This is it ladies and gentlemen, our final stop on the tour of terror. The Fatal Frame series ranks as the scariest I’ve played and Fatal Frame 3 is the last game that freaked me out. What makes it such a great example of horror is that it is the culmination of what I’ve talked about over the last 7 articles. That horror design requires a combination of great atmosphere and design, and Fatal Frame 3 had both in spades.
While Fatal Frame 3 is of course the third in the series, like Silent Hill it’s not necessary to play them all to understand the basic premise. Here’s “the story so far” you need to know to start playing #3: magic camera busts Japanese ghosts.
Now that may sound like the concept for an awesome sequel to Ghostbusters but the designers knew that the game needed one hell of an atmosphere to scare people, and they definitely succeeded. The basic plot is that the protagonist: Rei has been cursed. Each night when she goes to sleep she dreams about the Manor of Sleep: a run-down Japanese mansion which just so happens to be haunted by ghosts. The curse which was given to her by an evil ghost caused a tattoo to spread across her body and once it’s complete she is done for.
Each night she must brave the mansion and try to find out how to break the curse. To make matters worse the game goes by Freddy Kruger rules, so dying in the manor means death in real life.
The atmosphere of the mansion was all about an overwhelming feeling of isolation and despair. There was no support once inside; it’s just the mansion, you and the ghosts. Because this is an old style mansion, there was no electricity, meaning that the only other light source besides the moon was lanterns that provide very little light. Upping the mood, there were very few musical arrangements, mainly for fighting, instead the ambient noises make up the majority of the noises you hear during play.
To make things creeper, many ambient noises are random, and were heard if the player was taking too long or just out of the blue. This little fact was not good for me as I have to explain something about my house. I have one of those older homes that make all kinds of noises at night.
Here’s a scenario for you: I was sitting down in my den playing Fatal Frame 3 at around 3 in the morning. Everyone else in my house was asleep and everywhere else besides where I was at was dark. So I’m playing the game staring at the screen, when I heard noises coming from the pitch black hallway 15 feet away from me. You could not pay me enough to go down that hallway that night.
To provide contrast, the game also lets players explore Rei’s apartment during the day. These sections are established to be safe early on as the ghosts only exist in the manor. However, without spoiling it too much, this eventually changes and the first time I notice it, I swear my heart stopped for about 3 seconds.
So far I’ve spent the majority of this article just discussing how the game looks and sounds, and I haven’t even talked about the ghosts or gameplay yet, which really says a lot for the atmosphere. The ghosts of the Fatal Frame series aren’t your standard boogey-men or outlandish creatures you see in cartoons. Instead the ghosts look like humans … who want to strangle you to death. Some of them look average, while others appeared as how they died and chase you around with limbs bent backwards or the neck snapped.
To complete the circle, Fatal Frame 3’s gameplay fits perfectly with the atmosphere. To battle the ghosts in the manor, Rei uses the “camera obscura” aka “magic camera” to exorcist the ghost. The player could equip different types of film which determine how much damage was possible with each shot. To play into the horror of the game, in order to do the most damage, players had to take excellent shots of the ghosts. Once the player was focused on the face, the camera would charge up and if the player waits just before the ghost attacked, they would do increased damage.
Now the part that you have to realize was that while you’re waiting for the right moment. You had a ghost moaning and saying all kinds of stuff as it floated ever closer to strangling you. And when I said you had to wait until the last second I meant it, as the ghost had to be at the point where their hands were around Rei’s neck to get the perfect shot.
The best part about the gameplay and atmosphere interaction was that fighting ghosts is different than fighting monsters, hobos or zombies. Ghosts don’t make sounds when they are nearby, or need to worry about the lay of the environment to attack. Instead they can just pop out of a wall or come up from the floor right behind you to give you a heart attack. One area has the player trying to explore the mansion without the aid of the camera, forcing the player into a tense game of hide-and seek with the ghosts. As without the camera your only option is to sneak around and avoid them.
As the final example of the game scaring me, the first time I played Fatal Frame 3 I was trying it out at GameStop. Because I was in the store I had to play with the sound off. I was just standing there while people were walking by when a ghost on the screen appeared out of the wall next to Rei and attacked. I literally jumped in the middle of the store and everyone stared at me for a second. After that I quickly left before people could start asking any questions.
Fatal Frame 3 is currently the last game to scare me and it really did knock the remaining fear out of me. If you can beat it while playing in a dark room alone, it’s hard to be scared by anything else.
And that takes us to the end of this series. I hope that I didn’t scare everyone too much. More importantly I hope that I showed what makes the survival horror genre so interesting compared to other genres and gave some food for thought for the designers out there. This whole series came from Resident Evil: Revelations director: Masachika Kawata saying that survival horror is no longer a viable genre . I think an eight article series showed that I slightly disagree with him on that statement.
