3.5/5 ★ – Artagah's review of Luigi's Mansion 3.

I was somewhat biased going into this game due to all the super positive critic reviews I've previously read and seen, but I expected this game to be way better than it ended up being. While absolutely gorgeous, with high quality assets and really beautiful, well themed environments, Luigi's Mansion 3 turned out feeling a lot worse to play than I could have ever predicted. Nintendo generally NAILS how it feels to control your character, which includes the basic movement as well as all of the mechanics/verbs the player uses to interact with the world. It also includes things like perfect environment collision as well as reliability of mechanic execution in every possible scenario. They generally nail puzzle design and messaging, as well as gameplay teaching. They nail in-game/in-environment hints and they always make sure that you speak the game design's language perfectly and it's entirely up to you and your skill as a player to get through any challenge. Unfortunately, Luigi's Mansion 3 was often the opposite in every regard. Luigi felt bad to move and control, with sprint kicking in after 10 years of walking automatically, with no way to manually control it, and the blacklight button being positioned in the worst place imaginable. I also ended up out of bounds a few times with both Luigi as well as Gooigi when standing too close to a wall while spawning him. Initiating the sucking of ghosts was not reliable - there were many times, including on bosses, where my vacuum was essentially clipping with the ghost's tail and yet the suck wasn't being initiated. There was no consistent puzzle messaging language in the environment, not to say there wasn't any at all, they tried to message some things, but it wasn't consistent and was often far from obvious. I wasn't a stranger to coming into the room and sucking everything, blowing on everything, checking what to plunger, shining my blacklight around, flashing the light, doing the jumping burst, basically everything under the sun in order to make sure I'm not missing any gems in the room, because the game's design language was just not saying anything to me. Worst of all, there was basically no reason to search out any of the secrets in the first place - gems did nothing, and money was essentially useless. All of the three items you could buy with money were non-essential and consisted of 2 crutch items that they used to prop up their bad messaging (these items pointed out specifically where to find gems and Boos) as well as an item which revived you upon death (like the fairy in Zelda). All of the puzzles that I encountered were pretty basic and somewhat lackluster, but they got the job done. The cat chasing sequences, especially the 2nd time around were very annoying and felt like padding I wanted to get done with asap. Some floors felt way too short, consisting of a corridor and a boss room, where some were horribly designed for an open-ended exploration game with a very linear corridor to corridor to corridor design that was pure tedium to re-visit and get out of, in order to get the Boo as well as the gems if you missed any. Luigi was also always shaking and scared even when going into rooms you just cleared and that began grating on my nerves. Rooms also rarely felt cleared, there was no change in lighting or music or anything. The last thing that really got on my nerves was the low health chime. I remember this being common in sloppy AA games and crappy knockoff shovelware when games industry was younger, but I haven't run into this issue with absolutely any recent games. The chime is fine for a second, but not indefinitely! It also drowns out all music and sound effects and overwrites all rumble feedback, it's so bad. The game isn't all bad of course, it has plenty of charm in its environments, Luigi's and various other animations, gorgeous lighting, cute remixes of the classic Luigi's Mansion tunes as well as very good sound design in general (outside of Luigi's repetitive teeth chattering and the low health tone). The haptic feedback was also very impressive! Destroying the environment around you as well as sucking up all the money, while useless, felt so good while you were doing it! Smacking ghosts around felt awesome, finding boos with the stereo vibration radar was so creative and felt so cool too. Unfortunately, all the positive vibes aren't enough to elevate this game any higher than a 3.5/5 which is still "good" but no matter how I look at it, it just does not deserve anything higher. I can see all the work and the effort that went into making the game, it just doesn't quite come together. Hope the next one is given more love and care.