Getting Lost in Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
Playing Luigi's Mansion again after twelve years really brings home what a unique game it is.
Succinctness is a virtue in many games; even a superb concept can be stretched so thin over 15 or more hours of gameplay that by the end, you’ve forgotten why you liked it in the first place. But Luigi’s Mansion’s creepy, suspenseful exploration, ghost-busting and slapstick scares could easily have extended further than the six hours it offered to early Gamecube adopters more than ten years ago. (Almost twelve years ago! God, I feel old. I went out and bought that on launch day with my own actual money.)
In 2013 gamers are a little friendlier towards the relatively brief single-player experience, but Luigi’s Mansion has expanded anyway in Dark Moon – beyond one mansion, and beyond the super-simple ghost-hunting combat. Where once Luigi searched for Mario in one giant house, now there are several mansions– and where once he had only to hoover supernatural troublemakers into his cute little vacuum cleaner, now he has a bigger variety of gadgets to tempt them out and stun them before sucking them up, including a super-powered version of that old flashlight.
(...)
Playing Luigi's Mansion again after twelve years really brings home what a unique game it is.
Succinctness is a virtue in many games; even a superb concept can be stretched so thin over 15 or more hours of gameplay that by the end, you’ve forgotten why you liked it in the first place. But Luigi’s Mansion’s creepy, suspenseful exploration, ghost-busting and slapstick scares could easily have extended further than the six hours it offered to early Gamecube adopters more than ten years ago. (Almost twelve years ago! God, I feel old. I went out and bought that on launch day with my own actual money.)
In 2013 gamers are a little friendlier towards the relatively brief single-player experience, but Luigi’s Mansion has expanded anyway in Dark Moon – beyond one mansion, and beyond the super-simple ghost-hunting combat. Where once Luigi searched for Mario in one giant house, now there are several mansions– and where once he had only to hoover supernatural troublemakers into his cute little vacuum cleaner, now he has a bigger variety of gadgets to tempt them out and stun them before sucking them up, including a super-powered version of that old flashlight.
(...)
Playing Luigi's Mansion again after twelve years has really made me realise what a unique game it is. It's part traditional adventure, part ghost-busting action, part hidden object game, and nothing quite like it has been made since. Its return is welcome, but it also makes you wish that Nintendo had made more time for experiments like this in the intervening years. Nintendo is drawing on its GameCube history heavily at the moment - Dark Moon, Pikmin 3 and the Wind Waker remake are three of its most important games of this year - but it would be good to see the creative energy of that period revived.