3.5/5 ★ – Empyrean's review of Fatal Frame.

If you’re one of those sceptics that refuses to believe devs make horror game protagonists purposefully slow and clunky, you should play this game. There’s absolutely no reason for Miku to climb ladders at a snails pace besides intentional trolling. Fatal Frame/Project Zero 1 is a fantastic horror game, impressively scary for the PS2 with a LOT of inspiration from the Ringu series, but it is also absolutely determined to make the experience as worse as possible at every turn. The immediate red flag is the English dub, one of the worst you’re ever likely to hear across all media. I can handle a bad dub, but it genuinely detracts from the experience here. Playing with Japanese subs is unfortunately quite difficult with more loops to jump through than I was willing, so I guess we’ll have to just hope for a remaster. The translation is also fairly poor, with a lot of ghost names making very little sense. Second comes the gameplay loop of the first two nights. Whilst the atmosphere and spooks are at their best here, you’ll be spending your time solving the same sliding puzzle and having your progress blocked by seals. Imagine if in Resident Evil every other door required you to backtrack to find a hidden key. Whilst it does a good job of making you familiar with the layout of the mansion, which is well designed, it throttles the pacing and enjoyment of the best parts of the game. The ending of Night 2 is also where things take a nosedive. Lastly, and the big one, is Night 3. This came close to tanking my entire enjoyment of the game and almost made me ragequit. Scarce resources, fights in tight rooms against multiple enemies that can fire projectiles from behind walls, stunlocks, and two hit kills. If you thought Code Veronica was bad for its softlocking then you ain’t seen nothing yet. To make matters worse, all of the resurrection items disappear each night and you can only hold one at a time. Genius design! Thankfully the final night is a breeze and requires little healing, but the damage was already done at that point. It’s hard to rank this as all of the ingredients are there. The atmosphere is suffocating, you rarely feel safe, and it’s genuinely spooky. It nails the horror elements, but completely fails as a game. Ultimately I settled on a more positive score as I appreciate how well it nails the highs. It’s harder to make something genuinely scary than it is to make something that just plays well.