Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water Review – A Clunky Horror Game

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is a horror game that is developed and published by Koei Tecmo. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has finally left behind the Wii U and come to modern platforms, but this updated version of the game has done little to fix the many issues present in the original version, namely its poor controls and plodding pace.

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water takes place on Hikami Mountain, which is known for its various shrines, as well as being a place people go to commit suicide. The game has three playable characters: Ren Hojo, Yuri Kozukata, and Miku Hinasaki. The three become caught up in the supernatural happenings of the mountain, as ghosts of shrine maidens who died years earlier start to pursue them, often manifesting within the dark waters of the region. The only weapon they have against these foes is the Camera Obscura, a camera with the ability to harm ghosts that it takes pictures of. The game takes place across 14 chapters, with each of the protagonists exploring the mountain and its surrounding areas in order to learn the truth about the source of the ghosts, and their own connection to the dark history of Hikami Mountain.

One of the main gameplay gimmicks in Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water involves water. There is a wetness meter that fills up the more the character enters water or stands out in the rain. The wetter the character gets, the more damage they will deal and take. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the wetness meter is played for fan service, with the default costumes for the two female characters being sheer white outfits that become transparent over time. Sexualizing the female leads is already evidence of the title’s staleness, and it’s even harder to explain why so many of the enemy ghosts are also fetishized in the same way. Many of the enemies in Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water are the ghosts of drowned women, who wouldn’t look out of place in The Ring franchise, yet their body design and the camera angles that crop up by nature of the title’s gameplay seem to be angled towards more fan service. For what presents itself as a serious horror experience otherwise, it’s both distracting and unnecessary.

The game’s levels are dull and take forever to navigate, thanks to the slow pace of the characters. There is ample back-tracking, with the only puzzles in the game requiring the player to scour the environment for the next location they need to take a photo of. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water also has unhelpful help icons, as the arrows meant to show items, areas of interest, and monsters are loose and inaccurate to a frustrating degree. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water also struggles as a horror title, with it relying heavily on cheap jump scares and nightmare faces to get a rise out of the player.

The combat in Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water involves defeating ghosts with the Camera Obscura. Taking pictures of the ghosts breaks off part of their body, turning it into a spirit orb. The aim of combat is to catch as many of the ghost’s weak points and orbs in the frame when attacking, as the Camera Obscura has a cooldown for loading film. It’s possible to tilt the frame while moving the camera, giving the player the chance to line up as damaging a shot as possible. The approach to combat is akin to that of an arcade game, with the player earning points and modifiers depending on how much damage they deal. This approach is a bit jarring at first, considering how straight-laced the rest of the game is in its approach to horror, but it adds some excitement to what is otherwise a dull and plodding affair. The combat is fun, save for the fact that some enemies have a lot of health, making the late-game battles a slog.

What really drags down Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is the controls. The characters need to be steered like a car when moving around environments, making it tricky to move around when enemies are nearby. The camera also has a tendency to stick on walls, making it hard to look around inside of enclosed environments when not using the Camera Obscura. It’s difficult to pull off small movements with the character, while trying to pick up an item or interact with an object, adding to the frustration. There is a dodge function that can be used to avoid enemy attacks, but if the enemy stops near you, then the attack will go through anyway, potentially making the action pointless. The enemies tend to not do much of anything, and their slow moment means that their most fearsome trait is the ability to teleport behind the player for a cheap hit.

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water would be improved with a tighter pace, quicker battles, and more clarity when it comes to objectives in missions. As it stands, the game is often frustrating on both a gameplay and a technical level, but more importantly, it fails as a horror game, as its reuse of the same handful of scares quickly grows tiresome, with attempts to build tension falling flat.

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is available now for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Screen Rant was provided with a code for the Xbox One version of the game for the purposes of this review.

About The Author

Scott Baird
(2509 Articles Published)

Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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