The Verdict
Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is not your typical jump-scare-laden horror game. It blends classic survival horror elements with Japanese ghost stories that focus on the feelings of terror and dread. There's no point where you'll be horrified into leaving or quitting. Instead, you'll be subjected to a constant feeling of unease, waiting for the jump scares that may never come and wondering if you really saw something or if the game is just getting to you.
Turn out the lights and prepare to be unnerved, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is a great Halloween purchase, provided you have the space. Nintendo really dropped the ball with the lack of promotion and digital only release on the storage challenged Wii U.
The prologue and first two chapters are free, so potential buyers can experience the game before they take the plunge. It comes with a hearty recommendation.
The Positives
- Exploring Mt. Hikami will fill you with a lingering sense of dread. The dark, damp areas are replete with eerie music, the wailing of the dead, and strange phenomena. Creaky doors will open and close on their own, items will change positions when your eyes wander from them, and you'll catch glimpses are things moving in the screen's periphery.
- There are little to no jump scares. Nothing randomly jumps into your face with a loud scream, and the music doesn't let loose a sudden shriek to give you a jolt. Throughout the game you'll expect jump scares only for there to be none. The feeling of terror comes when you realize that doll moved five feet closer to you while you were peeking under the bed. A once closed door is now open with a figure staring back at you in the distance, but as you get closer the door closes
- Intentionally clumsy character controls. You read that right, intentionally clumsy controls are a staple of classic survival horror, expressly for the purpose of making slower enemies more threatening. Just look at the recent REmake HD to see how clumsy controls make a game better. Please note that these controls are not bad, as they're easy to use and reliable, they're just slower. Careful timing and thought out movement will render you completely untouchable, something that wouldn't be possible with truly bad controls.
- The camera controls are spot on. They feel completely natural and you'll have no problem quickly whipping it around to destroy ghosts with your camera-fu. If motion controls really just aren't your thing though, you'll be pleased to know there's a right stick option instead. It's not quite as satisfying, but it gets the job done.
- The game looks great. It's a 720p/30fps affair, with some slowdowns and rough looking textures in places, but for the most part it's nice to look at. Especially impressive are the water effects on your characters clothes, which is good considering how much real estate they take up. This is a case of limitations leading to creative solutions. The dev team knew what the Wii U would let them get away with and made a lot of good decisions when crafting Mt. Hikami.
The Negatives
- Linearity in games is not a bad thing inherently, but there are points when Maiden of Black Water is aggressively linear, taking the controls from you and smacking you on the nose for daring to stray away from the desired path. Exploration opens up a bit more in later chapters, but that chiding feeling is always there. Another locked door would have felt better.
- Fighting ghosts gets repetitive, and because of this the game is more scary when the ghosts aren't on screen. The first encounter with each type of ghost is fresh and exciting, but subsequent encounters devolve into: Bait the enemy into attacking, counter with a Fatal Frame shot, rinse, repeat. The only saving grace is that there's plenty of high level film lying around and upgrades are easy to unlock, so you can just steam roll common enemies without issue.
- There are way too many healing items. It's to the point that the only danger comes from stronger enemies with the potential to one shot you. Considering regular enemies will almost never hit you, even in groups once you've mastered the dodge and learned attack patterns, having 40+ healing items seems to be a little overkill. The already over matched ghosts become completely nonthreatening when all of their efforts are wiped out by a common herbal pill.
- Censorship rears its ugly head. Regardless of how you feel about the optional outfits that were removed, somebody out there wanted them, and nobody wants to buy an extremely graphic horror game to be told they aren't mature enough to handle sexy swimsuits. On top of that, the swimsuits actually had a slight role in the original story, being tied to a female protagonist's feelings of self worth and her career as a gravure model.
Th​e Neutral
- If you haven't caught on by now, the game is very Japanese in style. If Japanese horror does nothing for you, this game isn't going to change your opinion. You're either susceptible or you're not.
Do you miss survival horror? Not pure horror, like Slender, or action horror, like Resident Evil post RE4, but true survival horror? Then Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water may just be your type of game. Pair an underrepresented game genre with the fact that Japanese horror hasn't seen much exposure in the West since the early to mid 2000's, and Maiden of Black Water is a breath of fresh air.
Japanese horror is fundamentally different than what most of us are used to, and thus may not even be scary to you. Your mileage may vary, significantly. Instead of relying on jump scares, Maiden of Black Water heightens your sense of dread to a peak, where something may trigger an outright panic attack.
I like to think I'm fairly inoculated to horror at this point. Maybe I've played and watched too much Slender, FNAF, Alien: Isolation, Until Dawn, and Amnesia to be scared any more. At least that's what I thought until I myself had a breaking point early in Maiden of Black Water:
Mt. Hikami isn't a particularly inviting locale, unless you're literally suicidal.
Noticing things moving when I took my eyes of of them was creepy and the sounds weren't helping things. I felt high strung, but I never thought of screaming or throwing my game pad across the room like a twitch streamer.
However in one moment, my ceiling fan blew a plastic bag off my nightstand and it brushed across my elbow. There was no screaming. When I calmed down I realized I had silently flipped my mattress, bowled over a chair and wastebasket, plowed through a door, and turned on all the lights from bedroom to living room in my escape to safety.
That prolonged sense of dread is powerful and it draws on a different type of fear. If you've grown bored of the usual horror tropes, maybe it's time to wander the oppressive Mt. Hikami.
