Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Horror

Players: 1

.

Review:

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is a Graphic Adventure game with strong Horror elements first released on Wii U in 2015, with a port to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021. While I have generally made it a point not to review Wii U games that were released on Nintendo Switch, I’m making an exception for this one, as this is a game that makes some unique use of the Wii U’s capabilities, and I wanted to see how this version holds up. When I get around to reviewing the Nintendo Switch version I will undoubtedly be comparing it to this release.

Maiden of Black Water is the fifth game in the Fatal Frame series, though it is only the fourth to see release outside of Japan (the fourth game in the series, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, only just recently saw release in the form of a remaster for modern platforms. However, Maiden of Black Water almost didn’t get released outside of Japan either – its creators were reluctant to bring the game to the West, and when they did so, it was only released on the Wii U eShop, rather than having any sort of physical release.

Like the other games in the series before it, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water features a story that has the game’s protagonists (Maiden has three) exploring an area haunted by malevolent ghosts, with the only method of defense against these deadly spooks being the mystical Camera Obscura, a camera capable of repelling and even exorcizing the dead by taking photographs of them. This story’s protagonists find themselves drawn into a search for a missing person (as well as their own missing mentor and comrade) who disappeared on the cursed Hikami Mountain, known for its suicides and its history of terrible accidents and bloody rituals.

Graphically, Maiden of Black Water has to be one of the more impressive-looking games on the Wii U, with absolutely gorgeous, detailed 3D character models that actually reflect the dampness of the environment, an important gameplay element as this game’s ghosts are tied to the mountain’s haunted waters, and whenever your character is drenched they become more susceptible to this influence too. The game’s lighting and shadows are also excellent, and while the environments themselves are merely okay, there’s plenty of imagination that has gone into making these locations memorably chilling.

I know that some others have complained about this game’s voice understated voice acting, but I actually think I like it – Horror games full of shouts and screams are a dime a dozen, and I think it’s understandable when we see the game’s human characters are frozen in terror to the point where they can’t speak, or traumatized to the point where they speak in monotone. The game’s sounds are wonderfully foreboding too – this game does a fantastic job building atmosphere, though I don’t think it succeeds quite as well as some of the best games in the genre when it comes to creating feelings of true terror.

However, I think the biggest failing of this game has to be its awkward controls. Yes, the entire reason I’m reviewing this game on Wii U is because of the unique control scheme, which comes up every time you use the game’s central camera, and it simultaneously seems perfectly-suited for this game and a huge hassle dragging it down.

When you need to use the camera (which is all the time in the game), you bring up the Wii U gamepad and stare through it, like looking at the viewfinder on an actual camera, even being able to turn it using the Wii U gamepad’s motion-sensing abilities, or rotate it to change the view from landscape to portrait.

The problem with this is that you’re still using the analog stick to move your character while you’re doing it, and changing the Wii U gamepad’s orientation makes it harder to do this properly. What’s more, I found that on occasion my gamepad lost track of where it was looking, and I needed to move it around to get it reoriented again.

However, even beyond the frustrations of all of this was the fact that whenever I wasn’t using the camera, when the Wii U gamepad was simply acting as a copy of the image on the TV screen, I felt like I was being given strong incentive to just watch the entire game through the gamepad’s inferior screen, because I knew that soon enough I would need to respond quickly and switch to the gamepad, and the disorientation of swapping would lose me a few seconds as I try to get re-acquainted with the different screen.

In theory, I love so much about what this game is trying to do. Unlike so many games on the Wii U, Maiden of Black Water is actually trying to put the Wii U’s unique features to good use. The problem is, while it makes sense for the theme of the game, and it seems like a perfect fit for the Wii U’s unique features, it’s ultimately highlighting why those features haven’t generally been put to use in most Wii U games.

Despite all the issues I have with Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, I don’t hate this game. I think it has a great concept, an outstanding presentation, and an enticing story. And when the camera mechanics work, they can be really immersive. Unfortunately, I just feel like they don’t work out that way far too often. I’ll be curious to try the Nintendo Switch version of the game, see how this game has made the transition to a platform without the Wii U’s unique features. But in the meantime I think the Wii U version of this game is a fantastic but highly flawed entry in the Horror genre.

tl;dr – Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is a Graphic Adventure game with strong Horror elements. This is the fifth game in the Fatal Frame series, where the protagonists fend off killer ghosts using a magical camera, and this installment involves the search for missing persons on a mountain with a dark past. The presentation and atmosphere in this game is outstanding, and there is some extremely creative use of the Wii U’s unique features here… though I think the incorporation of the Wii U gamepad’s features may have been a bit too ambitious, resulting in a lot of unnecessary frustration. This release is still an extremely unique Horror game with a lot going for it, but there’s a lot you have to put up with to get to that good stuff.

Grade: C+

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