the thing is, like, i am a person who will go to great lengths to solve an inconvenience. i will fold up the napkin to wedge it under a slightly-wobbly table. i'll put a custom ad-block on a harmless gif or animated banner because it's taking my attention off the text i am trying to read. i'll spend hours debugging or designing an alternative way to do a menial task just to shave a couple seconds off each time i do it in the future.

so getting tinnitus, with no clear cause or solution despite seeing several professionals and experimenting and doing everything i can possibly research or think of, feels like a cosmic fucking joke

ghost trick rules, man.

i could tell you a billion funny lines or moments from the game out of context. i could tell you about the charmingly strange cast and stellar character design. i could tell you about the only buttons being "ghost" and "trick." i could tell you about twists that'd make your jaw drop to the floor, though that wouldn't be very fun to have spoiled.

but you know the realest draw that i rarely see people actually talk about? ghost trick has an incredible mystery!

the game starts with a question that isn't answered until the very end. but along the way, you do learn every single piece of information you'd need to figure it out yourself. the same is true of the smaller mysteries that pop up throughout the game, each of them presenting questions and then solutions that add more clues to your central mystery.

all of the game's logic is self-contained. all the information you need is said right to you - and yet, most often, people playing blind don't realize the answers until a few seconds before they're explained. the game presents you the same scenes over and over, but each time, you learn something new that completely recontextualizes what you've seen. the game will never make fun of you for not getting it, and on the other end of things, it's pretty rare (even on a replay where you know everything!) to feel like "what the hell, why aren't they realizing [x]?!" because generally, if you're able to piece something together, so are the characters, and they'll usually ask for relevant information the first chance they get.

the mystery is absurd, but as i said, perfectly self-contained. probably every single chapter gives you at least one key piece of information about the central mystery, even if you won't always realize it right away. funny throw-away lines have meaning. characters will do things that make you go "huh, i guess that was just for plot convenience" that turn out to have legitimate and relevant reasons of their own. ghost trick is a "don't look anything up before you play" game for many reasons.

play ghost trick!!!