![]() ![]() They're an ominous presence, rather than an immediate threat. Frightful things are happening here, make no mistake, but for the most part cruelty and death are witnessed after the fact, or through obscuring filters. It's a haunted-house tale in the traditional mold (although the Japanese setting lends it an exotic quality from a Western perspective), with surprisingly little reliance on violence or up-front shocks. To take things a question at a time, Fatal Frame is most certainly scary, and more than that, scary in a very classy way. ![]() In the case of a good one, Silent Hill 2 being the present pinnacle of the genre, the answer is Yes. One, is it an effective dramatic experience? Two, is it a frustrating gameplay experience? And three, is the value of the dramatic experience enough to outweigh the pain of the gameplay experience? In the case of a poor survival horror game, such as Resident Evil: Code Veronica, the answer to number three is No. Gameplay Evaluating examples of survival horror nowadays has boiled down to two related questions, or three if you bring them together. Hope through fear? Stranger things have happened. ![]() This won't be the source of a sea change in survival horror, which remains the object of a certain amount of backlash in gaming (some of it coming from exactly this quarter), but Fatal Frame proves that there's life and potential in the genre, no matter how badly some other games have tried to kill it. It's a better-looking game than we would have expected from an unknown development team at Tecmo, with a serviceable engine guided by a steady artistic hand. You have all probably heard of the central gimmick - our heroine fends off the lurking terror with the power of an enchanted camera - but the more you play the game, the less noteworthy that asset becomes in the face of a genuinely well-crafted thriller package. It is, in fact, quite an inventive piece of survival horror, managing to keep the fright up and the frustration down with a few smart design decisions and an abundance of creepy style. Fatal Frame has nothing to do with any of that. ![]()
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