There aren’t enough games where you get to play as a dead guy. Maybe because it’s a pain in the neck to re-learn all the things you knew when you were alive – your name, what you did, who killed you. Starting off from a blank slate can be a soul-crushing game experience.

Thank goodness Capcom made Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective a heck of a lot more fun than that.

An old-school style adventure game designed for the DS, Ghost Trick asks you to play as Sissel – a dead amnesiac whose soul will pass into the afterlife at dawn. He has until then to figure out who killed him, helping others and gaining clues to his murder in the process.

So how does a dead guy help the living? He’s basically a sentient blue flame. Well, that’s where the Trick part comes in: you jump from inanimate object to inanimate object, utilizing their properties to interact with the humans onscreen. In plain English – you possess the souls of fans, lamps, and refrigerators in order to move across the level and prevent people from getting killed.

Cool, huh?

There are limitations for ghost power. While going into Ghost World activates a kind of “Bullet Time” in the game, Sissel can only go back about 4 minutes in the past, so he can’t fix everything or save everyone. While the touch-screen controls are incredibly responsive, your range of motion is incredibly limited. Sissel can basically only possess objects that are really close together – and that’s where they game throws in puzzle quests. You’ll have to do a lot of traveling from object to object to get where you need to go, but it’s an intuitive challenge as opposed to a frustrating one. At least, it’s as intuitive as possessing a refrigerator to drop a blender on the floor can be.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why it looks like Phoenix Wright, you’ve got a very sharp eye, my friend. It’s from the same people who brought you the Ace Attorney series (including director Shu Takumi). The visual style, the character flourishes, that one detective who looks suspiciously like Phoenix. And why it’s so darn funny for a film noir game.

It’ll be out this winter. Bring out your dead then.