That Didn't Go Well.
Sep. 13th, 2012 08:05 amI just pulled open a door to an empty room. As I did so, a greeting card inside the room flew off its ledge and fluttered to the ground.
My second thought was 'well, obviously it was caught in the rush of air displaced by the door'.
My first thought was 'Sissel?'
Speaking of Sissel, I have now finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective! It is a fabulous, fabulous game. It also holds the distinction of making me shout 'WHAT' at a screen more than possibly anything else. In retrospect, a lot of things suddenly make sense in the light of various WHAT-inducing revelations! Regardless: what?
One of the many things I like about Ghost Trick is that you can rewind time in your efforts to save someone as many times as you like. In most games, if you fail, you fail, there's no hope left, and if you try again you're trying again in a new universe. Is that completely incoherent? If you have to go 'forget that, that never happened, restart' every time you get something wrong, you ultimately succeed in a sort of false universe in which you do everything perfectly the first time. The other universes, the ones in which you failed, are abandoned at the point of failure and left to fend for themselves. You get something wrong and you leap to a new universe, leaving the old one behind.
I AM MAKING NO SENSE AT ALL.
What I mean is that I like how your failure becomes part of the narrative in Ghost Trick. You're not scrubbing out your error entirely and pretending it never happened; you're rewinding time to have another go. Your failures become learning experiences, not only for you-the-player but for the characters. The universe in which you fail is the same universe as the one in which you later succeed, not some doomed universe left drifting and abandoned because you got something wrong.
I am not, of course, saying that every game should implement time travel as an explanation for why you get to retry things. That would be silly. But I do like the use of time travel in this particular game.
What on Earth am I talking about? I think the gist of this entry is 'I AM OVERLY CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO FICTIONAL UNIVERSES WHEN YOU HIT THE RESET BUTTON'. Ghost Trick is, I suppose, an appropriate game to inspire ridiculous existential musings.
I want to play it again immediately, even though I now know the answers to all of the puzzles. I love everything about this game. Apart from the stealth escort mission in the dark. That can go away, please. But I love everything else. Especially Sissel.
(On the subject of my ridiculous concern about fictional universes: part of the reason I want to play it again is so I can use the phone to hop around more. The time restriction imposed in the game meant that I always felt I had to go straight to the next objective, even though most of the game isn't really timed. So I'd like to explore more, find more optional scenes and so on. But there's a point towards the end at which you no longer have access to the phone lines. And I can't just stop playing then, because that means Sissel will never discover the truth.
I can't explain how my mind works.)
My second thought was 'well, obviously it was caught in the rush of air displaced by the door'.
My first thought was 'Sissel?'
Speaking of Sissel, I have now finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective! It is a fabulous, fabulous game. It also holds the distinction of making me shout 'WHAT' at a screen more than possibly anything else. In retrospect, a lot of things suddenly make sense in the light of various WHAT-inducing revelations! Regardless: what?
One of the many things I like about Ghost Trick is that you can rewind time in your efforts to save someone as many times as you like. In most games, if you fail, you fail, there's no hope left, and if you try again you're trying again in a new universe. Is that completely incoherent? If you have to go 'forget that, that never happened, restart' every time you get something wrong, you ultimately succeed in a sort of false universe in which you do everything perfectly the first time. The other universes, the ones in which you failed, are abandoned at the point of failure and left to fend for themselves. You get something wrong and you leap to a new universe, leaving the old one behind.
I AM MAKING NO SENSE AT ALL.
What I mean is that I like how your failure becomes part of the narrative in Ghost Trick. You're not scrubbing out your error entirely and pretending it never happened; you're rewinding time to have another go. Your failures become learning experiences, not only for you-the-player but for the characters. The universe in which you fail is the same universe as the one in which you later succeed, not some doomed universe left drifting and abandoned because you got something wrong.
I am not, of course, saying that every game should implement time travel as an explanation for why you get to retry things. That would be silly. But I do like the use of time travel in this particular game.
What on Earth am I talking about? I think the gist of this entry is 'I AM OVERLY CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO FICTIONAL UNIVERSES WHEN YOU HIT THE RESET BUTTON'. Ghost Trick is, I suppose, an appropriate game to inspire ridiculous existential musings.
I want to play it again immediately, even though I now know the answers to all of the puzzles. I love everything about this game. Apart from the stealth escort mission in the dark. That can go away, please. But I love everything else. Especially Sissel.
(On the subject of my ridiculous concern about fictional universes: part of the reason I want to play it again is so I can use the phone to hop around more. The time restriction imposed in the game meant that I always felt I had to go straight to the next objective, even though most of the game isn't really timed. So I'd like to explore more, find more optional scenes and so on. But there's a point towards the end at which you no longer have access to the phone lines. And I can't just stop playing then, because that means Sissel will never discover the truth.
I can't explain how my mind works.)
