Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water (2021)
By Chad Sapieha,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Dark survival horror game depicts ritual sacrifice, suicide.
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Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water (2021)
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What’s It About?
FATAL FRAME: MAIDEN OF DARK WATER is a remastered version of a Wii U survival horror game that puts players in the role of three protagonists each looking for answers to strange happenings atop a Japanese mountain. The area, covered in forest and abandoned buildings, has a dark history and is known to be a place from which curious travelers never return. Indeed, the mountain is teeming with the ghosts of the dead, many of whom met with unsettling ends -- including suicide. One of the heroes is looking for answers about her family, another is a fledgling paranormal investigator just learning to use her psychic gifts, and the third is an author researching his latest book. Ghost encounters are meant to be scary and intense, with players frequently forced to dodge or break free of spectral hands. When forced to fight back, players don't use guns or swords, but rather the Camera Obscura, a supernatural photography device that can hurt ghosts and force them away if you can frame and snap a picture at just the right moment. The camera can also be used to find and then bring objects from other worlds into the land of the living -- a vital part of unraveling the game's mysteries. New features added for the remastered edition include higher resolution character models, original costumes and accessories, and the ability to compose and snap custom pictures in a new photo mode.
Is It Any Good?
This one's for fanatics of the franchisse and few others. When Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water came to Wii U in 2015, it didn't exactly win awards. It was spooky in places, but clunky controls, linear design, and a lack of fresh ideas within a genre and series that were both aging kept it from making much of a stir. This remaster is pretty much a straight port of that game to modern systems, and doesn't do anything to fix these problems. The controls -- a mix of gyroscopic motion for framing photos and joystick control for movement -- are still very awkward, and players are still more or less stuck following ghosts as they lead to some clue, vision, or scene of horror, running through the same locations again and again. Worse, this was never a particularly pretty game (the Wii U was an underpowered console), and moving it to much more powerful systems on which players are used to seeing gorgeous graphics only amplifies its visual shortcomings. The character models have been reworked just enough to not feel jarringly out old (though faces still show about as much emotion as a block of cheese), but the environments are muddy and blurry -- often to the point of not being able to immediately make out what you're looking at.
The most compelling parts of the experience are generally those that involve no user interaction at all. Maiden of Black Water's cut scenes suffer some pacing issues, occasionally drawing out moments of anticipated fright so long that the effect is lost, but they still manage to deliver some disturbing moments of shock and terror -- the sort of stuff that fans of survival horror games eat up. Just be warned that it can get pretty dark at times, with characters killed or taking their own lives in ghastly ways. It's hard to recommend a game based on its non-interactive story sequences alone, so unless you're a die-hard Fatal Frame fan who didn't get the chance to play the Wii U original, you can probably take a pass on this remaster. The 2021 version of Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has no shortage of contemporary competition that manages to deliver both plenty of scares and fun mechanics.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about violence in the media. Is the impact of the violence in Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water affected by the fact that you're not actively committing violent acts? Since the game lets players banish ghosts with a camera rather than guns or swords, is this as disturbing as the acts of violence are witnessed in the non-interactive cutscenes? What difference do you see in taking active role in a game's violence versus passively watching it?
Did you know that help exists for people who feel trapped and depressed? Hotlines -- such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) – provide resources to help people get through difficult times.
Game Details
- Platforms: Nintendo Switch , PlayStation 4 , PlayStation 5 , Windows , Xbox One , Xbox Series X/S
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Available online?: Available online
- Publisher: Koei Tecmo
- Release date: October 29, 2021
- Genre: Survival Horror
- Topics: Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
- ESRB rating: M for Blood, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Last updated: January 13, 2022
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