fatal frame mask of the lunar eclipse music opening

#Fatal frame mask of the lunar eclipse music opening skin

Character models have clearly had a good amount of work done to them, and the lighting (or lack thereof) can add a lot to the experience, but don’t expect a modern-looking game when picking this up on Switch. There’s also a very distracting amount of film grain that always covers the entire screen, and while I’m sure there’s some level of artistry driving its inclusion, it also feels like a deliberate attempt to cover some of the visual seams, so to speak.

Get too close to a wall and you can clearly count the pixels on the wallpaper texture, for example.

While it doesn’t look bad by any means, the bones of this 15 year-old game are clearly visible. Even though the sounds are pretty low-fidelity and haven’t been enhanced for this remaster – a bummer – it’s all still incredibly effective at building atmosphere.Īs compelling as all this is, I wish more had been done with Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s visuals. Most of the music in this game sounds less like music and more like a building slowly caving in on itself, piece by piece – or, when in combat, like something is clawing its way up from hell to scream at you. Even when I knew I was safe, the low rumbling of distant machinery, or the sounds of creaking metal convinced me otherwise.

#Fatal frame mask of the lunar eclipse music opening skin

The game also managed to get under my skin thanks to its layered and ambient sound design. Such authenticity can be deeply unsettling, which is exactly what I look for in a horror game.

A lot of care has gone into furnishing each room with tiny details that help provide context to what happened, and I felt myself imagining what the place looked like before it was struck with tragedy. And while that’s nothing new for the genre, what makes this setting unique is its detailed focus on environmental storytelling. Players will guide the protagonists through the shambling ruins of the island’s medical facilities, mostly through cramped, foreboding interior spaces whose clutter alludes to the tragedies that happened there.Įxploring the labyrinthine hallways of the Haibara Infirmary and its attached residential building is a huge focus of Mask of the Lunar Eclipse like many of its peers of the era, much time is spent looking for keys and codes to unlock pathways to new parts of the facility. Each chapter of the story rotates the player through a cast of four characters who have all returned to the island for their own reasons some seek to deal with the trauma of their dark and murky childhoods there, while others pursue a deeper understanding of the events that led to the island’s downfall.

The setting this time around is Rougetsu Island, which houses the remnants of a culture that disappeared years ago under mysterious circumstances. Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is a much more claustrophobic experience than its sequel, Maiden of Black Water.