lights. The urban reality of Rain Code is very similar to my own, except we don’t have a shady mega-corporation responsible for the infrastructure, power supply and secret experiments… or do we? This requires a thorough investigation from the World Detective Organization! I will get in touch and will let you know about any further developments! I’ll try to steer clear from Halara Nightmare to avoid more debt. Even though she’s one of the best detectives, very efficient and insightful, her work is extremely expensive to contract.

Ok, let’s not digress any further. Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is a new series (or I hope it will be) developed by Spike Chunsoft and Too Kyo Games. The CEO of Too Kyo Games is Kazutaka Kodaka, the creator of the Danganronpa series, and the designer of Rain Code. Masafumi Takada, also having worked in the Danganronpa series, composed the beautiful soundtrack of Rain Code in his unique atmospheric jazzy style. The game was released last year (2023) and only for Nintendo Switch. Why the game is an exclusive, considering that many Spike Chunsoft games are also available on PC, beats my understanding. It is, however, a jewel on the Switch that risks being forgotten among the thousands of extraordinary games on the platform. In all its uniqueness, I think Rain Code is a niche game, and even on PC it would remain so. I don’t know why that is, or even why such a beautiful piece of art can be so fleeting. There’s not much people in the community talking about Rain Code, at least in the West (you know, that big country that The West is) but I believe it has a strong fanbase, spanning from East to West, with strength in dedication, although not in numbers.

Rain Code tells the story of Yuma Kokohead, a young man who wakes up in the lost-and-found section of a train station. Wouldn’t you know, he doesn’t remember who he is! Where did I hear this before? Ah, Utawarerumono and pretty much every other Japanese visual novel I could think of. As any other amnesia story, everything just goes a bit crazy from here, maybe a bit crazier than we’re used to. The thing is that Yuma has, within himself, something or someone who perfectly remembers who he is. A shinigami, or as we say in The West, a god of death! A goddess, to be more exact, and a beautiful one at it, who takes the form of a cute little ghost when she travels the real world with Yuma. Of course, this realization was very confusing to him. It seems like sometime in the past, he made a contract with this shinigami a la Death Note, and now he’s stuck with it, not entirely aware, if at all, of its consequences. Within his belongings, he also finds a letter with a contract to investigate something undisclosed at Kanai Ward, a city detached from the outside world and run by the Amaterasu Corporation, an all-powerful company with its fair share of secrets. He’s supposed to take the train and meet with the other Master Detectives, hoping that someone would remember who he is. That he did, but things didn’t go as expected.

Shinigami with Yuma

Yuma and Shinigami dancing

From the time Yuma enters the train, we initiate our first investigation. At the end of the trip to Kanai Ward, Yuma is pretty much in panic. He doesn’t find the most welcoming party when he arrives either. He’s actually going to get arrested for a string of grisly murders that happened on the train. He is surrounded by the Peacekeepers, a special force dedicated to keeping peace, enforcing law and administering punishment (usually the latter). The good part is that we had time to gather a lot of evidence during the trip, and in the nick of time the shinigami halted time and opened a portal. Yuma was most likely kicked or punched into it by the shinigami and ended up in a place called the Mystery Labyrinth. The purpose of the labyrinth is, with the help of Shinigami, finding the truth about a murder case by solving a variety of puzzles and battles. Our weapon, the Solution Blade, suggestively taken out from inside Shinigami’s throat, holds the Solution Keys used to solve puzzles, answer questions, and battle with bosses.

Inside a Mystery Labyrinth. I love the random elements floating there!

Don’t expect the Labyrinth to be like the castles in Persona 5 convoluted with rooms, backtracking and hidden paths. The Mystery Labyrinth is very linear, despite being an alternate area called labyrinth, no backtracking and no exploration is necessary. The path is straightforward and in order to unlock a room you need to solve the mystery within it, which is always related to the case itself. It can be Crime Scene Recreations, Reasoning Death Matches (RDMs), Shinigami Puzzles, questions that pop up during chase/platforming sequences, and God Shinigami QTE/questions. There’s some variation to this depending on which chapter we’re in. It is, actually, my favorite part of the game, where I can test my deduction skills with the information I’ve learned during the investigation in the real world. No, my skills don’t work that well (heh), but even the failure is funny and it doesn’t bring any punishment apart from stamina loss. I never experienced what happens when we run out of stamina for constantly failing at challenges but I presume we have to restart the Labyrinth from the beginning.

Navigating inside a Mystery Labyrinth

There’s always a challenge at the end

The RDMs are interesting because it’s where we fight the phantom of a person from the real world. They try to trick us and deviate us away from the truth. We use Solution Keys to refute statements thrown at us, like attacks. We can get damage if we fail the exact match between a statement and a refute, but the shinigami helps us get there by giving hints. So be careful and read her dialogues when you refute a statement with the wrong Solution Key. These statements are sentences and comments literally thrown at you. You have to dodge the white ones, refute the red ones and repel the blue ones. I experienced a bit of jank while moving my character and not only in battle. Since this is not a game with real combat I can’t see any negatives apart from it being a bit annoying. Our character can either run outdoors or walk indoors but we can’t control how fast the running goes. So crossing the districts to find Gumshoe Gabs (memory shards to unlock dialogues with the other detectives) will require a bit of time and legwork. Fortunately, fast travel is available between areas, and each area, apart from the Kamazaki District, is not very big.

A Mystery Phantom is a reflection of a person from the real world

So, after beating the Mystery Labyrinth, we finally enter Kanai Ward, the neon city as I described above. It’s so pretty, with all the reflections of neon lights against the rain water. Yuma meets his boss, Yakou Furio, the one who kept trying to recruit new Master Detectives but kept getting notices of their deaths. It seems like no one wants them there, but why? Yakou needs help finding the Kanai Ward’s ultimate secret. It can’t be more vague than this! Another group of Master Detectives also arrived at the destination apparently unscathed. I wonder how Fubuki pulled that out… They’re the best of the best, and each one will be Yuma’s companions for the next four chapters, being the fifth the final one. There’s one criminal investigation per chapter without counting the five DLC episodes which focus on investigations from the perspective of the other Master Detectives.

A rainbow Shinigami!

So, if Rain Code doesn’t have traditional combat, and it isn’t a visual novel, what kind of game is it? I’d say it’s part visual novel, because there are many sequences that resemble one, albeit with more action and a faster pace. It has a leveling system, skill trees and side quests but it isn’t exactly an rpg. It’s a detective sim, with the deduction puzzles and the Labyrinth sections. It’s overall a big mystery adventure that shouldn’t be overlooked by any fan of Japanese games. Shinigami sent me a memo later today. It reads like this: I’ll curse you if you don’t play this mysteriful game and find the ultimate truth through perfect deduction.

The Curse of Kudan

I was looking forward to finding The Curse of Kudan during the Winter sales on Steam but ran out of luck very fast. I knew it was also available on Nintendo Switch, yet I didn’t want to get it there because I’ve been enjoying my visual novels on my laptop, and I already have a little collection there that I want to keep adding to. I eventually found it for a very good price on Jast. It’s also available on Mangagamer. I never tried the latter, but the former gives you all the files. You buy the game and that’s it. Feels like 1990 again. So, I started reading it and found it very enjoyable. It’s a yuri visual novel from Sukera Sparo, very well written with a gripping story about folklore, hauntings, apparitions, nightmares with slice of life thrown into the mix. 

Our main character is called Kudan Sakuya who’s an athletic scholarship student at Kudan Girl’s Highschool. This is the story of her life and the people she meets. In general terms it’s a journey of self-discovery, but at first, we are introduced to a little bit of her story and to her best friend that frequents the same school, Azuma Karen. Sakuya is on the kendo club and Karen is on the softball team. 

Sakuya talking about her love for retro games.

I don’t remember quite well the exact chain of events, but it doesn’t take much before we dive into a mystery about an ominous veiled woman missing a hand, who happens to appear to random people, announcing their misfortune on the seventh day after her arrival. Her name is Kudan, the same name as our main character, even though they appear unrelated in a strict sense. 

We are then introduced to Touko, whom our main character happens to randomly bump into, and the story catches up from there. Touko is a central figure in the plot, and she’s always seen in the company of her assistant Iwai-san. The first folklore tale Sakuya will try to solve is the one involving the curse of Kudan and Touko herself. For that she engages the help of the president of the Occult Research Society, Akinashi Koto.

After solving the Kudan mystery, Sakuya moves on to the next urban legend called the Fortune Message, which is a chain mail that grants wishes if performed in certain conditions. This case will involve the sports team headed by Azuma Karen and it’s a self-contained story. The Yauri Hundred Tales is the third folklore/case which is also an outlet for granting wishes involving telling a story in a group and writing a wish to be fulfilled by someone else. Said wish could be good or bad, yikes. This mystery paves the way for a much bigger development in the story, involving Touko and Koto.

Since the start of the game, we see Sakuya having recurrent nightmares about a girl falling from a cliff. Sakuya grabs her hand to save her but then the girl’s panicked expression transforms into an elongated evil smile. As if that smile wasn’t creepy enough the girl tries to weigh herself down and pull Sakuya off the cliff with her. The last part of the story involving Karen, Touko, Koto and Iwai is somewhat correlated with this nightmare. 

Sakuya on a date with Touko. This was my first route.

However, there’s much to explore and since this is a yuri visual novel there’s routes and romance. The decisive plot point unravels according with the route of our choosing with some variations. If we choose Touko’s route, we can romance her in the end, and we unlock the respective CGs. Then, we can try Koto’s route (or do Koto’s route first) and unlock new dialogues while unraveling a bit more of the story from her perspective. The true ending route comes after completing the first two. This is where the story gets a bit crazy, not in a negative sense at all, it just appears formulated a bit differently and with much more detail. Since it involves more characters, it also produces a different chain of events leading to an ending with elaborate twists.

The art on this visual novel is absolutely gorgeous, full of color, movement, and soul. It’s also part of why I completed the entire thing. It’s not a long game, so it shouldn’t take long to do a natural playthrough, saving when we’re prompted with a choice, and then go back and choose the other options for the remaining routes. By skipping the dialogue and only reading the new unread lines we can save a lot of time. I had to use a guide to point me toward the true ending and it wasn’t time consuming at all to set it all up properly and then follow the story naturally. There’s also two remaining CGs right at the start that can be unlocked later in the end, completing the collection. 

By reaching all endings we are presented with some warm words from the voice actors themselves, talking about their experience working in the game and voicing their opinions about their characters! It was an amazing way to end the game!