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When I think of October, I immediately think of Halloween being around the corner. While the kids have their heads filled with candy and dressing up to become someone else for one day, naturally teens and adults want to be scared silly with horror movie marathons or visiting haunted houses. For gamers, it might be all about playing the scariest video games you can find. For my next video game challenge, I have selected an appropriate game in honor of the month that brings us Halloween.

If you think I’m talking about playing Until Dawn, the current horror video game release that’s all the buzz in video game circles, you’d be wrong. I’m not a fan of the horror genre at all. I don’t like jump scares and watching a person’s skin get ripped off their faces by a murderous psycho has me wincing and cowering underneath my blankets. Nope, I like being able to sleep peacefully every night I hit the bed. The video game I’ll be playing this month is Capcom’s Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on the Nintendo DS.

Our main protagonist is a guy named Sissel who wakes up as a ghost and discovers he is very dead. If you think that’s a bad day, it gets worse. Sissel has no recollection of who he is or how he died, except knowing just his own name. In this story based puzzle game, you perform ghost tricks as Sissel in order to help people from meeting a similar grim fate as our protagonist, while getting clues to who Sissel was before he died and who killed him.

The game has a similar feel to the Ace Attorney series, which isn’t surprising when the lead developer for Ghost Trick, Shu Takumi, is the same person who created the beloved Ace Attorney franchise. The game is broken up into chapters and thankfully the puzzles in this game aren’t too difficult to solve. You interact with a number of objects in Sissel’s environment to produce the desired result he needs to either prompt an action from a person in the land of the living or to set up the proper space to prevent someone’s death. It’s the kind of puzzle video game I can play without feeling like I’m going to get badly stuck, a situation I unfortunately found myself in with last month’s challenge. Finishing this game is entirely doable when the last time I played left me somewhere in the mid-point of the story. It’s impossible to pass up choosing this game as my next challenge when Halloween and a good ghost story go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Who killed Sissel? It’s a question I intend on finding out once and for all. Come back at the end of the month for my delightfully spooky progress report!