Watch this teaser, see no gameplay – but that’s the point.
Someone over at Nintendo has had an idea so cunning, you could put a tail on it, and call it a weasel. The remake of Fatal Frame 2: Deep Crimson Butterfly is due out for the Wii any day now – still no word on a North American date, sorry, you’ll just have to envy the Europeans and Japanese a little while longer – and, rather than demonstrate gameplay, they decided to show two people playing the game instead. In the video, the two unfortunates go from scared, to OMG, to ‘please call the authorities, my mind has broken,’ in about six minutes. Fatal Frame, aka Project Zero, gets the job done with hardly any gameplay screen-time; instead, it’s all about the screaming.
Fatal Frame, for those unfamiliar with the series, is a horror game where the protagonist faces off against the undead armed not with a shotgun, but with a camera. This Camera Obscura, a parapsychological McGuffin, is the only thing that can photograph ghosts, and it’s also the only thing standing between Mio Amakura, the main protagonist in Deep Crimson Butterfly, and certain doom. Mio spends much of the game looking for her sister, so it’s probably no surprise that, in the video, two girls of about the same age as the game’s characters are playing Fatal Frame.
You know what? That actually is a cunning plan. One of the greatest ghost story writers of all time, M.R. James, once said that, to make a good scare, you have to “Put the reader in the position of saying to himself ‘If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'” Exactly that thought is flashing in those girls’ eyes, every time they look at the game – or, in the case of Girl Without Controller, every time she hides her face in her hands. Plus, if we, the audience, had seen game play, we’d have probably judged the play itself, particularly since it’s a remake of a 2003 title; but now we see the effect it has on people instead, and can get an idea of what it might do to us, when we play it.
There are no subtitles in the video, and it’s all in Japanese, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll still get the idea.
Source: Kotaku
