Fatal Frame once stood as a novel take on survival-horror. Rather than directly combat ghoulish assailants, players would utilize a supernatural camera to strategically photograph them and drain their power. Steady improvement propelled Fatal Frame through three PlayStation 2-era iterations (along a 2008 Wii-exclusive entry that never made it out of Japan). With Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, Fatal Frame V in all but name, I was curious to see how much Tecmo’s beloved series had learned during survival horror’s dormancy.
For better or for worse, Fatal Frame has gained almost nothing. Other than expected obligations to its exclusive platform, Maiden of the Black Water operates with the care and precision of a title from two generations ago. Rather than embrace modern design amenities, it opts for rigid character movement, inelegant combat mechanics, audacious repetition of content, and scant narrative coherence. By budget or by honest conception, Maiden of Black Water has been resistant to change.
Not all of these observations are necessarily negative. After blossoming in the 90’s, survival horror sequels hit something of a crescendo shortly before the release of Resident Evil 4. After a brief lull, Amnesia: The Dark Descent extended a thesis of pure frailty, leading to games like Outlast and Slender soaring in popularity. With that in mind, there is some virtue in a modern game operating with abandoned principles of interaction and design. Whether you consider these ideals worn or sacred ultimately determines your response to Maiden of Black Water’s torpid presence.
Maiden of Black Water’s narrative is an ardent investor in Japan’s death-obsessed line of horror. The fictional Mt. Hikami is analogous to a real life section of Mt. Fuji, which has gained an infamous reputation as a place people go to quietly end their lives. Maiden of Black Water treats its suicide forest as more of a totem of darkness and depression, and expresses itself through three different protagonists. Yuri is a young woman with a unique ability; she can rescue people who have been pulled into the spirit world. Ren, an author and an acquaintance of Yuri, is curious as to what sort of inspiration Mt. Hikami could provide for his new work. Miu, another young woman, makes a later appearance and suspects her mother disappeared in Mt. Hikami. The three of them, along with a host of minor non-playable characters, gather at a nearby antique shop as a base of operations.
Dividing fourteen chapters into three characters ensures everyone gets plenty of time to resolve their respective issues with Mt. Hikami. While they’re also meant to explore the greater mystery of the mountain and revel in the themes of dark water and ghoulish subterfuge, more often than not, the characters fall victim machinations of Maiden of Black Water’s aggressive insistence on tying all of its threads together. Treating the mountain as a compulsion and its seekers as victims is an interesting spin on what’s traditionally thought as a lonely place to commit suicide is an interesting play on expectations, but that’s the gist of the entire story. Nonsense quickly overrides substance. At a certain point, particularly when the term “ghost marriage” is trotted out and repeated with a straight face, the game abandons all hope of a subtle or curious resolution.
What’s particularly disappointing is how ineffective Maiden of Black Water is at generating an atmosphere of dread. The spirits occupying Mt. Hikami have expressive faces basked in pain, but their place as an unnerving entity only lasts for the first encounter. You’re always chasing a specter, but not one that gets under your skin and fights your will to carry on with the narrative. Exceptions are in place, chapters where Ren is monitoring the antique shop’s security cameras make smart (if not predictable) use of presentation and design, but these sequences are short lived and divorced from Mt. Hikami. I don’t know if games have changed or if I have moved past Fatal Frame’s brand of horror, but the hostility of and anxiety from modern peers is nowhere to be found in Maiden of Black Water.
To be fair, Fatal Frame’s attempts at horror were never as unique as its signature mechanic. Rather than actively combat an enemy, players would instead use the “Camera Obscura” to strategically snap pictures and drain a spirit’s menacing energy. This sort of active non-violence was novel in its time, and, nearly fourteen years after its inception, still a unique way of combining fear with action. Unfortunately, the expected play of using the Wii U’s gamepad as the camera’s viewfinder does little to enhance the experience. Worse, it actually harms the player’s ability to effectively play the game.
If you’re testing the pure durability of the Camera Obscura’s functions, it seems to be a well-oiled machine. Snapping pictures of ghosts puts a dent in their energy. Taking their picture just before they attack, creating the titular fatal frame, takes a massive bite of their health. Additionally, using the viewfinder to lump different ghosts, or their fragmented bits of their existence, in the frame is another way to inflict significant damage. Upgrading the Camera Obscura’s parts with earned points or finding (or buying) more powerful film serves as another way to boost damage output. As the ghosts become more violent and versatile, so does your arsenal of options to deal with them.
For their part, Maiden of Black Water’s ghosts do their best to subvert your expectations. One ghost is actually a troupe of three children that surrounds and takes turns attacking the player. Another ghost creates lampposts(?) that must be destroyed before he can be vanquished, and another that must be photographed before he becomes fully visible. Before you know it, multiple types are quickly closing in, and the space you have to deal with them keeps getting smaller and smaller.
Creating a fatal frame is eased by the fact that the viewfinder turns red and clicks just before the attack but, even with that information, it’s still important to learn the ghosts and their signature tells. In this regard it’s not unfair to compare Maiden of Black Water to something like Punch-Out!!, where you’re reading feints and saving your attacks for intermittent moments of glorious opportunity. This cuts down on the scares and eventually transitions Maiden of Black Water to more of a mechanical procession of random ghosts, but, considering how quickly the game gives up on horror, it was probably the right move.
Once a ghost appears there’s usually a buffer for you to punch X and activate the viewfinder on your gamepad. Maiden of Black Water would prefer you twist and turn the gamepad in real life to find the ghost, but it’s much easier and more effective to assign that responsibility to the right analog stick. From there you can use the d-pad to cycle between film stock and ZR to lock-on to the trigger point on the ghost. At that point, the challenge should be a matter of timing your shots and managing the tension between reloading film and staying clear of other roaming ghosts.
Problems with this are evident upon execution. If you get attacked or miss-time a shot, you’re kicked out of the viewfinder on your gamepad and action continues on the television screen. It’s disconcerting to have this happen, look up, and see your character getting mauled by whatever’s happening on your TV. Once you realize this you either have to contend with the game’s sluggish controls and run to a safer point, or mash X and hope you can make it back to the viewfinder before you suffer another attack. The delay in this process is maddening, and the lack of any sort of indication on the gamepad is frustrating. Maiden of Black Water wants to you look in two places at once and doesn’t make either option convenient.
Other than trying to justify the existence of the gamepad, I have no idea why the thing is employed in the proper game. It’s a huge distraction and literally disconnects the player from the experience. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I took the television out of the equation, but Maiden of Black Water isn’t fit for gamepad-only play. You can do it—all it really takes away is quick access to your map—but it doing so removes the game’s soundtrack and voice performances. It effectively neuters Maiden of Black Water’s presentation, and I have no idea if it was an oversight or if the development team just didn’t care.
Character movement is endemic of Maiden of Black Water myriad of solvable problems. Adding a run button was nice, but it doesn’t excuse poor basic character movement. You have to be standing directly on top of objects to be able to pick them up, the simple act turning around can be a huge pain in the ass, and you’re guaranteed to lose health if you encounter ghosts in confined areas. The camera does no favors, and managing to run effectively takes about as much time as putting up with the gamepad viewfinder. Some of this makes sense—part of the tension of survival horror is aligning your meager resources against an onslaught of aggression—but poor control and obtuse environments aren’t the preferred exercise for exploring stress and anxiety.
Exploration is another facet of Maiden of Black Water that wears out its welcome. Mt. Hikami is composed of maybe a dozen locations and the game is more than content to run repeatedly run its characters through all of them. Most of the time you’re provided with a literal spirit to follow to the right area. Along the way you can venture outside of the intended path to pick up consumables like health pills or film caches, and occasionally equipment like different lenses. Toward the end of the game I was wondering why in the world these people would keep returning to the exact same locations—some of which even had the same pick-ups in the exact same out-of-the-way spot—but such are the pratfalls of poor pacing. There’s only so much to go around, evident by the fact that certain doors that were blocked by a mysterious force are suddenly open and available in subsequent chapters.
Maiden of Black Water occasionally makes room for other activities inside of its spaces. Sometimes you’ll have to focus the Camera Obscura on a certain object, receive an image, and then go hunt around the premises and recreate the shot in the mysterious image. Likewise, later chapters make use of keys hidden in obscure locations, the likes of which you’ll find at opposite ends of the level. This is busy work and this is predictable, and by your third or fourth trip through the same area, all while contending with either random or instanced ghost attacks, it becomes a chore.
If the Camera Obscure is Fatal Frame’s endearing relic, Maiden of Black Water tries to make the wetness gauge its own particular stamp on the series. Water is a major theme of the game, with characters either being trapped, transported, or forced to content with its encroachment on their lives. As a mechanic, how wet the player becomes, measured by the gauge, determines the strength of the ghosts and the severity of their attacks. It can also affect your ability to pick up objects, as a spooky ghost hand will occasionally reach out and grab you if you don’t pull away in time.
Most of the time, however, the wetness gauge functions as another annoying thing to deal with in midst of combat. Sometimes a ghost will perform an attack that overloads your wetness gauge, which instantly starts draining your health. Items that stop this are in short supply (and considerably expensive), meaning you’ll frequently have to contend with shuffling through menus to use healing items in the middle of combat — all while managing movement and your camera. Rather than a thematic tie to Maiden of Black Water gloomy narrative, the wetness gauge just feels like another idea tossed in to buoy your stress levels.
Through and through, Maiden of Black Water feels like a game that was either lost or immune to time. There are just so many little things that make me think either the development or localization was handled poorly. There’s an environmental “proceed” prompt that is frequently met with a denial to proceed, the aforementioned gamepad/television disorientation, about twice as many chapters as the game actually needs, miserable dialogue, heavily compromised off-screen play — the list of anachronisms goes on and on.
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In the past these flaws were things I didn’t think or care about, it was just the way games were and I dealt with them because there were no other options. Today they feel like relics of a bygone era, and I can’t decide if that’s a consequence of this style of game, if the development team just didn’t know how to move on, or if they weren’t allowed the time or budget to develop better solutions to these ancient problems.
In the interest of positivity, Maiden of Black Water isn’t completely without its bright points. Here they are in rare mid-review list form:
· Ren, Yuri, and Miu each have slightly different abilities with the Camera Obscura, and, while they don’t make that big of a difference, it’s nice to know some thought was put into separating their characters.
· The ghosts’ faces are well rendered, as are the FMV-like “fatal glimpses” of their deaths. Earning fatal glimpses by rushing up to their fading-away presence is an interesting risk/reward.
· Repetition kills the mood, but your first trip through Maiden of Black Water’s environments usually yields impressive results. The art team nailed the feeling of being alone and lost in the woods.
· Spooky percussive sound effects and an excellent use of eerie music resonate with traditional Japanese horror.
· Bonus chapters with Ayane from Dead or Alive, available once the game is completed, focus more on stealth rather than direct engagement. Brevity is a strength, and I wish the main game maintained this sort of efficiency.
Maiden of Black Water’s lack of compromise is ultimately its downfall. It’s capable of developing good ideas, but it can’t recognize when to let it go before it runs out of steam (ironically, this directly contrasts with Nintendo’s design philosophy, which fills their titles with seemingly endless bursts of creativity). Much of what Maiden of Black Water does well—the gloomy atmosphere of Mt. Hikami, your first encounter with a new ghost, an attractive supernatural hook—is run into the ground through unnecessary repetition or rendered indifferent and ineffective through its obligation to be a game. It is neither a fun game to play nor a creepy narrative to piece together.
Excitement over the prospect of a new Fatal Frame game was quickly extinguished by the reality of a new Fatal Frame game. Rejecting genre conventions once allowed Fatal Frame to stand alongside Siren, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil, but declaring antiquated ideas sacrosanct leaves it, ironically, in a modern version of the same company. Survival horror hit a wall, and Maiden of Black Water isn’t the one to overcome it.
