![]() I thought “ Wow, what a cool idea! Surely this mechanic will lead to some cool scares!” And - spoiler alert - it does! but then immediately afterwards a tutorial pops up, telling the player how to deal with that same situation in the future. ![]() ![]() In another odd instance of the developers sapping the sense of danger, when the player picks up an item, they have to physically hold down the interact button as their hand slowly moves towards it and a dramatic music sting plays. (I think I only got truly stuck on a puzzle once during the entire playthrough). During the puzzle-solving portions, important keywords/phrases that essentially lead directly to the solution are always highlighted in red. When a key is found, instead of allowing the player to infer what door it unlocks, the map is automatically pulled up and the site of the appropriate lock is marked with an icon. The overall atmosphere, punctuated by ambient droning soundscapes that change with each room, started to become a cloak of comfort rather than a sign of impending danger.Īs I alluded to earlier, Fatal Frame almost seems designed with this flattening of challenge and danger in mind. I had killed countless Wraiths with similar movement patterns, and I had taken pictures of countless Specters. Then, as hours started to pass, the elements of Lunar Eclipse that I originally found novel started to become routine. Cutting through these temporal and spatial dislocations and facing the ghosts with the relative objectivity of a camera smartly mirrors the way in which the characters themselves are forced to reckon with the distortions of their own past. In Fatal Frame’s prologue chapter, for instance, the gameplay is constantly interrupted by minor cutscenes, shifts to a wider POV when opening doors, varied close-up shots of ghosts, and more. What’s more, adopting a personal, constant POV in order to fight back against Fatal Frame’s enemies compliments the way in which the narrative is constantly shifting and interrupting the player’s perspective. Forcing the player to adopt a narrow first-person perspective in order to attack while also severely limiting their view of the enemies that are creeping around them elicits a sort of fumbling tension that every great horror game trafficks in. I found this combat system entrancing in theory. While the game is generally played from a third-person perspective, the the player can enter a first-person view while using the Camera and snap pictures of passive Specters (entering them into a catalog and granting the player points to spend on items/upgrades) or use it to damage aggressive Wraiths. Some spirits are aggressive, others are spookily benign, but all can be interacted with via the Camera Obscura, a staple of the series. …And then, they encounter ghosts! Lots and lots of them! Now, two of the girls have died under mysterious circumstances, and the others (as well as the investigator who originally found them) decide to separately return to the island, seeking the truth about their past. ![]() Years earlier, these characters were involved with a mysterious incident during a ritual, after which five girls were found in an underground cavern with no memories. But i think it works? By the time I finished the story, exhausted yet somehow satisfied, I felt that Fatal Frame had become my part-time job at the Taking Pictures And Running From Monsters Factory.Īs a new ’employee’, I took control of a handful of different characters, investigating the mysterious Rogetsu Island. ![]() Opting to skip over or dilute some of the usual challenges offered up in survival horror, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse instead asks the player to do a few very specific things, in a very specific way, for about 10 hours or so. However, even among its contemporaries in the genre, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse seems committed to a sort of ascetic minimalism that surprised me, a committed Silent Hill guy who had never dipped into this series before. I doubt it’s controversial to say that the survival horror genre isn’t known for deep game mechanics. WTF The collectibles are a bunch of creepy haunted dolls. HIGH The use of a camera is an FPS-like combat system without the violence! ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |