One of the most rewarding aspects of the Fatal Frame games is how their controls continue to refine themselves with each new release and generation of gaming.
They’re quick, effective, and feel like they exist to creep you out just as much as they’re there to convey story beats. They almost feel like snuff films in nature. These are usually accompanied by cut scenes that play out with a certain abrupt harshness. A random enemy in Silent Hill or Resident Evil is just acting out their impulses and has no agenda, but the ghosts in Fatal Frame have clear vendettas. This gives every encounter so much more impact and you almost feel for the vengeful spirits that try to kill you. It shines a light on the darkness of humanity in a way that many other survival horror titles don’t experiment with to such great detail. These are people who have been targeted and murdered for terrible purposes. This isn’t just an outbreak that infects without discrimination. They often involve sinister cults or other dark territory, which finds a way to make these scary visuals more upsetting and even feel grounded. These ghosts are scary, but the Fatal Frame games always feature an extremely disturbing backstory for these plagued spirits. The Fatal Frame titles requires you to take pictures of lost spirits with your Camera Obscura in order to capture their past pain and help them move on in the process. It’s the kind of experience where something like surround sound and a proper audio setup really go a long way and were priorities during development. It feels more residential and homegrown, like this horror hits at a personal level. The environments that fill the games are usually something like an abandoned village or gothic, dilapidated Japanese housing, which is arguably creepier than something ornate like Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion. The original game also loosely pulls from real events for the inspiration of its haunted story.
So if that’s your jam, then these atmospheric titles are absolutely for you.
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The tone of Makoto Shibata and Keisuke Kikuchi’s Fatal Frame series is also more representative of Asian horror cinema than any other survival horror video game series that’s out there (it’s pretty fitting that the director of the Japanese live-action Fatal Frame film also directed a Ju-on sequel).
It’s a brilliant game design that finds a way to increase the fear while it also doesn’t compromise gameplay. The games also inherently force tension in the way that you explore the rooms and slowly navigate with your camera, shifting over to the first-person perspective. In fact, Fatal Frame actually encourages you to let your enemies get as close as possible before you snap the flash because you’ll get a higher score and deal more damage that way, yet it also helps intensify this terror to its breaking point. In Fatal Frame, a camera is your only weapon and you have to allow the attacking ghosts to get right up in your face. As much fun as it can be to mow down these threats, the Fatal Frame series (or Project Zero, as it’s known in Japan and Europe) chisels out a very unique place for itself in the genre due to how it approaches its horror. There are plenty of frightening monsters that fuel the survival horror games that give us so much joy. We examine what makes the Fatal Frame games so terrifying, why they’re so important to the survival horror genre, and the series’ best scares.