Ghost Trick is the strangest, most perfectly made sense game ever.

A murder mystery in puzzle game form, Ghost Trick: Ace Attorney and Dino Crisis 2 creator Takumi Shu's Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is about a dead man who routinely says things like "Oh, by the way, the desk lamp is right" after talking to a possessed inanimate object. Protagonist. And the lamp was right. In the world of "Ghost Trick," even the source of light can help unravel the case.

Sissel, a recently deceased hero with amnesia, was told he could go four minutes in the past to prevent a young woman from being shot by a nearsighted killer, using a bicycle, a flag, and an old guitar. Sissel saves her life then and there. And again after that.

Instead of picking out keys to find, scribbled notes to read, and people to interrogate, as in a regular mystery, you use your ghostly powers to possess everything from umbrellas to telephones, turning the lives of unjustly doomed people into the last critical moments before they die. In doing so, you will be on your way to revealing many secrets hidden in your own death.

The ironclad internal logic of Ghost Trick keeps this time-twisting monstrosity from becoming a supernatural mess. The script takes its time, directly answering questions like "If I can possess things, why can't I possess my own corpse and get out of here?" early on, and the subsequent "Hey, why am I ...... which all anticipate the situation.

Another truly elegant puzzle design in "Ghost Trick": you can't examine or manipulate what is useless. No matter how bizarre "Ghost Trick" turns out to be, you're never going to be jumping from one ridiculous object to another, grumbling, "What the hell am I supposed to do with a refrigerator and a blender?

"Ghost Trick" not only wants me to solve the mystery of the multi-layered onions, but also spares no effort to cheer me up. Sissel knows my current situation as well as I do, and I always feel as if we are working together to solve the "sudden death" thing. And whenever I have a ghostly companion, I can almost guarantee that they will enthusiastically throw something positive at me when I am trying to solve another problem. If I make a big mistake at the last moment, the ghost trick doesn't care. Cicelle's ability to rewind time means that mistakes and retries are literally built into the plot.

This jovial attitude would normally feel out of place in a game where you can't go five minutes without someone getting killed, but "Ghost Trick" knows how to keep things light. There is always an ACME-like logic to the ghosts' actions, and before you know it, they are rolling doughnuts and possessing Christmas ornaments like the lead characters in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. This knowing and unknowing absurdity allowed me to immerse myself in death after death without feeling creepy.

Even as I struggled and exhausted every scrap of dialogue I could find, the gorgeous, artistically exaggerated animation of the stylishly textured cast kept me moving. It was the first time I had ever seen a woman with a wine glass stuck to her perfectly manicured hand light a match behind her back, and that memory will stay with me forever. I swear, no one in this game can even sit in a chair without making it look like an event.

More than just beautiful, these extravagant productions give us a glimpse into the personality of each character. The contrast between the uptight guard and the guard slumped over the back of his chair is immediately apparent, even before a word is spoken. The hired man's expertise is evident in each of his precise movements. The junkyard superintendent casually slides down the railing of the office staircase, silently demonstrating his familiarity with the building.

No matter which of the game's graphical choices you make for this game - screen resolution, windowed/non-windowed mode, aspect ratio, etc. - "Ghost Trick" is always presented in a pillar-box window within a 4:3 play area. One would wonder why Capcom didn't add full 16:9 screen support to the HD remaster of the old DS game. Asking for more than that seems as wrong as asking an AI to draw anything outside the Mona Lisa's frame.

"Ghost Trick" is so beautifully made that I'm willing to call it art, and I'm not going to zoom in on the top or bottom of the art, stretch it out, or invent new things to go to the edges (except for modest wallpaper, but "Ghost Trick" has a healthy selection). It's a shame, though, that Capcom didn't add more aspect ratio support; there's no way to take advantage of the extra space on Steam Deck's 16:10 screen. And oddly enough, when the resolution is reduced to the CRT-optimized 640x480, instead of the play area filling the entire 4:3 window, a large amount of space is lost due to pillarboxing and letterboxing.

But this is the game equivalent of a can't-miss crime novel, a gripping mystery where every answer leads to three more questions and ten seemingly unrelated people and places are connected in ways you never imagined. I honestly couldn't stop until I had finished it, and once I did, I wanted to dive back into it again, exploring between every line and poking at every object to see what more I could discover in this treasure of a story, without worrying about deadlines. [The game's Steam Deck has been verified, so you can (and should) enjoy this unforgettable adventure on the go.