Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective comes from some of the minds behind the Ace Attorney series, including that of director Shu Takumi, making it a DS game with an instant pedigree. This quirky 2D puzzle adventure with a morbid twist, styled in a colorful take on film noir, stars the bequiffed, recently deceased Sissel, who has poltergeist-like powers but can't remember how he died.

　　The opening tutorial level, set in a junkyard, introduces the key concepts: Sissel, now controlling the disembodied blue flame that is his soul, can slide (with a stroke of the DS stylus) a limited distance into the white dot "cores" of certain inanimate objects, possessing them and activating them with his "ghost trick" power. The ghost trick action, displayed on the upper DS screen while you navigate on the lower screen, varies from object to object: in our demo, for instance, we find a bed that unfolds, an umbrella that extends, cupboards to open, bowls to spin, and hanging Christmas decorations to dislodge.

　　Sissel puts these powers to use saving the victims of a mysterious, shortsighted, and sharp-suited gunman, since he can travel backward in time to four minutes prior to each murder. The resulting gameplay amounts to short levels with a timer counting down to the victim's death, though time freezes while Sissel switches to the reddish ghost world, where he can slide between objects, restarting when he returns to the real world to perform his ghost tricks.

　　In a later, more advanced level, based in the apartment of a soon-to-be-murdered girl and her equally doomed dog, Sissel has four minutes (in the real world) to make the girl hide beneath the sofa by manipulating the ordinary items lying around her. The solution, in the end, is discovered with a certain mix of intuition and trial and error, with Sissel's thought bubble prompts delivering hints in the right direction.

　　It involves knocking a set of headphones into a fish tank to prevent the girl from covering her ears. At this point, the game congratulates us with "Fate Changed!"-- marking a checkpoint in the level. Then we roll, inside a trolley with a bowl of donuts on it, across the room, where we rock the bowl, spilling a donut onto the floor. By sliding Sissel from the trolley, up a Christmas tree, onto a hanging, spinning ornament, and then down onto a TV unit, we gain access to a cupboard whose door, when flipped open, knocks the donut under the sofa--attracting a mouse, which attracts the barking dog, which, in turn, attracts the girl. She's now saved--concealed under the sofa when the gunman arrives. Cue: "Fate Averted!"

　　The 2D puzzling is executed in a colorful, angular, cartoony style and with pop-up anime characters and dialogue bubbles that will be familiar to Ace Attorney fans. Ace Attorney's humor and charm, in fact, are ever-present, particularly in the dialogue, making a funny, quirky game out of Ghost Trick's macabre premise.

　　Ghost Trick for the DS will be out in Japan shortly and will be released this winter in North America.