Games worth discovering

Say cheese and die! - Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse Quick Review

2K View2023-03-11

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Play it if you love old-school survival horror games, but be ready for a lot of PlayStation 2-era jankiness. That’s partially because Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse isn’t that far removed from that era. It was originally released on the Wii back in 2008 but never made it to Western regions until now. The wait will have been worth it for hardcore horror fanatics like myself, but it doesn’t come without some outdated design frustrations.

TIME PLAYED

I played five hours of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse on the PlayStation 5 version of the game. That five hours took me through the first three chapters and a good chunk of the way into the fourth. Including the prologue chapter, there are thirteen in total in the game, and you can expect each to last around an hour or two, depending on how much time you spend carefully exploring the haunted environment.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Frights galore. Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is a genuinely unnerving experience, even as someone who plays lots of horror games. The long-abandoned buildings and caverns of Rogetsu Isle make for a memorable setting, and the general lack of power of the playable characters had me flinching in concern every time a malevolent spirit floated through the wall.

• Story. It’s hard to come up with a unique angle for a ghost story, but Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse puts forth a respectable effort. The plot follows a group of five teenagers who disappeared together as children and lost their memories of this mysterious time, but now seem to be getting killed off one by one. If the remaining girls hope to survive, they’ll need to uncover the dark secrets of Rogetsu Isle, which means reading documents, listening to voice recordings, watching old film reels, and of course, encountering lots of ghosts. The game employs plenty of cliches in the details, but it puts all of them together in an inventive way that pushed me to want to figure out exactly what went down on this creepy island.

• Snap Mode. As is only fair for a game that’s all about taking pictures, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse includes one of the best photo modes (called “Snap Mode” here) of any game I’ve played. This is actually one of the few additions to the game from its original Wii release, alongside slightly improved visuals. But Snap Mode not only allowed me to position the camera however I wanted and put on cool filters, but I could even add spirits or other living characters into scenes and pose them as desired for the perfect creepy shot.

WHAT SUCKS

• Combat. Obviously you can’t fight ghosts with guns, but Fatal Frame’s camera-based battles got a bit frustrating for me. Every time you snap a picture of an angry spirit and thus inflict damage, they disappear and then rematerialize nearby. But the speed that I was able to aim my camera made it frustrating to readjust. Worse yet, as the game progressed I was put into more and more scenarios where I was fighting off multiple enemies at once, often attacking from multiple angles. It felt like the game was purposefully turning its slow, awkward controls into part of the challenge, which was not fun.

• Linear levels. It’s possible that things open up in later chapters—I certainly hope so!—but for the early portions, at least, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse forced me down a very narrow path. While exploring the old hospital in Rogetsu Isle, I discovered that almost every door was locked, and I was constantly being directed where to go next, whether through cutscenes or appearances from apparitions. I really love the environment here; I just wish I could explore more of it and maybe get rewarded with more camera ammo or unique ghost encounters for doing so.

• Character progression. Fatal Frame offers one path for making the playable characters more powerful: unlocking camera upgrades. To upgrade the camera, I needed to spend blue stones, which I rarely found as I explored. And when I say rarely, I mean very rarely. In the first five hours of the game, I only managed to scrounge up enough blue stones for a single (relatively weak) camera upgrade. Saving up for some of the more expensive upgrades sounds like a very long-term, exhausting process.

💬 Are you ready to brave the ghastly horrors of Rogetsu Isle, or will you be skipping Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse? Let me know where you’re leaning in the comments below.

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