Game Details Developer: Koei Tecmo

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Wii U (eShop exclusive in North America)

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Release Date: October 22, 2015

Price: $50

Links: Nintendo.com Koei Tecmo: Nintendo: Wii U (eShop exclusive in North America)M for MatureOctober 22, 2015$50

After nearly two decades, a long-forgotten photography simulation has finally found a spiritual successor that has made its way back to North America. I'm not talking about Fatal Frame, though Maiden of Black Water does bring the horror classic to the Wii U for the first time. I mean Pokémon Snap, possibly the only great home console game in Nintendo's wildly popular franchise.

For those who don't recall, 1999’s Pokémon Snap armed players with a camera and asked them to capture photos of shutter-shy pocket monsters in grand, fleeting poses. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water does much the same, except instead of capturing a gracefully surfing Gyarados, you're shooting stills of spirits watching you from behind corners or reliving their final, bloody moments.

It’s a survival-horror game in the way that survival-horror games haven’t been in years. Open areas inspire exploration, which is rewarded with ammunition (in the form of film) and other consumables, which have to be hoarded efficiently enough to drown the final boss in weapons-grade Kodak.

A return to horror form

It’s also a big return for the series itself. Even in Japan, where Fatal Frame is known as Project Zero, it has been a fair few years since the most recent, Wii-exclusive 2008 release. The found-footage-in-action idea has been a clever one since the PlayStation 2, when those who know the series as Fatal Frame last saw the game.

A lot has changed since then, of course. New horror games like Amnesia, Soma, and Until Dawn have begun to forego conflict and resource management. Old series, like Resident Evil, have essentially become action games, pushing players toward conflict by dousing them in balms and bullets. Maiden of Black Water finds a rare balance between these two divergent ideas of horror gaming.

It does this in much the same way as previous games in the series. The game follows three strangers, each drawn to popular murder-suicide spot Mt. Hikami, to capture ghosts through the lens of their “Camera Obscura” devices. There’s Yuri, tormented clairvoyant girl; Ren, a layabout with recurring nightmares; and Miu, another psychic with ties to the first Fatal Frame.

































The player’s special cameras literally pull specters' souls apart, and subsequent shots capture these tatters and dish out more damage. Players are encouraged to get the best shots of their pursuers, capturing as many weak points as possible in tight, well-framed photos. Twisting and turning the gamepad works as you'd expect it to, changing the angle of the Camera Obscura and allowing you to take in more of an enemy's weak points. Particularly good shots can trigger the requisite points, counters, and combos.

Maiden of Black Water holds an aching degree of promise for a game that's half spent staring down at a camera viewfinder on the Wii U gamepad. The focus on ghostly photography makes the game defiantly abstract and provides for a different sort of tension—one where you try to time the perfect shot again and again. Somehow, this never seems at odds with the game's third-person exploration portions, which provide plenty of scripted scares while simply wandering around.

Each of the game’s three protagonists has their reasons for repeatedly making the journey, but overall the characters' motivations feel just a bit flat. That’s especially true when compared to the appropriately sinister story of the mountain itself—often told through flashes of each ghost's own gruesome demise.

The stories of Ren, Miu, and Yuri are concise, but they at least resolve in some interesting places. Miu doesn't get a ton of screen time, and Ren is overshadowed by his androgynous assistant Rui. That leaves Yuri to carry most of the plot's weight. While Hikami itself remains the centerpiece, and Yuri is at first too opaque to be interesting, by the conclusion I was happy to follow her lead.

Maiden of Black Water borrows greedily from films like Ju-On and Kairo, as well as any number of distinctly Japanese horrors. Death and suicide are never romanticized here, coming across as things to be rightly feared. Women are crushed, drowned, and dissolved in tiny caskets. Ghosts sound like they're gargling, creaky doors.

Despite the obvious inspiration, the veneer rarely feels cheap or stolen. The game’s allusions are a foundation, a canvas that the Fatal Frame series has been re-crafting in its own distinct style for years. This continues in Maiden of Black Water.

Cheap filling

Visually, Hikami's temples, caves, and interiors look as though they were siphoned from PlayStation 2, right down to the muddy, low-res graphics. The female protagonist's soaked, clinging clothes, on the other hand, look immaculate. That's not just a bit of fan service, either, but a mechanic. Wetter characters take more damage when spotted by ghosts, adding rain and waterfalls to your list of worries.

Low resolution couldn't stop Maiden of Black Water from utterly terrifying me at times. The game compensates for its low-budget vistas with an astounding use of framing. Ghosts often only show a fraction of themselves: a side of their face, an arm around a corner, legs drifting past a window. When they do get up in your face, it's only for seconds at a time; long enough to get a terrorizing impression, but not enough for a thorough examination.

The game’s bargain-basement development shows through in the amount of backtracking at the start of every chapter. Most of the game's 16 stages are demarcated by the selected piloted protagonist tobogganing back down Hikami like they have some common sense. It makes them more believable and adds some much-needed rising and falling action amid the tension. Unfortunately, it also means that nearly every chapter starts with you hiking back through familiar territory to unlock a new area. Two steps forward and one step back simply doesn't make for a satisfying pace.

The backtracking reaches its zenith in the final chapter, which takes you through nearly every previously visited wing of the mountain in a single shot. The familiarity isn't enough to spoil the spooks, but it pads out what could have been a 10-hour game to nearly twice that length, and not in a good way.

One benefit to the extra length, however, is more opportunities for exploration and resource accumulation. Like many players, I tend to squirrel away one-time-use items for a rainy day that never comes in just about any game I play. In Maiden of Black Water, all of those healing salves and higher grades of film don't just go to waste if left unused. Instead, they're added to the score you accumulate in combat at the end of each level. That score is turned into points, and those in turn become upgrades to the Cameras Obscura and their lenses. It's a small game design detail, but one I really appreciated.

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is full of that kind of smart design, from the care in ghost placement to clever use of the Wii U gamepad for something other than just a map. At times, the game’s mechanical limits can fall just barely short of its scope. But that doesn't stop it from consistently achieving its primary goal—to be an intense and frightening excursion into horror.

The good

A harshly scary environment to explore

Smartly mixes combat challenge with more traditional horror

Impressive use of space makes danger feel constant

Acknowledges survival-horror trends and uses them to reward players

The bad

Backtracking pads out the game more than necessary

Flimsy looking environments

Not every character is terribly interesting

The ugly

Fatal Frame's awful English voice cast is a peek into the dark, possible future of a video game voice actor strike. Stick with the Japanese voices.

Verdict: Maiden of Black Water polishes an old formula almost perfectly, though the game itself isn't so polished in spots. Buy it anyway.