One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.

You’ve likely noticed that seven of the nine games that I have reviewed so far for this series hail from either the Resident Evil or Silent Hill franchises. This is for good reason, as those two series are generally considered to be the most recognizable and influential foundations of the survival horror genre. For someone like me, who was an almost complete neophyte when it came to survival horror just a few months ago, it thus makes sense that I would focus on them at first. Now that I have a bit more of an understanding of what makes Resident Evil and Silent Hill tick, however, I feel it is time that I take a look at other franchises and standalone games that make up the genre. One series that I have particularly been interested in dipping my toes into is Fatal Frame (known as Zero or Project Zero outside of the United States), with its camera-centric combat and focus on hauntings rather than zombies allowing it to carve itself a unique niche. The series is also notable right now for seemingly following a similar trajectory to Resident Evil and Silent Hill, with a hiatus in the 2010s being followed by an upcoming remake of the second game.

(It’s interesting how all three series began their modern remake projects with their second installments. In the case of Resident Evil, this is because the first game was already remade more than 20 years ago. And for Silent Hill, the second game seems to be the most well-known and also the most standalone of the first three, making it a good test case before moving ahead with the more-connected Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3. I don’t know enough about Fatal Frame II to know for sure why it was picked, but my guess is something similar to the reasoning for SH2R.)

The first Fatal Frame was released in 2001, during the original golden age of survival horror, and was followed by four more sequels by the end of 2014. Developed by Koei Tecmo, the initial three games were launched on Playstation 2 before the series made the jump to Nintendo consoles for the fourth and fifth entries. It appears that at some point Nintendo had obtained an ownership stake in the series of some kind,¹ but I’m not certain if that is still the case. The franchise has a pretty loyal cult following but has unfortunately struggled commercially with the total combined sales of the series being less than 1.3 million copies as of 2014.² (For comparison, the original Silent Hill sold more than 2 million copies.) As with Silent Hill, the majority of the Fatal Frame games are not currently available to purchase on PC. In fact, up until 2021 none of the games could be played on PC without emulation. Starting that year, however, Koei Tecmo began to release Windows ports of both Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (formerly a Nintendo Wii exclusive) and Fatal Frame V: Maiden of Black Water (formerly a Nintendo Wii U exclusive). This was a particularly notable development, as Mask of the Lunar Eclipse had also never received an official English localization before the new port.

As opposed to the other games in the franchise, which (from how I understand it) are all connected in some way through their characters or stories, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is a standalone title. This, along with some issues I’d heard about Maiden of Black Water’s PC port, made Mask of the Lunar Eclipse a tempting starting point for me. The game takes place largely inside a dilapidated mental hospital on Rogetsu Isle, an island that was the site of a strangely insular society that mysteriously died out a decade or so before the main story in some kind of calamity. The hospital was the site of extensive research into Moonlight Syndrome, a debilitative disease that long plagued the island’s residents and would over time cause them to lose their memories and sense of identity, culminating in the process known as ‘Blossoming’ (in which their face would become distorted). The player takes control of three main protagonists (and an additional one in the prologue) across thirteen ‘phases’ or chapters, with each chapter focusing on one of the characters. Ruka and Misaki are two 17-year-old girls who were treated at the hospital when they were young and were somehow involved in the beginning of the aforementioned calamity before moving to the mainland. After the mysterious deaths of two of their friends, also former Rogetsu natives, the girls returned to the island in an attempt to remember just what happened ten years ago. The other main protagonist, Choshiro, is a private investigator hired by Ruka’s mother to find her daughter. Choshiro had been previously employed to save Ruka and her friends a decade earlier, and he too wants answers.

For some reason, before starting the game, I worried that I might find its storytelling too slow and not compelling enough to hold my interest throughout. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that, to the contrary, the story and world-building are among Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s strongest elements. It was a risky choice to split the game up between three main characters whose paths rarely cross. There was a good chance that by doing so, the developers would create a game that felt unfocused and scattershot. They didn’t quite manage to entirely avoid this stumbling block – there were multiple times where the game would switch to another protagonist and I would have to rack my brain just to remember what they were last up to (even with the summaries that would begin each chapter), and this wasn’t helped by one of the main characters lacking a well-defined personality – but overall I thought it worked out very well. The separate storylines allowed the developers to introduce and explore important concepts (such as the hospital’s increasingly unethical experiments, introduced early in Choshiro’s story, or the potential power of the Moonsong as seen in Ruka’s story) more smoothly and organically than if there was just one protagonist trying to figure all of this out. The use of three central protagonists also allows the player to see the game’s major inciting events from several different angles and gives the game more opportunity to play with narrative conventions in intriguing ways. I’m not going to delve too deep into spoiler territory here, but I will say that this was particularly evident in Choshiro’s story, which went in a direction I wasn’t expecting. The overall story hooked me from early on and continued to do so through to the end.

The game does such a good job as well of doling out enough intriguing lore tidbits (through both flashbacks and the tried-and-true survival horror staple of documents laying around) to make Rogetsu Isle feel like a fully developed society with its own strange customs. Why are there so many masks? Why are the people so obsessed with the moon? What do their rituals mean? The way the answers to these and other questions are gradually revealed to the player alongside the events of the main plot is expertly done and goes a long way toward fleshing out the game’s main themes.

Speaking of themes, the game has a heavy focus on memory and the loss of identity. As mentioned before, the bulk of the game takes place inside a mental hospital, on an island where people regularly contract an illness (somewhat akin to dementia, but clearly supernatural in provenance) that causes increasing memory loss over time that erodes their very sense of identity. As the player encounters ghosts of patients, they learn about the patients’ backstories and varied ways they tried – to no avail – to hold on to their sense of self. One young boy, for example, hoarded as many objects as he could in his room in the hope that this would somehow stave off his forgetfulness. Another patient disassociated elements of her personality into her collection of dolls, believing that if she externalized parts of herself she would be less likely to lose them. The more we learn about what the residents of the hospital were going through, the more terrifying the whole situation becomes. This feels like a very different type of horror than what I encountered in the other psychologically oriented survival horror games I’ve played so far (the Silent Hill series, Signalis). It’s almost a more insidious horror, and it gives the game an incredibly unsettling atmosphere. We often take for granted just how much our memories shape ourselves. The thought of losing that is honestly one of the ideas that most scares me, and the game explores that concept very well.

Along with the focus on identity loss, the hospital setting contributes significantly to the game’s oppressive atmosphere. Like some of the best main locations in the genre (such as the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil or the Raccoon City Police Department from Resident Evil 2), there is enough detail and thought put into the hospital’s layout to make it feel like an actual place and enough variety to make it memorable and keep it from being too confusing. The game takes place entirely at night, so the corridors are often dark and lit only by the moonlight streaming in through the windows (especially nice given the game’s moon motif) which creates an ambiance that is both creepy and weirdly serene. As you progress into the patients’ rooms and the operating rooms, the environmental design (a patient’s increasingly erratic artwork, for example, or devices that look like torture implements) does a great job of conveying a growing sense of horror at just what the patients were facing, both from their disease and the doctors themselves.

My main problem with the game’s exploration element, though, is the pretty extensive backtracking. You are playing through three storylines, and in each one the characters are frequently progressing through the exact same areas of the hospital. This makes sense in-story, to an extent, but it begins to feel a little old-hat by the middle of the game. It also seemed like which doors were sealed and which could be opened changed from chapter to chapter, even in the same storyline, in a way that felt somewhat arbitrary and required the player to check every door every time. Some of this backtracking could have been broken up by more puzzles, similar to what was done with the Spencer Mansion in RE, but puzzles are relatively sparse in this game and few of the ones that are present really stood out to me (besides an infamously frustrating slide puzzle). On a related note, the game does this weird thing where whenever you pick up a key item it will automatically open the map and zoom in on the location where you need to bring the item. I wasn’t a fan of this, as I felt like it broke some of the immersion and came across as a little too hand-hold-y. It did seem like a lot of these issues were resolved by the last third of the game, though.

Outside of the story structure and themes, what most sets Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (and Fatal Frame as a whole) apart from the rest of the genre is its combat system. In every other survival horror game I’ve reviewed so far, you use weapons that make sense in the real world – guns and melee weapons like iron bars, baseball bats, or knives. In the Fatal Frame series, on the other hand, you use a seemingly innocuous object to fend off enemies: a camera. (Choshiro makes use of a different type of weapon, a flashlight, but it is very similar in principle.) Specifically, you use a Camera Obscura, a specialized camera with the power to exorcise ghosts. The idea is simple – take a picture of a ghost to damage it. The amount of damage caused by this is dependent on a number of factors, however. The longer you keep the camera trained squarely on the enemy before taking a picture, the more the camera will focus and the more damage will ultimately be dealt. There are various types of film (akin to ammo) that can be found or traded for, with some more powerful than others; you start with an infinite amount of the default (weakest) film, but the other types have a more finite supply. You can acquire different lenses for the camera as well, each of which has a unique ability (such as temporarily slowing enemies). By collecting blue and red stones, you can upgrade the Camera Obscura and the lenses respectively, allowing for more damage or faster reload times. It should be noted that Ruka and Misaki have different Camera Obscuras. While they are functionally the same, you have to upgrade them separately and they have separate supplies of film and lenses.

Ever since hearing about the Fatal Frame series, I’d always wondered how well a combat system focused around taking pictures would even work. I can’t say for sure about the other Fatal Frame games, but I really enjoyed how it was implemented here. You can’t just pop off a few shots or hits with an iron bar and then dodge or run for cover like in other games of the genre. If you want to do actual damage, you have to either keep the camera focused on the enemy for an extended period of time or try to time your trigger exactly when an enemy is about to strike in order to achieve a ‘Fatal Frame’. (The game doesn’t do a great job of explaining what exactly a Fatal Frame does, but from my experience it is more likely to stun an enemy and can allow you to do a quick chain of attacks in a row.) Having to keep your view centered squarely on the ghosts even as they come steadily nearer adds a nice and unique bit of tension (and even something of a scare factor) to the combat system. Seeking them out again after they’ve disappeared into a wall or teleported behind you is panic-inducing in a good way as well. (It helps that I found many of the ghost designs genuinely unsettling.)

It should be noted that there are actually three types of ghosts in the game, with only one type being involved in combat. Enemy ghosts are specifically referred to as ‘wraiths’. Throughout the game you will also encounter many ‘specters’, which are harmless ghosts that will briefly appear and carry out some kind of action like they would have done when they were alive. They only stick around for a few seconds, but if you can catch a picture of them then you will receive points that you can exchange for health items or film. A short cutscene will play whenever you encounter a new specter or wraith, and much like the game showing you where key items go I wasn’t the biggest fan of this as it drew your attention straight towards where the ghosts are rather than allowing you to find them more organically. The final type of ghosts is ‘revenants’, invisible ghosts akin to specters that will only show up on film once you have taken a photograph of their particular location. Wraiths involve more extensive gameplay than the others, so I will continue to refer to them as just ghosts for now.

There tends to be a lot of similarity to the ghosts’ attack patterns, especially early on. Typically they’ll move towards the protagonist, attack when they get close (either by striking with a weapon or by grabbing onto the player), teleport to a different part of the arena, and then repeat the process. Because of this similarity, the developers have to find other ways to add variety to the encounters. There are multiple instances where you are required to fight more than one ghost at the same time, for example, which adds some interesting complexity and chaos to the mix. Do you focus all your energy on one ghost at a time, and risk leaving yourself vulnerable to the others in the process? Or do you attempt to maneuver such that you can hit two or even three enemies at the same time, something that can be time consuming to set up and might cause you to miss better openings? Perhaps the most noticeable method the developers use to diversify combat, however, is in the environmental design. Almost every room in the hospital is different and poses its own unique challenges when encountering wraiths. The dining room is spacious but cluttered with tables and screens that can impede the player’s movement, for example, while narrow and winding hallways offer ghosts more opportunity to phase into the walls and get close to the player before they have a chance to react. Environments and room layouts have naturally always played a role in combat in the survival horror genre, but I never really noticed how much impact they could have before I played Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.

Unfortunately, my feelings on the game’s enemy encounters began to sour in the final few chapters of the game due to some frustrating design choices. Starting around Phase X, more and more of the ghosts have erratic movement patterns that seem to involve teleporting right up close to the player, attacking almost immediately, and then teleporting away. With the amount of time it takes to get the Camera Obscura up and into the proper position, it becomes nearly impossible to charge it up for more than a few seconds before you lose your window of opportunity, resulting in weaker attacks and prolonged battles. This is only exacerbated by some increasingly obnoxious arena design that further makes it difficult to get a bead on your opponent in time, culminating with one ghost that you have to battle twice while climbing a narrow spiral staircase. Each encounter begins to feel like a slow battle of attrition, with some taking me upwards of ten to fifteen minutes despite using high level film and an upgraded camera. These fights often don’t even feel that hard, just exhausting. In the early game, I quite looked forward to each wraith encounter; during the final chapters, I just wanted them over and done with. As if to rub salt in the wound, the game requires you to complete a music mini-game after beating the final boss, and if you get it wrong three times you have to repeat the boss fight all over again. At least the final boss fight didn’t take me as long to complete as some of the other encounters, but I still found this deeply annoying.

In general, I felt like the game was dragging quite a bit by the end. Those drawn-out battles in the final few chapters were definitely a contributing factor, but there are other reasons as well. Repetition is one component of this. For example, there are these black-and-white FMV-style cutscenes that will play when one of the characters remembers the events surrounding the inciting ritual, complete with distorted audio and film grain. These are a great addition at first, adding a lot to the unsettling atmosphere, but they begin to feel quite same-y after a while and don’t always progress the plot all that much. The aforementioned backtracking through the same areas of the hospital during each chapter also gets quite repetitive quite quick. I think the biggest factor, though, is just how long it takes to actually get anywhere. Every character’s walking speed is absurdly slow, and their running speed is probably on par with the walking speed in any other survival horror game. Outside of the 180 degree quick-turn, which is a godsend, most other simple maneuvering feels like it takes much longer than it should. Even opening a door seems weirdly time-consuming.

Still, though, there is a lot to like in this game. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is ultimately a very solid entry in the survival horror genre. It didn’t blow me away, but a solid combat loop and an intriguing and unsettling story centered around identity and memory can still make it an engrossing experience. I hope to be able to give other Fatal Frame games a try in the future.

Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space (2008), Alone in the Dark 1, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Fear the Spotlight, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Clock Tower: Rewind, White Day: A Labyrinth Called School, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Sorry We’re Closed, Fragile Reflection, Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2, You Will Die Here Tonight, Cronos: The New Dawn, My Friendly Neighborhood, Conscript, The Callisto Protocol

My Current Survival Horror Ranking:

1. Resident Evil (HD Remaster) (9.5/10)
2. Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
3. Signalis (9/10)
4. Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
5. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
6. Crow Country (8.5/10)
7. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (8/10)
8. Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
9. Silent Hill f (8/10)
10. Resident Evil 4 (7/10)

Up Next: Cronos: The New Dawn

Header image courtesy of Rock Paper Shotgun.

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1. Endgadget ↩︎
2. Retroware ↩︎