It’s November 1st. Halloween is technically over. Everyone’s scary Twitter names are slowly going back to normal, and you’re already running out of time to get great deals on costumes at your local Spirit store. But we can still be spooky if we want. Chris Christie delayed Halloween in New Jersey over a weather emergency. So we get to extend it, too, to talk about two recent games that together offer horror for all ages on Nintendo Switch: Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Vampyr.
Let me get this out of the way. I’m not one of these weirdly passionate stans for the first Luigi’s Mansion. It was a cool tech demo for the GameCube launch, and the abstract nature of its visuals compared to sequels do make it scarier in a way, but I don’t understand the hate for these sequels as some deviation for the pure original. That game was parody Resident Evil by way of Ghostbusters covered in family-friendly Nintendo polish. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is absolutely a continuation of that same bizarre mashup.
As in the first game, you explore a single haunted house, in this case is a towering hotel. However, the mission-based design of Dark Moon influences the segmented nature of the building. Exploring a self-contained floor rewards you with a missing elevator button to go explore another largely self-contained floor. Luigi’s Mansion is about poking your way through little areas rather than figuring out a massive puzzle box dungeon. Heck, the online co-op multiplayer randomizes room layouts and yet never feels inconsistent as a result.
That focus on micro dioramas (not unlike Link’s Awakening) to solve allow the developers to pack each room with detail as lovingly rendered as Luigi’s endless scaredy-cat animations. In aggregate, they wind up giving the hotel the fearsome scaled implied by the title screen. It helps that this time you can mess with almost every object with your vacuum, once you figure out what exactly the game wants you to do. Sometimes you can just suck or blow. Other times you need to blow with a burst jump or suck after attaching a plunger for extra strength. Work together with your gross clone Gooigi to reach tricky spots or just use the power of two vacuums at once. And switching between different beam types, your normal flashlight and spectral dark light, give the game almost third-person shooter qualities, again continuing the Resident Evil comparison.
However, also like certain Resident Evil games, the shooting can’t always keep up when the pacing moves from methodical terror to action-packed horror. I experimented with all different types of control schemes, from motion controls to separating moving direction and aiming direction to using the triggers for different shots, and never quite found one that felt as responsive as I wanted. Other folks have decried the slam move as being an overpowered way to defeat ghosts, but frankly I preferred it to what would’ve been an infinitely more awkward exercise of capturing ghosts in a more intricate way. It’s a shame, too, because my frustrations with the shooting especially came into play during what were otherwise spectacularly creative boss fights against TV cop ghosts or musician ghosts that possess their own pianos.
Much like how Luigi is the lesser Mario brother, Luigi’s Mansion is kind of a B Nintendo series. But without the expectations of a flagship release, B games can do cooler and weirder things without fear of screwing them up. In that vein, Vampyr is also very much a B game. Just know that Dontnod’s blood-sucking adventure is very much not for kids.
Being a vampire, an immortal superpowered mesmerizing creature of the night who can turn into a bat, is a power fantasy that’s almost too powerful to be represented accurately in a video game. What are they going to do? Give all the villagers garlic guns and cross shields? As fun as that would be, Vampyr instead uses a very compelling story conceit to both balance out the gameplay and get you invested in the suffering characters of its blighted Victorian England world. You play as a doctor ice-skating uphill as he tries to help patients and unravel the conspiracy behind his affliction while denying his own vicious bloodlust.
That means you spend a lot of time in this RPG just talking to people, making sure areas don’t get too sick, and brewing new remedies in your lab. When you want to find a quest giver, their name doesn’t just magically appear over their head. You need to talk to strangers you think fit the description. It’s surprisingly sociable, a nice contrast to the isolating vampire experience. Your connections to these humans is supposed to make it that much more agonizing if you then choose to suck their sweet animal blood for experience points.
Unleash your frustration over the murders you commit during the game’s frequent combat encounters. These scraps against future vampire victims are pretty straightforward. Players found earlier versions of the game too difficult in a way the fights didn’t really deserve. But in easier modes you can get by with regular attacks and guard breaks. What kept it entertaining to me is how schlocky your custom vampire powers get as you progress. You turn into mist as a quick dodge. Staggering enemies exposes their soft necks for biting. And you have a blood meter for powering sharp claws or projectile spheres made of the sticky red stuff. There’s nothing gameplay-wise holding you back from being a complete monster, just the reluctant nature of the character.
Well that’s not entirely true. Vampyr is held back by a small open-world that takes too long to get around, layers of management systems confusing and optional enough that I ignored them, and performance strain you’d expect from a big Unreal Engine 4 game running on Switch. But its thoughtful B-game vampire sim charms win out in the end.
And if neither of these sound like your bag, check out these other spooky Nintendo Switch games. Or download the performance patch that hopefully makes Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night a little less horrific on Switch.
Buy Luigi’s Mansion 3
Buy Vampyr
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