Today’s horror games seem torn between wanting to be action-adventure romps, with a few jump scares thrown in for good measure, or walking simulators with little to no meaty gameplay mechanics to speak of. Leave it to the survival horror game Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, a remaster of the fourth title in the Fatal Frame series, to straddle that line right down the middle, for better and for worse. A relic from a bygone era, the game harkens back to a time when spooky and spartan titles like Silent Hill and Condemned: Criminal Origins could reliably dominate the market and general discourse for weeks on end.
While Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s story, which centers around ghostly spirits on a deserted island known as Rougetsu, is often patently ludicrous, the game’s ambiance never is. But in order to get to the meat and potatoes of the campaign, one must endure a lot of expository text based-dialogue about how three girls—Misaki, Madoka, and Ruka—survived a sacrificial cult thanks to himbo detective Chôshirô Kirishima. Then, all four return to the scene of the crime searching for answers about the girls’ capture and, of course, get caught up in a series of supernatural phenomena along the way. While Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s narrative inanity really starts to rev up once a few obviously signposted twists start stacking up on top of one another, the game’s petrifying milieu never once wavers under these blatant contrivances.
This is a bona fide horror episode that’s downright antiquated when compared to the likes of Dead Space, with a slow-building and suffocating atmosphere so thick that you could practically cut it with a knife: doors and floorboards creak ominously from several feet away, apparitions frequently pop up from seemingly nowhere (and always right behind you), and the whole game has the look and tactile feel of a deteriorating 8mm film. Most of the ghosts you encounter don’t even want to fight you, as they’d much rather stare from afar as you feel even more discombobulated from Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s smothering climate.
The game is similar to another horror franchise’s beloved fourth entry: Resident Evil 4. Both titles abandon the fixed and distanced camera perspective of prior installments of their respective franchises and use the over-the-shoulder third-person view. That, though, doesn’t guarantee a seamless experience, as Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s camera takes what feels like an eternity to finally lock onto the proper angle you’re searching for. But it does have the added benefit of ramping up the game’s sense of tension, as inspecting the dilapidated environments’ nooks and crannies becomes a suspenseful act each and every time you enter a new room.
The lumbering quality of the camera also feels in line with the pace and rhythm of just about everything else around you, especially whichever playable character you’re inhabiting: They all move at an extremely slow pace, and holding down your controller’s shoulder button only turns their sleepwalking crawl into a slightly accelerated walk. For every item you wish to grab, you do so by reaching your arm out and carefully grasping the object in question, taking your leisurely time while performing the action, which you will do several dozen times in each of the game’s 13 chapters. After all, it’s not like you have a bunch of ghosts chasing you or something.
More annoying than the long-winded nature of Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s objectives is how non-user-friendly it can be. One early puzzle requires you to take a photo of a grandfather clock that’s located in the central foyer of the sanitarium that serves as the game’s main location, a task that will become obvious due to a clue that you obtained a few seconds prior. But in order to accomplish this task, you can’t simply just take a picture of the said clock after obtaining the hint. Rather, you must first walk up to it and press an action button in order for your playable character to remark, via a long-winded text box, something along the lines of “hmm, guess I should take a picture of this clock.” It’s then that the game tells you via yet another textbox that, yes, this is what you should be doing all along, before then letting you finally proceed forward.
This isn’t intuitive game design, but rather, reading for reading’s sake. And you’ll be doing a lot of that here, as none of the game’s original Japanese dialogue has been dubbed over into English. So if you want to get a decent grasp on what’s occurring in the narrative, other than attempting to follow what happens in any given opaque cutscene, you’ll have to decipher a lot of this contextual information that’s been shuttled away to a series of collectibles.
Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s biggest barrier to entry, though, may be its obtuse control scheme. Awkward battle mechanics are par for the course in survival horror games—and, really, with a mechanic as wild as using a Camera Obscura to take photos of your enemies until they die, some measure of clunkiness is expected. But this game seems more interested in instilling the wrong sense of helplessness within the player, as you need to press three separate buttons in order to snap a picture of any ghost. It’s a process that’s as laborious as it sounds, and one which turns most combat encounters into cumbersome chores with little payoff. Add to this the game’s incoherent implementation of three pause menus—each serving a different purpose—and you have a control layout that requires too much leg work from players to ever feel natural.
With Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, you must take the good it offers along with its regressive design in order to even begin to ride its eerie wavelength. Which, for what it’s worth, is an exceptionally uncanny ride that never puts on the brakes long enough for boredom to ever set in, as even its wildest swings result in some considerably discomforting set pieces (the funeral-themed room inhabited by the hostile spirit Kageri Sendou and her maleficent doll Watashi, while a tad on the nose in its design, is a disturbing highlight). This may not be a game that was made for these modern times, but for those willing to put up with its old-school frustrations, it’s also one that will certainly keep you up at night and stick in your subconscious for weeks to come.
This game was reviewed with code provided by One PR Studio.
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