Poor, hapless Luigi. While his heroic mascot brother goes on interplanetary adventures and builds entire worlds, Luigi is trapped in dusty old buildings exorcising aggressive spirits. It’s been nearly two decades since Luigi’s Mansion dropped on the GameCube and he still can’t catch a break: In Luigi’s Mansion 3, a vacation away from the Mushroom Kingdom to a seemingly glamorous hotel goes south when Mario and his friends are kidnapped from their beds by King Boo and imprisoned in portraits, leaving Luigi to rescue them with the help of mad scientist E. Gadd and his spectral dog, Polterpup.
As in prior entries in the Luigi’s Mansion series, the core gameplay here is very much indebted to Ghostbusters: Luigi is kitted out with E. Gadd’s supernatural vacuum cleaner called a Poltergust that neutralizes and sucks up ghosts and also destroys most of the environment. It’s a thrill to smash up rooms and suck up items throughout the haunted hotel, and in no small part because the mayhem that Luigi causes across the campaign as his Poltergust feasts upon loose paper, bedsheets, furniture, and ghosts alike is rendered in vivid detail.
No less satisfying is the game’s gentle subversion of standard video-game power fantasies through its focus on its protagonist’s feelings of inferiority as he explores the hotel, moving from floor to floor to banish the spirits and find his missing kin. Luigi, afraid of his own shadow, slowly walks on his tippy toes, scared to look around corners, stammering sadly to himself over his unlucky state of affairs. But he cuts an almost mean image whenever he busts out his tricked-out vacuum cleaner, stunning enemies with a flashlight before trapping them.
At first glance, the game’s stationary camera angle, though consistent with previous titles in the series, feels old hat. But this turns out to be an effective artistic choice, as it evokes early horror classics like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, where fixed camera angles allowed the developers to rely on cinematic framing in order to create the sort of meaning and atmosphere that would be impossible if the player had control of the camera. Mainly, the stationary camera paves the way for the deployment of jump scares, where enemies materialize suddenly into view from the sides of the frame, further disempowering Luigi. Luigi’s Mansion 3 freely indulges in these types of scares, albeit in a family-friendly manner. After all, the game is primarily a comedy where the slapstick humor is at the expense of Luigi being frightened.
Luigi’s Mansion 3’s most notable upgrade to the series formula is the introduction of Gooigi, an ectoplasmic clone of Luigi that emerges from his backpack. Throughout the campaign, the player gets to switch between controlling Gooigi, who’s extremely weak to water but can move through grates and small spaces to access new areas and engage in light puzzle solving. Gooigi is also a great introduction to cooperative play in the game, though this isn’t the only multiplayer component here, as there’s also a Mario-Party-lite mode called “ScreamPark” and a fully-fledged four-player online mode called “Scarescraper,” which has four Luigis co-operating to complete unique tasks across the hotel on a strict timer. These modes stand on their own, separate from the main game, by offering unique spins on the franchise’s mechanics, either by pitting players against each other as Nintendo characters in the haunted setting or by having them, respectively, work together in frantic co-operative challenges.
The further Luigi explores the hotel, the stranger the setting becomes and the more weirdly creative the ghosts get, with trickier puzzles and bosses requiring extra steps to take down. Fortunately, the game never becomes overly difficult like Luigi’s Manion: Dark Moon, and it features frequent checkpointing, thus ensuring that you won’t be redoing too much of a level following an untimely death. By its conclusion, Luigi’s Mansion 3 has well and truly deviated from the chateau settings of past games in the series, with the upper floors of the hotel getting especially weird. (Why would a hotel contain, of all things, a castle?) But even as the game delights in bizarre wonders the likes of which the series has never seen before, it never loses sight of either its core theme—of the underdog overcoming adversity—or its enjoyable vacuum-powered comedy of destruction. Luigi might be luckless, but he’s still a force to be reckoned with across this, the most variety-rich Luigi’s Mansion game to date.
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