Fatal Frame III: The Tormented
Scaring the piss out of yourself has never been so much fun.
Published: November 18, 2005
Poor Rei just can’t forgive herself. Though everyone would and probably has told her that there’s not thing she could have done to prevent the car accident that would leave her fiancée dead and her with a persistent sense of guilt, she just can’t get over it.
Even as a freelance photographer, little gets her mind off things, but when she suddenly stumbles across the image of her husband-to-be in a dilapidated wreck of a house, she’s suddenly sucked inexorably toward the spirit realm. Quite literally, she’s repeatedly pulled into the House of Sleep, a massive haunted mansion, every time she goes to sleep.
Oh, and then there’s the mystery of a bruise that’s slowly taking over her body. One that she seems to share with a rather large-breasted creepy crawly she meets around the same time she follows her lost love.
Fatal Frame III is quite literally almost identical to the first two games. That is to say it has the storyline cohesiveness of the first game with a few of the combat upgrades that the second game offered, plus a few key improvements to the pre-selected camera angles that the game employs. You’ll still clunk around with the same lightly unresponsive controls and combat ghosts the same way (by snapping their photo with the Camera Obscura, which has exorcising powers depending on the user).
Still, for as little as the games have changed, they’re still a very specific kind of scariness that’s unlike anything else out there. There’s a constant, looming kind of fear that creeps up the back of your neck, that constantly sets your hair on end, but unlike something like, say Silent Hill, the game evocates a kind of compassion for the tormented souls that attack you.
It’s this mixture of fear and empathy that the game stirs so well that makes it so captivating, and unlike other games where you can hack or shoot your way through the enemy, to actually kill the ghosts, you have to look into the restrictive view of the camera’s viewfinder, thus eliminating your peripheral view, and then stare down the approaching spirits until the last second when you snap the shutter to damage them,
If timed right, the shot will open up the opportunity to damage them more and knock them back for more points. These points are then used at any time to upgrade the camera, boosting its attack, range and reload time in addition the film you can find scattered around the levels that add more damage or have different abilities.
Even as a freelance photographer, little gets her mind off things, but when she suddenly stumbles across the image of her husband-to-be in a dilapidated wreck of a house, she’s suddenly sucked inexorably toward the spirit realm. Quite literally, she’s repeatedly pulled into the House of Sleep, a massive haunted mansion, every time she goes to sleep.
Oh, and then there’s the mystery of a bruise that’s slowly taking over her body. One that she seems to share with a rather large-breasted creepy crawly she meets around the same time she follows her lost love.
Fatal Frame III is quite literally almost identical to the first two games. That is to say it has the storyline cohesiveness of the first game with a few of the combat upgrades that the second game offered, plus a few key improvements to the pre-selected camera angles that the game employs. You’ll still clunk around with the same lightly unresponsive controls and combat ghosts the same way (by snapping their photo with the Camera Obscura, which has exorcising powers depending on the user).
Still, for as little as the games have changed, they’re still a very specific kind of scariness that’s unlike anything else out there. There’s a constant, looming kind of fear that creeps up the back of your neck, that constantly sets your hair on end, but unlike something like, say Silent Hill, the game evocates a kind of compassion for the tormented souls that attack you.
It’s this mixture of fear and empathy that the game stirs so well that makes it so captivating, and unlike other games where you can hack or shoot your way through the enemy, to actually kill the ghosts, you have to look into the restrictive view of the camera’s viewfinder, thus eliminating your peripheral view, and then stare down the approaching spirits until the last second when you snap the shutter to damage them,
If timed right, the shot will open up the opportunity to damage them more and knock them back for more points. These points are then used at any time to upgrade the camera, boosting its attack, range and reload time in addition the film you can find scattered around the levels that add more damage or have different abilities.
