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User Score
5.8

Presentation - 5.5
Gameplay - 6.0
Value - 6.0

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is a classic slow pace Japanese horror game. With many neat gamepad exclusive feature. A spooky story and lots of content to get through. But on many fields, doesn’t live up to the potential.

The story takes place in a small rural Japanese town and on Mt. Hikami, which has become a popular place to commit suicide. The mountain hosts a number of spooky forest, shrines, and building to explore.  You will follow the story of three character’s Ren, Hui, and Yuri as they figure out the stories behind the haunted mountain.

There is very little character developments and doesn’t do much to connect each other. The story is incredibly slow moving, it really feels like you made no progress most of the times. And it only really makes significant attempts to bring you further into the story until the last 2 chapters, before then, it really just feels like a bunch of fetch quests over and over again. They take you very little further into the story. But I will say, the endings in the game are good and will make you happy and sad.

Characters in the game are all voice acted. But most of it is really bad. There is no emotion in the voices, they just sound like they are reading a script. The character models also show no emotion or anything. They never look worried or scare, just the same blank look. Which is very off putting.

Fatal Frame has a very unique combat system, you use camera Obscura to kill ghost. The camera is displayed on your gamepad screen. Using the gamepad, you try aim for as many spirits in a shot as possible. These spirits include specific weak parts on the body, a combination of more than 1 ghost in a shot, or some that break off and fly around the ghost. If you get 5 in one shot, it will deal even more damage and push you ghost back. You control your camera by using the motion controls or the right stick. You can change your vertical and horizontal views by twisting you game pad to try and get as many spirits in as once.

You have lots of customization for your camera. You can use a variety of different lenses that offer bonuses such as damage up, or health regain. There are also several different films that you collect as you go along, they vary in damage, recharge time, and more. Finding the right combination is key in getting a ghost dead in a short period of time.

The combat in this game is genuinely a blast. I never thought using a camera to kill ghosts would be so much fun. The motion control work great in this game and the gamepad as a camera really elevates the experience. And it is always rewarding when you kill a ghost and you go up to it for a ‘fatal touch’, which sometimes will bring up a ‘fatal glance’ which will put up a short movie that shows you how they died. They are all well-made and always had my attention.

The only thing that holds back the game play is the horrible controls. Once you start up, you will greatly struggle to turn around, move around or really do anything. They get better as you play along, but they still will mess you up quite often. You are basically trying to control a tank through narrow environment pathways with fast moving ghosts to keep track of.

In total, there are 14 chapters. They mostly consist of you exploring mount Hikami. While the games graphics are not that great, mount Hikami has an amazing atmosphere. There are low  res textures that pop out when up close view, but it has an amazing dark feel to it that puts you right in the mood for where you investigate a missing person, or other various tasks. There are also great sound effects when ghost die and over all the environments that give you a spooky feeling.

But the missions on the mountain quickly fall into one of this game’s flaws. For most of the missions, they start you off from a beginning point of the mountain, meaning you have to go the same way up the mountain each time to get to your area.  Each area you go to, you will most likely go back to it at least 2 or 3 more times in another mission. Which is boring since they add nothing to these areas typically, you just explore the same areas again and again.

The missions also include a ton of back tracking. You will sometimes get to the back of the house or woods, get to your goal and then they’ll tell you, “go recreate this picture”, which makes you explore areas again and again. A lot of the goals you do through the houses and area aren’t always properly set up either, not sending you in a logical path through the houses that brings you one point to the next. But rather to one point, then goes back to the beginning, and then takes you past that first point, then back again… Just not great design to these missions.

Once you’re done with an area and find your goal, they don’t let you stop there, they always make you back track out of the area you are in and sometimes all the way back to the beginning. I get it that you don’t magically show back you in real life after a mission. But this is a video game and it completely messes up the flow of your game. Which is an overall trend, the flow is horrible and can get really boring.

Overall, fatal frame recycles way too much, each mission contains the same ghosts over and over again, the same environments, and the same tasks. This is all spread out over a 16 hours game. The amount of fluff is appalling. After 8 or so hours, you have seen what the game has in it for you and it just rinse and repeat over and over again. While most say the more content the better, Fatal Frame 5 is a perfect example that the more content is not always the best. With the amount of areas and ghost they had, they had no reason to make this game 16 hours long.

Fatal frame does offer some replay ability, at the end of each mission you earn points and a score. You get points by getting high scores during ghost battles, finding health, film, and other items throughout your adventure. If you have them still by the end, they will give you extra points. This will give you a grade, the highest being an S. Luckily the points are not for no reason; you can use them to upgrade your camera. Giving it more damage, faster reload time, and more. You can also unlock more. So there is plenty of reason to replay levels, but I never found a reason to go back to do them just due to them being so undesirable by the end.

Finally, that brings us to the horror part of this game. Fatal Frame does include jump scares. But don’t expect much, they are not one bit scary. But what they do get you on at times is the tense feeling of opening a door slow and what might be on the other side. The slow picking up of an item, think of what might grab you. They also provide a very spooky atmosphere, which is great, but this game is not one bit scary.