It seems like it’d be fairly easy to implement, but here we are all the same. You can’t move the camera or navigate the menus with a mouse in any capacity. Swinging the camera around with a mouse would surely be one of the best ways to play the game, no? Well, there’s no mouse support outside of the buttons. Since the re-release was announced, I often thought about how awesome it’d be to play Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water with mouse controls. At least it runs well? Let’s take a look at the graphics options next. I got a steady 60 fps with very rare drops, outside of certain instances such as the misty folklorist’s house in drop five. At least Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water runs wonderfully at 4K. I just switched my resolution to 4K/60hz and that solved that problem. You’ll likely have to use an external program to cap your fps in order to play this. There doesn’t appear to be a way to work around this in-game. At first, I thought I was losing my mind when I noticed how fast everything was. The problem is that the game’s speed is tied to its frame rate, so I was playing the game at double speed. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water runs at a solid 120 fps for me for the most part. I use a TV with multiple settings and usually game at 1440p/120hz. If you don’t, the game will either run at your monitor’s refresh rate or thereabouts. If you have a 60 hz monitor, it’ll all be fine on your end. That wasn’t fun.There is a rather glaring problem with this port, though. Along the way I’d used up all of my decent gear, so the end boss had to be be faced with the most basic provisions. In particular, the final mission feels interminable: you go through the same locations with different characters and fight droves of the same enemies. Early on, encountering drowned shrine maidens is a chilling experience, but by the end you’ve fought so many, seen them up close so many times, that their impact is almost non-existent. But disappointingly, in the final stretch, you’re sucked into a succession of encounters where you fight the same handful of ghosts a ridiculous amount of times. Giving Up the GhostĪgain, I’d like to stress that for the first two thirds of the campaign I really enjoyed the combat system, and using the GamePad as the camera works brilliantly – it’s engaging and fun. Eventually I stopped drying myself off, and played through the entire game ignoring this central mechanic without any notable problems. You can dry yourself using a consumable, but it’s almost impossible not to immediately get wet again. A lot of the environments are flooded, and becoming wet makes you more susceptible to attacks. Water, for example, is a prominent element, both in terms of story and gameplay. There are a few other mechanics which feel similarly unbalanced and underdeveloped. It’s powerful enough to render all the others pointless, unless you want to deliberately handicap yourself. But after some experimentation, I found myself using the same lens – the one that dealt the most damage – all of the time. Different characters also have slightly different cameras, too – one, for instance, can take four pictures in rapid succession. “ Camera lenses can be swapped, unlocking secondary abilities like being able to freeze ghosts or forcefully knock them back. Considering how well the GamePad is implemented, it’s such a shame these more basic controls aren’t better. Occasionally, I found myself accidentally leaving a room I had just entered or heading directly into the embrace of a ghost I wished to avoid. This is all the more frustrating since you’ll often want to turn around quickly and put distance between yourself and an evil spirit. This is a game with a lot of tight corridors and small rooms, and it’s fiddly to manoeuvre with any precision. The general characters’ controls, however, are much less intuitive and precise. It pleasantly reminded me of a light-gun game, but instead of being tethered to the TV, you can spin around with the GamePad, and effectively hunt ghosts around your living room. If you take the perfect shot, with the ghost and stray pieces of its spirit in view, you inflict more damage. When you activate the camera, the screen on the GamePad functions as the camera’s viewfinder. The only protection characters possess is a camera obscura, a mechanical device which allows you to exorcise spirits by taking pictures of them – an idea the Wii U’s GamePad was made for (or vice versa). There’s a fair bit of backtracking to be done, but the threat of repetition is well countered by the feeling of uncanny suspense created by this new information. Sound design and lighting obviously play an important part, but simply knowing what had taken place here in the recent past was just as effective. It’s so potent that when I found out what terrible event had occurred in a particular location, I became much more unsettled the next time I had to pass through.
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