My first ever Fatal Frame game! So as a fan of survival horror games, Fatal Frame was a series I had always heard about but never got a chance to play. I remember watching my friend's dad play it once back on the PS2 but never got to play it myself until this game. Oddly it seems like Koei Tecmo is remastering the series in reverse as this is obviously the 5th game and they remastered the 4th one afterwards, so hopefully they get to first 3 games lol But each game, is pretty much its own stand alone story, so I felt comfortable starting here. But what did I think?

Starting off with the combat which was a very unique experience for me. In most survival horror your weapons are usually guns or melee weapons but in the Fatal Frame series you use the camera obscura to take pictures of the ghosts in order to do damage to them. And if you time it right you can get either a Fatal Frame shot or a shutter chance shot for extra damage. This is punctuated by the different types of film you get that act as your ammo, dealing with various different amounts of damage and taking faster or quicker to load. You also get different lenses that have different effects based on when you do a special shot. My personal favorite was the one that would freeze ghosts in place until you shot at them again which even works on the bosses. My only complaint with combat is just the amount of health enemies and bosses have (especially the final boss!) as they take as many photos as an instagram model to go down.

I also really enjoyed the story for this game as it was pretty emotional by the end of it. The characters can come off as wooden when you first start playing as they don’t emote very much or even say that much in the cutscenes but I grew more attached to them as I played. Much of this requires you to read the various notes and diary entries in the levels to figure out what is going on with this mountain and to know what the characters are feeling. But once you do, it's quite a rich story and as someone who isn’t as familiar with Japanese culture, it was interesting to read all the lore. Also the cinematography in the cutscenes was very good with me taking a few screenshots during them. Adding to that,I also loved how when you defeat the ghosts if you touch them in time, you get a cutscene to see how they died originally and it was very cool and quite haunting.

Now onto my negatives which are really 3 things. Firstly, as you explore the levels your character will get wet due to the rain, with water being a big theme of the story. But once you get drenched in water your character is more susceptible to being grabbed by a ghost hand each time you want to pick up a diary entry or some resources on the ground. This got really annoying, as it doesn’t do as much damage to you and then you're stuck watching the animation of your character trying to escape the SCARY GHOST HAND WHOOOOOOOOOOOO! You can mitigate this by using a resource that dries yourself off, but it gets really annoying after a while. Secondly, this game recycles the same levels a lot throughout the chapters. Sometimes, you will often have to travel through old areas to get to a new level, but sometimes it's just the same levels for the whole chapter and it also gets frustrating after a while. You can’t tell me there aren't other areas on this damn mountain.

Lastly, the final boss was a complete nightmare to fight and not in a scary way, more in a frustrating way. They just have so much health that it's ridiculous and I burned through my resources fighting them really quickly. There’s also some very specific timing you have to do in order to beat them completely and it ties into what ending you get for the main character, Yuri which is also great.

In conclusion, despite my frustrations I still really enjoyed this game! Obviously this is the only Fatal Frame game I’ve played so I can’t compare it to the others, but it's a good start for me. I look forward to playing the 4th game now.

jank asf but pretty good

The controls are too confusinging for me and moving your mouse is too slow ive but it all the way high in the settings and its still slow.