Review: Fatal Frame
Fatal Frame enables you to enter a creepy, haunted mansion armed with only a camera and a keen puzzle-solving wit. So when do we leave?
You last saw your brother preparing to enter a mysterious mansion to learn the whereabouts of a missing famous author. When your brother goes missing as well, you must enter that same creepy house and find out what went wrong.
The idea of defending yourself with just your camera and some special film is interesting, if not particularly fun. When ghosts attack, you must shift to camera-vision, point, and shoot; each in-frame picture you take damages the ghost. This would be a lot of fun if the camera controls felt right, but the analog sticks trade functions in camera mode, and trying to evade attacking ghosts from within a viewfinder is annoyingly difficult. Still, there?s a fair amount of creepy fun to be had outside of combat since your camera can see things you can?t. You might take a picture of a water wheel, only to have the photo show a trace of the ghost of the person who died there. Discovering hidden ghosts and piecing together the mystery of the mansion are almost fun enough to excuse the lame combat controls, but not quite.
Fatal Frame?s Silent Hill?esque gritty look and ambitious sound can?t quite keep us with the game?s competitors?, but its mystery is gripping enough to make serious seekers of freak-outs take notice, even without the genre?s typical blood and gore. It might not kick Resident Evil out of the house, but it?s definitely settled somewhere around Silent Hill.
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