Thursday 18 August 2011

Project Zero


"Zero" in its native Japan and "Fatal Frame" in America, this is survival horror with a twist. No weapons to battle the dead, just the mysterious Camera Obscura with the ability to capture them.
You start out as Mafuyu Hinasaki in the dilapidated Himuro Mansion, apparently based on a real site outside of Tokyo, where gruesome deaths took place. Inside, shadows mislead, hair traps door handles and candles are somehow lit. Obvious nods to releases like Ringu and Ju-On abound. A friend of Mafuyu's, Junsei Takaminé, is known to have gone into the mansion for research, along with his assistants Koji Ogata and Tomoé Hirasaka. The three have been missing since, and so too now is Mafuyu, as the game switches to his sister.

This game is fascinating in the regard that the player is pretty much completely powerless for the whole adventure. Touching the spectres causes your life to drain and will eventually kill, so you cannot strike out. Running works for a limited time as ghosts swoop around the mansion to find you. They keep doors forced shut and all the windows are mysteriously nailed down. All you can do is aim that strange old camera and sap them a bit at a time.

Conveniently, you'll find film for it dotted around the grounds. There are multiple types, such as 14, 37 and 74, each with different levels of exorcismal power. You can also find the likes of herbal medicine and small stone mirrors containing a protective spirit each, who will save your life just once. There is a filament in the bottom right corner of the screen, indicating the locations of the dead as it gets brighter. If the light is blue, the spirit is friendly and photographing them will free them from the mansion. But if red, you need to be wary. Photographing some objects, doors and scenes causes a completely different image to appear in the developed photograph, as a clue. However, do not be too snap-happy. On my first save file of Project Zero, I had collected literally every box of film in the mansion, and had low health when no more medicine could be found. I was fairly near to the end but simply could not proceed through the next battle because of the situation I had put myself in. Don't waste film! Additionally, I think that aiming the camera when not needed attracts the likes of Broken Neck and the macabre floating head to fight you.


Miku's isn't a bad arse to stare at, but you will find yourself wishing that it would go a little faster. There's a lot of tooing-and-froing in this game. Project Zero requires you to intelligently plan your steps and will stretch your memory, but its trickiness will occasionally have you stumped. In that case you just have to re-explore, diligently watching the filament, but I won't pretend that this doesn't get tiresome. The way that the controls invert after you have gone through a door, causing you to run back into it, is annoying. The sound effects are good, although wooden boards drone a predictable repeating pattern.
The soundtrack is brilliant, ranging from ghostly wails to offbeat drums knotting the terror in your stomach.




The voice acting leaves a little to be desired. As you hunt for Mafuyu, you find page scraps and audio tapes recorded by the missing individuals. Said tapes are not very convincing. I realise that you have to speak clearly into a tape recorder for later reference, but these people seem far too calm when describing horrendous things, and likewise, while the scraps from books are meant to inform the player of the bizarre practices of the family a titbit at a time, they are unrealistic.
New material frequently appears in locations you have already searched, as the ghosts drag the mansion back into the past.


In summary, I adore Project Zero. It has its faults, but as a whole the title overcomes them. What a fantastic game.

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