A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - Fatal Frame
I brought this game up in class the other day, so I figured I would elaborate on it a bit for people who haven't experienced it.
Fatal Frame and its various sequels are horror survival games made by Tecmo. Their stories deal heavily with the dead, ancient rituals, and the idea that the camera captures souls. You won't find your character pulling out any guns, swords, or proton packs to deal with the various spirits they run into. Instead you use the camera to take pictures that exorcise (deal damage) to the ghosts you snap. The challenge in the game play is using your camera's various upgrades (flash bulb, better quality film, etc) to line up the perfect shot: a Fatal Frame, if you will.
Malevolent spirits are only half the ghosts you discover though. Part of Fatal Frame's story is told in a roundabout manner through the use of passive and hidden specters that your sixth sense alerts you to the presence of. As an example, say your character arrives at the top of a staircase and your sixth sense kicks in. You take out your camera and search until you find where the spirit is and then snap a shot, revealing a ghost called "Fallen Woman" in the film. If you take the time to observe the area you'll see a broken banister and when you put two and two together, you realize this woman either fell to her death.
The spirits are a fairly interactive way of telling the story. You're encouraged to seek them out (or they seek you out) and put together the pieces based on the environment and what you know of the rest of the story. The rest of the story, by the way, is told through a few additional channels. There are standard, run-of-the-mill cut scenes and flashbacks. The more interesting back story stuff comes from various newspaper scraps and journal pages that you'll find scattered about. Some games even provide a radio that tunes into the thoughts of exorcised ghosts via gemstones they drop, or a film projector that can capture ghosts, much like your camera.
The interactivity here really comes in two big parts. The first is that the story largely doesn't simply fall into your lap. If you play straight through the game without reading journals, listening to stones, or finding ghosts, you're only going to get the bare bones. You'll know that you have to save your sister, but you won't really be certain why. You have to seek out the story. The more effort you put into exploring your surroundings, the more of it you'll uncover (and the more opportunities you give for the game to scare you out of your wits, funny how that works).
The other part of the storytelling is that...well, for lack of a better description, the story doesn't tell itself. You have to piece together the extra stuff you discover as you go to try to make sense of the story. Once you fight the malevolent spirit of the "Broken Woman" and listen to the stone she drops, you realize she used to be the "Fallen Woman". And the "Fallen Woman" didn't fall off that staircase, she jumped in a desperate bid to escape the ravages of the evil force affecting the village. Then you flip through your diary pages to find out why the evil force showed up. And so on, and so forth. This continues for, and pervades through, the entire game.
I would very much recommend this game to anyone who hasn't experienced it, anyone who likes scary games, anyone who's looking to play something a bit different, and anyone who enjoys an interesting story. Start with Fatal Frame 1, play at night (or block out all the windows) for better effect, and preferably grab some friends (fear bounces off multiple people). If you like it, definitely grab the others and play them in order. The story builds off itself from sequel to sequel. The first three games are available for the PlayStation 2 and XBox. The fourth was made for the Wii, but was never released outside of Japan. If you still desire to play the fourth installment, you can acquire the Japanese version and apply a fan-created patch that translates all the subtitles into English.
Fatal Frame and its various sequels are horror survival games made by Tecmo. Their stories deal heavily with the dead, ancient rituals, and the idea that the camera captures souls. You won't find your character pulling out any guns, swords, or proton packs to deal with the various spirits they run into. Instead you use the camera to take pictures that exorcise (deal damage) to the ghosts you snap. The challenge in the game play is using your camera's various upgrades (flash bulb, better quality film, etc) to line up the perfect shot: a Fatal Frame, if you will.
Malevolent spirits are only half the ghosts you discover though. Part of Fatal Frame's story is told in a roundabout manner through the use of passive and hidden specters that your sixth sense alerts you to the presence of. As an example, say your character arrives at the top of a staircase and your sixth sense kicks in. You take out your camera and search until you find where the spirit is and then snap a shot, revealing a ghost called "Fallen Woman" in the film. If you take the time to observe the area you'll see a broken banister and when you put two and two together, you realize this woman either fell to her death.
The spirits are a fairly interactive way of telling the story. You're encouraged to seek them out (or they seek you out) and put together the pieces based on the environment and what you know of the rest of the story. The rest of the story, by the way, is told through a few additional channels. There are standard, run-of-the-mill cut scenes and flashbacks. The more interesting back story stuff comes from various newspaper scraps and journal pages that you'll find scattered about. Some games even provide a radio that tunes into the thoughts of exorcised ghosts via gemstones they drop, or a film projector that can capture ghosts, much like your camera.
The interactivity here really comes in two big parts. The first is that the story largely doesn't simply fall into your lap. If you play straight through the game without reading journals, listening to stones, or finding ghosts, you're only going to get the bare bones. You'll know that you have to save your sister, but you won't really be certain why. You have to seek out the story. The more effort you put into exploring your surroundings, the more of it you'll uncover (and the more opportunities you give for the game to scare you out of your wits, funny how that works).
The other part of the storytelling is that...well, for lack of a better description, the story doesn't tell itself. You have to piece together the extra stuff you discover as you go to try to make sense of the story. Once you fight the malevolent spirit of the "Broken Woman" and listen to the stone she drops, you realize she used to be the "Fallen Woman". And the "Fallen Woman" didn't fall off that staircase, she jumped in a desperate bid to escape the ravages of the evil force affecting the village. Then you flip through your diary pages to find out why the evil force showed up. And so on, and so forth. This continues for, and pervades through, the entire game.
I would very much recommend this game to anyone who hasn't experienced it, anyone who likes scary games, anyone who's looking to play something a bit different, and anyone who enjoys an interesting story. Start with Fatal Frame 1, play at night (or block out all the windows) for better effect, and preferably grab some friends (fear bounces off multiple people). If you like it, definitely grab the others and play them in order. The story builds off itself from sequel to sequel. The first three games are available for the PlayStation 2 and XBox. The fourth was made for the Wii, but was never released outside of Japan. If you still desire to play the fourth installment, you can acquire the Japanese version and apply a fan-created patch that translates all the subtitles into English.
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