One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but it is interesting how we’ve now had three important survival horror franchises start their modern remake campaigns with their second games. I know that circumstances are slightly different with Resident Evil, as the first game had already gotten a remake way back in 2001, and with Silent Hill and Fatal Frame it likely comes down to the second entries being both the most well-known games in their respective series and standalone titles that can be understood without any knowledge of the first games, but it still feels like a strange coincidence nonetheless.
Anyway, the original Fatal Frame (Project Zero in Japan and Europe) released on the PlayStation 2 in Japan in late 2001 and in the rest of the world in early 2002. Work on a sequel began almost immediately, largely following the formula of the first game while incorporating some changes based on player feedback. One of the biggest areas of focus was the story. Director Makoto Shibata has said that the team had received comments indicating that many players found the first Fatal Frame too scary to finish. It was believed that by fleshing out a deeper story for the second game such players would be hooked more strongly and be more willing to continue onward. Shibata claims that this new, more intriguing story came to him nearly fully-formed in a dream.1 It also appeared that the difficulty level was too uneven, as players seemed polarized over whether it was too hard or too easy with little middle ground, so an emphasis was placed on finding a better difficulty balance for the sequel.2 The game, titled Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly in North America, officially released in late Winter 2003 and received highly positive reviews.3 In the years since its launch, it has frequently been considered the best game in the series, among the best survival horror games, and among the scariest games of all time.4,5 It should come as no surprise, then, in this aforementioned age of modern survival horror remakes, that Koei Tecmo would eventually come around to remaking Crimson Butterfly. Such a remake was announced in September 2025 and launched only six months later on March 12, 2026, and I could not wait to get my hands on it.
Fatal Frame II is focused on teenage twin sisters Mayu and Mio, who start the game wandering through a forest visiting locations where they used to play together as children. While stopping by a stream Mayu is distracted by a glowing red butterfly and follows it off into the trees. Desperate not to lose her, Mio gives chase and manages to catch up just as they pass through into some kind of strange eternal night. The twins had, as they soon realize, entered the perimeter of the cursed Minakami Village, a mountain town that had seemingly disappeared without a trace in some kind of calamity many decades earlier. Haunted by the spirits of its former residents, Minakami has become a death trap that consumes all who enter its borders – and now it’s up to Mio and Mayu to find a way out.
The original Fatal Frame II, at least as I understand it, used a mix of third-person fixed camera angles for exploration and first-person perspective for combat. The remake, by contrast, abandons the fixed camera angles in favor of the over-the-shoulder style introduced in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. (Combat remains in first-person.) This works quite well overall, although it does run into the issue that a lot of remakes that have switched away from fixed camera angles have encountered, where events that were originally designed to be a visual focal point can now be easily missed because the camera is no longer pointed directly at them. I most noticed this early on, such as when you’re supposed to see a ball come eerily rolling down a set of stairs. Instead I just heard a thud and when I swung the camera over the ball was already at the bottom. It definitely made the moment less impactful than it could have been.
In general, the game is mechanically very similar to Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (the only other Fatal Frame game I’ve played) but feels a lot smoother and like less of a slog. A large part of this comes down to a scaling back of interruptions to the game’s flow. Picking up a key item no longer forces the map to automatically open and zoom in on the location where the item must be brought. The appearance of a specter (benign ghosts that briefly appear and perform a short task, during which time they can be photographed) similarly no longer always triggers a cutscene showing exactly where the specter can be found. A quick jingle and a light on the Camera Obscura’s UI indicate the presence of nearby specters instead, and it’s up to the player to figure out their location. In addition to improving the game’s flow, these two changes also serve to make the game feel decidedly less hand-hold-y than Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. Opening a door does still take a few seconds, but it feels shorter than in Lunar Eclipse. Pressing the grab button to pick up an item does sometimes result in a scene of the protagonist slowly reaching out to it, but this no longer occurs every single time you find an item. (Rather, it seems closer to forty to fifty percent of the time – the rest of the time it just shows the item get added to your inventory.) You don’t have to hold down the grab button the whole time this occurs anymore, either. And, perhaps most importantly, Mio moves noticeably faster than any of the player characters in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. In that game, even the running speed felt like a slow walk. Here, it feels like actually running. It’s refreshing. The ghost hands – a mechanic that was apparently first included in Lunar Eclipse and annoyingly became a series staple – do unfortunately make a return, and a similar mechanic is introduced as well where a wraith will occasionally be waiting directly behind a door when you open it. They’re less obnoxious than the ghost hands but still can become at least a little annoying by the end.
The combat system is also quite similar to that of Mask of the Lunar Eclipse with some notable improvements. Wraiths are fought using the Camera Obscura, which can be upgraded using collectibles (prayer beads, in this case) to increase stats like film reload speed, range, or power. Multiple different camera filters (akin to Lunar Eclipse’s lenses) are acquired that have special effects both inside and outside of battle. And there are a number of types of film that can be used as well, with some being more powerful but slower to reload while others are weaker but reload faster. You have an infinite supply of the default film, Type-07, from the start, but all of the other types are finite. Unlike in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse film cannot be bought at save points, so you are entirely dependent on what you find lying around. This doesn’t seem to be an issue at first, as there are a lot of them scattered throughout the village; however, you come back to the same locations repeatedly and so by the end of the game you can suddenly find yourself running low without much more to find if you aren’t too careful. It adds a nice bit of ammo management into the mix, something that I appreciate in survival horror games like this.
In Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the amount of damage the Camera Obscura dished out was highly dependent on how long you focused on the wraith’s face (illustrated by a circular bar that would fill the longer you did so). This could get very frustrating in the late game due to wraiths’ increased movement speeds and teleportation abilities and cramped environments that would allow the ghosts to easily slip through walls and out of sight. Crimson Butterfly Remake does retain aspects of this mechanic, with ghosts being out of focus the farther away they are and the camera thus being less effective, but it puts a lot more emphasis on focal points. These are a pattern of dots on the camera’s lens, and when a shot is taken a ghost will receive increased damage based on how many of them are within the ghost’s outline. This both adds a strategic element to the fights and allows the player to get a quick shot in and still do a good bit of damage in the process, ensuring that the fights don’t drag out too long.
One enemy combat mechanic that is entirely new to the remake (at least from how I understand it) is aggravation. When a wraith’s health gets low, there is a chance they will enter an aggravated state. They will begin to glow red, gain back a chunk of their health, get a defense boost, and act more aggressively. Getting them back below a certain level of health – indicated on their health bar – will revert them back to normal. From what I’ve gathered, this mechanic was pretty broken at launch; ghosts would become aggravated multiple times in the course of the same fight, constantly getting health back in the process, and even getting a Fatal Frame (a special type of powerful shot that can occur when you interrupt an enemy attack) against them while in this state would do minimal damage. This was fixed in a patch a few days later, and I never ran into these issues. I’m still fairly ambivalent toward the aggravated concept, though. It can add a good bit of challenge, but, as with the whole ‘ghost hiding behind the door’ thing, I found it increasingly annoying the more times I encountered it – especially with some of the more difficult enemies in the later sections of the game, who were almost guaranteed to become aggravated.
On the atmosphere front, Crimson Butterfly Remake knocks it out of the park. Minakami Village is just such a fantastic horror setting. The winding streets, reminiscent of Silent Hill f (not surprising as it also takes place in a small Japanese village), and the suffocatingly constant darkness on their own would be enough to make the place unforgettable. But that’s not all there is to it, as there are multiple key spots throughout the town that are highly memorable in their own right. There’s a field of gently swaying tall grasses that you must pass through, for example, that feels particularly eerie. One house was owned by a dollmaker and as such is littered with dolls of various size – some of which are out to harm you. Another building, a mansion known as the Kurosawa House, serves as the setting for a large chunk of the game and feels almost Spencer Mansion-esque at times. There is even a hill from which you can look out over the entire village, a surprisingly beautiful sight amongst all the heart-pounding tension. Setting a horror game in a small town isn’t necessarily a very original idea, but Minakami still manages to feel unique and the environments are executed extremely well (outside of some occasional issues with pop-in). And while the story isn’t quite as fascinating as Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s story (although it is still good in its own right), there are a sizeable number of side quests included in Crimson Butterfly Remake that serve to provide depth and insight into the past of the village and its residents.
Further, I do appreciate the extent to which the game centers itself on Mio and Mayu, both in terms of gameplay and story. I especially liked how the personalities of the twins are paralleled with those of Yae and Sae. Yae and Sae (avoiding spoilers as much as possible) were a pair of twin girls who played a role in the downfall of Minakami Village all those years ago. Both Mayu and Sae suffer from clear codependency issues, each of them terrified that their sister is going to leave them behind some day, and it’s intriguing to see how that dynamic within the sisters’ relationships affects the game’s events both in the present and the past. What’s also interesting is how the developers managed to reflect Mio and Mayu’s relationship through the game’s mechanics. The player controls Mio for the entirety of the game, so we largely only observe things from her perspective. This leaves some of Mayu’s motivations up to interpretation and helps to highlight the differences between the two of them. Mayu follows Mio around for substantial swaths of time, essentially as an escort mission, sticking as close to Mio as possible except for during combat where she cowers in place and begs Mio to help her. Again, this serves to emphasize Mayu’s almost obsessive attachment to Mio and her resulting struggles with independence. (I know I’ve been critical of escort missions in other games – like Resident Evil 4 or Silent Hill 4 – but I didn’t have a problem with it here. Mayu rarely gets in the way, and while ghosts can attack her and she can apparently die she was never killed during my playthrough.) They do love each other, though, and I enjoy that they illustrated this by including a dedicated button for holding hands. This is useful both for ensuring Mayu doesn’t fall behind and because it actually causes Mio to regain health over time, but it’s also just kind of sweet to see.
I can’t say how well it works as a remake, as I haven’t played the original Fatal Frame II, but as a survival horror game I found a lot to love in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake. Sure, there are some annoyances – the return of the ghost hands, some applications of the aggravation mechanic, a ridiculously easy final boss, and some stealth sections that didn’t feel necessary, as some of the big examples. These don’t come close to outweighing the positives for me, however. The atmosphere is incredibly creepy, the gameplay feels noticeably better than in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the character dynamics are interesting, and it’s great to be able to delve deep in the disturbing history of the village. Playing this has once again affirmed my interest in the Fatal Frame series, and I am hoping with all my heart that this game does well enough that it convinces Koei Tecmo to continue supporting the series in the future.
Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil (OG), Resident Evil 2 (OG), Resident Evil 3 Remake, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Resident Evil Revelations, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space 2, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Alone in the Dark (2024), Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, 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, My Friendly Neighborhood, Conscript, The Callisto Protocol, Penumbra: Overture, Penumbra: Black Plague, Penumbra: Requiem, Lamentum, Outlast, Outlast 2, Carnival Massacre, Late Homework, Routine, Alan Wake 2, White Night, Onimusha, Onimusha 2, Heavy Metal Death Can, Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Remothered: Broken Porcelain
My Current Survival Horror Ranking:
- Resident Evil Remake (9.5/10)
- Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
- Signalis (9/10)
- Dead Space (2008) (9/10)
- Resident Evil Requiem (9/10)
- Cronos: The New Dawn (9/10)
- Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
- Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
- Crow Country (8.5/10)
- Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (8.5/10)
- Subversive Memories (8/10)
- Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (8/10)
- Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
- Silent Hill f (8/10)
- Resident Evil 4 (7/10)
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent (7/10)
- Alone in the Dark (1992) (7/10)
Up Next: Resident Evil 3 Remake
Header image courtesy of Nintendo.
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