![]() Hikami at anywhere near 30 frames per second. It was actually a bit shocking – even when I was standing still, doing absolutely nothing – the Switch just couldn’t handle rendering the forests of Mt. While everything looks crisp and runs smoothly in handheld play, connecting the Switch to the TV turns any outdoor environment into a choppy mess. I’m also frustrated by the remarkably poor performance of this game in docked mode. But by the third time, I was considerably less thrilled about doing so. That’s not to say that these locations aren’t worth experiencing – they’re remarkably detailed and realistic facsimiles of Japan’s natural scenery and architecture, and are fascinating to explore the first time. Hikami all the time, but when a character you just rescued from certain death gets lured back to basically the same location one or two episodes later for the exact same reason, the premise loses a lot of its excitement in that moment. This is a game in which characters go missing on Mt. You’ll visit the same handful of environments many times over this game’s 15-20 hour runtime, often for plot reasons that feel contrived at best. The story itself also progresses at a snail’s pace for seemingly no reason than to pad out the game’s length. It doesn’t feel like this is trying to be a tribute to old-school style controls, either – it just feels poorly executed. Not only do they walk and “run” ridiculously slowly considering the precarious situations they are often experiencing, getting them and the third-person camera to turn and face the way you want to look or move is an exercise in frustration. Firstly, characters move with all of the finesse of an eighteen-wheeler. Maiden of Black Water, however, does not accomplish that balanced pace. ![]() This isn’t me being impatient, as I have no problem with a game that progresses less rapidly as long as it does so deliberately. You’ll do this slowly, though – sometimes much too slowly. Hikami as she seeks both answers and peace from the spirits who seek to destroy her. And so, for the next fourteen chapters, you guide her (and a handful of others) through the labyrinthine forests and abandoned structures of Mt. The only reason Yuri – the game’s main protagonist – gets involved is because the stakes become personal to her early on, after a friend of hers goes missing at the same tine as another disappearance. It’s a place that seemingly lures people to their own demise quite frequently (and graphically – be warned), and yet its presence in the lives of those who live near it has a semblance of normalcy about it all. Hikami, a towering landmass in the rural countryside of Japan that has a centuries-long history of bringing death to those who visit it, and even those who watch the sun set behind it. Maiden of Black Water is set primarily on and adjacent to Mt. There are ghosts, sure, but their presence is grounded in reality – to the credit of the game’s copious lore and restrained storytelling. This is a game in which people lose everything simply because forces beyond their understanding view them as tools that can be manipulated and destroyed. It excels in building dread, creating a sense of bleak and inescapable hopelessness – something that’s deeply relatable to many people. ![]() Fatal Frame is ostensibly a series about ghosts – something that in of itself I generally don’t’ find overly frightening – but Maiden of Black Water wracked my nerves more than pretty much any other horror game I’ve played. Generally, games that attempt to use copious gore or jump scares, for example, do little to unsettle me and can often be bizarrely comedic. In my experience, horror is one one of the more challenging genres to critique due to the high level of variance in what “scary” means to different people. Fortunately, Maiden of Black Water remains a darkly compelling experience that all horror fans owe it to themselves to experience – even if it feels rougher around the edges than it did originally. But despite possessing a setting and tone that feels special compared to modern day ghost stories, Maiden of Black Water’s deep reliance on the versatility of the Wii U GamePad left me curious to see how it would fair without its second screen. Quickly falling out of the spotlight upon the rapid decline of the Wii U, I was cynical about its prospects of being ported to the Switch and thus was pleasantly surprised to see it announced for current consoles earlier this year. ![]() Perhaps the only thing scarier than Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water – the 2014 entry in Koei Tecmo’s long-running series of horror games about photographing ghosts – is how much time it took for this game to come to modern platforms.
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