照 - Zhao4 - Illuminate, Take (a picture), Look After, According To

照片 - Zhao4 Pian4 - Take Picture

We’ve rented Fatal Frame. It’s a “survival horror” game, with a twist: your only weapon is a camera! You creep around this haunted house, and take pictures of stuff to solve puzzles. Occassionally you are attacked by ghosts, and you take pictures of them too! Apparently, they hate that, and are destroyed if you take enough pictures of them. And if you can keep them in focus for a while, and take good close up pictures of them when they are RIGHT ABOUT TO GET YOU, it hurts them even more.

(before you say that this has to be the strangest premise for a horror game ever, check out The Typing of the Dead)

The game has the same creepy feel as all those Japanese horror movies, which have never really been that scary to me. But this game is. When you enter a particularly spooky room, the controller starts to pulse, simulating your heartbeat. As things get creepier and creepier, the beating speeds up and gets stronger. And when ghosts appear, it starts beating really fast! It really adds to the feeling of panic as you’re being attacked. The ghosts themselves are really scary (women with broken necks, children with dark eyes, things that move akwardly or backwards, normal Japanese horror movie stuff) and the sound effects are really good as well. The scary stuff isn’t just “surprising scary” but also “atmospheric scary”: You also constantly catch glimpses of scary things, but when you turn around, they’re gone. You see things in mirrors, and shadows of things that aren’t there. You hear whispers in dark hallways. Doors close, and windows shut as you approach, and when you go in, you find nothing. None of it is overdone, it’s all sort of understated and adds up to a really unsettling experience.

It’s a good game to play alone, at night.

(ObComplaint: posted by dialup. stupid DSL is broken. back up now - that was fast)