I don’t know about you, but I don’t scare very easily, especially not when it comes to horror films or video games. I mean come on; it’s just a bunch of computer graphics, lighting and clever camera angles after all! That was how I felt about a week ago, how I’d felt my whole life, right up until that fateful night when I decided to play Project Zero 3: The Tormented.
Behind you!
You know how it is, you sit down to play an alleged “survival horror” game, that you know isn’t going to be remotely scary so you decide to set the mood a bit. You turn the lights off and open the living room door just a crack so that every now and then as the cold wind blows through, it lets out an eerie creek which is sent screaming around the room. Little did I know that I was about to play without doubt the scariest; most bone chilling game I had ever encountered! I couldn’t tell you how many times the hairs stood up on the back of my neck in anticipation of crapping myself, and I freely admit that around five minutes after I had started playing I completely regretted being so foolishly macho. The lights were back on, the door fully opened and the duvet fetched from upstairs to hide underneath, just in case…
Project Zero 3 tells the story of a young photographer Rei Kurosawa who while out on an assignment to a haunted house, has the misfortune of taking a photograph of a piece of scenery in which a ghost of her deceased boyfriend suddenly appears. She decides to investigate this phenomenon and quickly finds herself in a waking dream of an ancient Manor deep in some far away mountains, filled with tormented souls and twisted memories of inexcusable events. From this point on Rei spends her time drifting from one reality to the next, trying to piece together the puzzle of a mysterious cult who in ancient days performed bizarre and frightening rituals on people, the reasons for which Rei must discover if she ever hopes to escape her living nightmare.
Survival horror games always have stairs in them...
Like pretty much every survival horror game made, Project Zero 3 involves a lot of walking around puzzle solving, and in keeping with this, most of the puzzles are as you’d expect: get funny shaped key from one end of the mansion and bring it back to funny shaped lock at the other end, then find oddly coloured missing shape for simplistic puzzle. Not very challenging as you can probably guess and towards the end of the game this sort of thing gets a bit tedious. The game’s pretty long after all, especially for one in this genre. (Around 12 hours first time around) Part of the reason for the game’s longevity is that you’ll take control of three characters in total at various intervals. Miku Hinasaki, Rei’s glamorous slightly younger assistant who runs around in a mini skirt, high heels and hold-up stocking for most of the game. She’s smaller than Rei and so can fit into tight gaps and under floors that the other characters can’t. This is much like Kei Amakura, the last character you control. He was a good friend of Rei’s beloved boyfriend Yuu before he passed away. Kei is stronger than Rei and Miku and as such can move large objects out of the way of doors and ladders in order to progress. The use of the three different characters adds a little bit of variation to the game every now and then but doesn’t really do that much to stop Project Zero 3 becoming rather tedious.
Okay, that is pretty scary.
As you make your way through the game, you’ll soon discover that the mansion you’re running around is full of nasty ghosts just waiting to jump out at you when you least expect it. So how better to deal with these fear inducing horrors than to arm yourself with something equal to the task at hand… A camera! From the early stages of the game, you’re armed with the ‘Camera Obscura’ an ancient camera invented by a wise old man in distant times, which gives you the ability to see things in ‘the other world’ and take pictures of them in order to capture their souls, thus rendering them powerless. At first, the ‘Camera Obscura’ seems like a novel idea that could bring an interesting change to the usual, shoot anything that moves tactic, as is common in most survival horrors. Unfortunately though, the actual feel of the characters’ movement and the use of the camera in terms of game play seriously lets the whole experience of Project Zero 3 down.
Now that's more like the traditional survival horror stuff we know and love.
The movement is sluggish to say the least, the characters never really run anywhere, it’s more like a slow jog. You control each character in third person mode, then switch to first person mode to look through the camera and shoot the ghosts. This way of controlling your movement means that you’re constantly losing track of where ghosts are, this is amplified by the fact that you often find yourself walking along narrow corridors when the camera angle suddenly switches and zooms in towards you, giving you a view such that you can see your character and not a lot else. This is very frustrating when you can hear two or three ghosts floating around you but have no idea where they are because you can’t see anything. Then when you do finally pick them out, you switch to first person view to shoot them and they’re gone again (for another two or three minutes some times.) When you do finally manage to capture a ghost, you’re rewarded with points which go towards giving you upgrades for the camera, these come in handy when dealing with the tougher ghosts near the end of the game, so a steady hand and quick reactions are a necessity.
A ghost camera. Eh, a ghost camera? Yikes!
Project Zero 3: The Tormented is a very nice looking game, (especially during the cut scenes) A perfect mood is set by the attention to detail throughout, whether it’s through a creepy shadow suddenly appearing across a wall or a ghost lurking behind you out of nowhere you’ll actually feel as if you’re in the mansion with them. The graphics are that good that you’ll get to see a close up of a particularly nasty ghost and actually be able to see the expression on it’s face change, and believe me, it’s scary as hell! Couple this with an excellent use of music and sound effects and you’ll be shaking with fear that the next heart stopping scare could be just around the corner.
If only the same amount of effort was put into the actual game play as was put into making it so beautifully disturbing to look at, you’d probably have a near flawless result , as it is the lack of mobility and annoying combat situations are just too irritating to ignore.
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