Celebrating All Things Spooky: Fatal Frame
As usual, October will be filled with horror game reviews, starting with one that’s long overdue.
Remember five years ago when I started the original Fatal Frame? I got stuck and gave up on it not long after that, but this year when I got my PlayStation 2 out, I decided to give it another try.
Fatal Frame is a classic survival horror game following a girl named Miku who heads into a haunted mansion in search of her brother (who himself went inside searching for another character). The mansion is filled with ghosts, most of which are hostile, but Miku can fight back by using the Camera Obscura to photograph them.
It’s a pretty interesting twist on combat. You need to keep the ghost in your sights to power up your shot, and taking the shot at the last minute deals extra damage.
As expected in a survival horror game, you have limited “ammo” in the form of film you find in the mansion. Fighting ghosts also gives you points you can use to power up your camera or unlock special attacks, which made it feel oddly like it encouraged combat more than other survival horror games, but at the same time every encounter felt deadly.
I got better at the combat the longer I played, but that never removed the dread. There’s something scary about a ghost advancing toward you while crying out about its death, then fading from sight as you desperately try to find it again before it attacks.
(Some can teleport. And they can go through walls!)
Adding to the sense of dread is that you don’t have a mansion full of wandering enemies that you can clear out. Many fights are scripted encounters, and then there are also random ghosts that can appear anywhere, even in rooms with save points. You can run from the random ones, and one random ghost that began appearing near the end was dangerous enough that I fled every time it arrived.
Of course, the fact that you’re encouraged to take the shot in the moment right before the ghost’s attack also increases the tension.
The gameplay also has all the survival horror mechanics I look for – puzzles, exploration, an environment that gradually opens up – and uses its supernatural premise to add to these. Locked door? You might need a key, you might need to solve a puzzle, but then again, you might need to take a photograph to get a clue and then go fight a ghost whose power is sealing the door.
Finally, Fatal Frame is just disturbing. The atmosphere is unsettling, the story is dark, and the more you learn about the events that occurred in the mansion, the more twisted everything feels. I’m actually surprised they got away with a T rating.
I often give survival horror games a pass on story compared to other genres, but like with the Silent Hill series, Fatal Frame is one where I really enjoyed learning more about the story (mainly backstory) as it unfolded.
Five years ago, I gave up on the original Fatal Frame, but now that I gave it a second chance, I ended up really loving it. It was the perfect way to kick off this Halloween season.
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