The Camera Obscura returns with an upgrade thanks to a multi-platform remaster of Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water. Does this snapshot of the Fatal Frame series’ recent past look sharp or has it faded?
After spending seven years confined to the Wii U, Maiden of Black Water remains the swansong entry in the underappreciated Japanese horror game series, and it wasn’t seen as a particularly triumphant finale either. So perhaps time and refinements to the game will shed new light on it.
Maiden of Black Water utilizes the standard box of Fatal Frame tricks. Explore haunted locales and vanquish ghosts with the use of a magic camera. The key change to the original version of the game was in how it incorporated the Wii U’s tablet screen, and that’s of course now, not the case. All the same, a good effort has been made to hide the game’s origins and make it playable without the need for a second screen. It actually turns Maiden of Black Water into a more traditional Fatal Frame game, which has mixed results.
This particular story sees three protagonists caught up in the mysteries and tragedies of the fictional Hikami Mountain, a notoriously haunted locale. An ancient evil known as the Black Water is corrupting the mountain, causing people to go missing… or worse. At the center of it is a cursed shrine maiden, who repeatedly appears to torment the protagonists as they investigate the various disturbances on the mountain.
The game is split into stages, each focusing on a portion of one person’s story. There’s Miu Hanasaki, daughter of series stalwart Miku Hanasaki goes to the mountain to help her friend, and fellow protagonist Yuri Kozukata, who has a special gift to bring people back from the shadow world. Rounding out the trio is another of Yuri’s friends; the author Ren Hojo, who is also out searching for Yuri. It’s not immediately clear when each character’s story is happening in relation to the others, and that doesn’t always feel like an intentional choice.
In any given stage, the action takes place from a third-person perspective when exploring the environment, and switches to first-person when battling specters with the Camera Obscura. The camera is Fatal Frame’s unique selling point, a tool as much as a weapon, as it uncovers secrets, finds guiding ‘shades’ to light the correct path, causes previously lost items to rematerialize, catalogs otherwise harmless spirits, and of course, busts the nastier ghosts via their weakness; exposure (which is coincidentally a weakness of gaming writers).
It’s not as simple as just firing multiple snapshots off like a photojournalistic machine gun, each shot requires time for the camera to load the next strip of film before another snap cam be taken. Luckily the ghosts aren’t all that fast most of the time, and the rest of the time there’s a handy dodge button to avoid the more sprightly of those entities. The key is patience in lining up and focusing shots to maximize damage to the ghosts or even knock them back when they try to get a little too fresh. Hitting the ‘fatal frame’ (the ghost’s weak spot) breaks off spectral fragments of that ghost, and when lined up together in a single shot, does massive amounts of damage. It’s often tempting to chip away at a ghost from a safe distance, but they have a nasty habit of vanishing temporarily before reappearing somewhere else.
Given how claustrophobic some of these encounters can be, taking place in rotted waterlogged corridors, confined rooftops, and enclosed forests, it adds an unnerving edge to what would otherwise be fairly pedestrian combat. Slow doesn’t have to mean easy, and Fatal Frame has long understood that. What Maiden of Black Water doesn’t do quite so well is signposting where exactly ghosts and items are, with the hinting arrow system a little too vague for my liking.
Back to the Camera Obscura, and it throws a bit of variety in there with different types of film and lenses to combat apparitions that offer unique problems to the protagonists. The basic film is unlimited, but weak, while stronger variants are limited. By collecting points from capturing images, performing camera-based tasks, and defeating ghosts, the player is able to purchase extra film between stages, as well as the various healing items required to survive the extreme haunting shenanigans on Hikami Mountain.
Ghosts touching the player is just one way of taking damage. The connection between the happenings on the mountain comes from the Black Water’s involvement in so much death there. So water weakens the player characters, causing them to take on more damage and gain some other unpleasant ailments that can turn a simple encounter into a multi-ghost nightmare. A special drying cure reduces the moistness of characters, but there’s always rain, flooded buildings, and rivers that end up being an unavoidable obstacle. As a gimmick, it’s an intriguing one, but during some later stages, it can become a dreadfully repetitive slog to literally keep rinsing and repeating in the span of a twenty to thirty-minute episode. It, unfortunately, ends up being quite literally oversaturated.
That was always an issue with this game, but surely Maiden of Black Water’s remaster has to offer some fixes for its historical faults? Well the visuals are easily the standout improvement. Yes the female protagonist’s outfits still feel odd for the tone of the game, but the Hikami Mountain area looks far more enticingly haunting on modern consoles. There’s no doubt you can peer closer and see the seven years in the details, but the glowy, ethereal sheen to the visuals do well to hide a lot of those. The ghost designs remain superb as ever.
There’s little fixable about the constant backtracking to previously explored areas, but the technical upgrade does at least mean it doesn’t take as long to get to it and through it now. The story, while a refreshing break from the glut of Western ideas of horror in gaming, isn’t exactly top-tier Fatal Frame by any means. A little too clunky in introducing its central cast, and giving its grim subject matter an all too light touch during the cutscenes. It doesn’t help that the voice acting is fairly underwhelming, selling what strong points the story does have pretty short. I will caveat the story criticisms by noting there is a deeper, more meaningful story to be found in Maiden of Black Water, it’s just largely tucked away in journals and notes.
It’s unfortunate that, even with a decent fix for the absence of the Wii U gamepad, it still takes away one of the major positives of the original release. The claustrophobic nature of combat is still present to some degree, but it simply cannot feel as dreadfully intimate as it did when you’re effectively holding your own very own Camera Obscura. If you’re coming in never having experienced that, then it’s not going to be that much of a problem.
That run of downbeat paragraphs out of the way, I can say that despite these issues, there’s sill something about Maiden of Black Water that connected with me. The soft glow of candles and lanterns against the dark and rainswept locales of Hikami Mountain, the creeping dread of moving through increasingly tight spaces, the unnerving utterings of the ghosts, and their distinct designs felt intoxicating. The methodical pace and episodic structure combined to make for effective snack-sized portions of horror, rich in atmosphere. To play Maiden of Black Water for longer stretches exposes the game’s repetition and backtracking, so I much preferred approaching it in short bursts where its strengths are easier to appreciate.
While Maiden of Black Water may not be the best example of the Fatal Frame series, it’s been long enough that a whole new potential audience has emerged in the last few years, and this, flaws and all, will be something of a new experience. It’s more important that Maiden of Black Water got this multi-platform remaster for that reason than any other. If Fatal Frame is to have a future, it will need more than a handful of existing fans championing the good old days. It needs new blood too, and Maiden of Black Water’s remaster for a wider audience gives the series that chance.
Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water review code for PS5 provided by the publisher.
Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is out on all major formats on October 28.