FATAL FRAME / PROJECT ZERO: Maiden of Black Water

Another classic survival horror that will keep you on your toes . Be careful though as this game requires that you will get very close to ghost after ghost , so it can be quite stressful , especially if you play at night .

Maiden of Black Water is a solid horror game. It's both scary and challenging especially when you want to discover the whole story and earn achievements. Location (Mt. Hikami) and history of the rituals are terrifying too.
Some people complain about controls but for me it's a feature that makes you feel like the characters are paralyzed by fear. The only downside this game has is that I've been afraid to look through the camera lens lately.
Po... po... po...
Did you hear that?

Pretty scary with an interesting story. If you like horror games, you should definitely get this. I'd love for them to bring the third game to Steam.

My first ever Fatal Frame game! So as a fan of survival horror games, Fatal Frame was a series I had always heard about but never got a chance to play. I remember watching my friend's dad play it once back on the PS2 but never got to play it myself until this game. Oddly it seems like Koei Tecmo is remastering the series in reverse as this is obviously the 5th game and they remastered the 4th one afterwards, so hopefully they get to first 3 games lol But each game, is pretty much its own stand alone story, so I felt comfortable starting here. But what did I think?
Starting off with the combat which was a very unique experience for me. In most survival horror your weapons are usually guns or melee weapons but in the Fatal Frame series you use the camera obscura to take pictures of the ghosts in order to do damage to them. And if you time it right you can get either a Fatal Frame shot or a shutter chance shot for extra damage. This is punctuated by the different types of film you get that act as your ammo, dealing with various different amounts of damage and taking faster or quicker to load. You also get different lenses that have different effects based on when you do a special shot. My personal favorite was the one that would freeze ghosts in place until you shot at them again which even works on the bosses. My only complaint with combat is just the amount of health enemies and bosses have (especially the final boss!) as they take as many photos as an instagram model to go down.
I also really enjoyed the story for this game as it was pretty emotional by the end of it. The characters can come off as wooden when you first start playing as they don’t emote very much or even say that much in the cutscenes but I grew more attached to them as I played. Much of this requires you to read the various notes and diary entries in the levels to figure out what is going on with this mountain and to know what the characters are feeling. But once you do, it's quite a rich story and as someone who isn’t as familiar with Japanese culture, it was interesting to read all the lore. Also the cinematography in the cutscenes was very good with me taking a few screenshots during them. Adding to that,I also loved how when you defeat the ghosts if you touch them in time, you get a cutscene to see how they died originally and it was very cool and quite haunting.
Now onto my negatives which are really 3 things. Firstly, as you explore the levels your character will get wet due to the rain, with water being a big theme of the story. But once you get drenched in water your character is more susceptible to being grabbed by a ghost hand each time you want to pick up a diary entry or some resources on the ground. This got really annoying, as it doesn’t do as much damage to you and then you're stuck watching the animation of your character trying to escape the SCARY GHOST HAND WHOOOOOOOOOOOO! You can mitigate this by using a resource that dries yourself off, but it gets really annoying after a while. Secondly, this game recycles the same levels a lot throughout the chapters. Sometimes, you will often have to travel through old areas to get to a new level, but sometimes it's just the same levels for the whole chapter and it also gets frustrating after a while. You can’t tell me there aren't other areas on this damn mountain.
Lastly, the final boss was a complete nightmare to fight and not in a scary way, more in a frustrating way. They just have so much health that it's ridiculous and I burned through my resources fighting them really quickly. There’s also some very specific timing you have to do in order to beat them completely and it ties into what ending you get for the main character, Yuri which is also great.
In conclusion, despite my frustrations I still really enjoyed this game! Obviously this is the only Fatal Frame game I’ve played so I can’t compare it to the others, but it's a good start for me. I look forward to playing the 4th game now.

idk buy the game or whatever so we can hopefully get remasters of the original trilogy on steam
A very tentative recommendation; this is the weakest Fatal Frame game, but it can still be a good time if you go in with the right mindset and especially if you buy it on sale. This is the first game in the series where even the ghosts have jiggle physics, and you can touch the ghosts now. Truly we are putting the bust back in ghostbusting. It's also a remaster of a 2014 Wii U game, so make sure to set your expectations accordingly. What does this mean for you? Well, it means the controls are clunky even by survival horror standards, and right trigger functions as an interact button. Right trigger. Bruh. Personally I find this charming; wrestling with the game's controls really makes me feel at one with the protagonist, who is also wrestling with her own problems!
Maiden of Black Water is a noticeable departure from the series norm in a few ways, some good, some not so good. For starters the combat is overhauled, the most obvious change being that you can now rotate the camera, and are expected to do so. This is actually pretty cool and I hope they keep this mechanic if they ever return to this series. One change I disliked is that each chapter is now completely separate from each other - the items you stock up on in one chapter do not carry over to the next, instead each chapter has a default starting loadout and you can spend points to buy more stuff. This...kinda sucks, and removes a crucial aspect of long-term resource management. The game also throws mountains of resources at you - why? Because the game also throws more ghosts at you than Luigi's Mansion. Does fighting TWELVE GHOSTS in the space of 3 minutes sound like fun to you? I hope so! In endgame, they regularly throw 3-4 ghosts at you in a single fight which is every bit as annoying as it sounds.
I will say I really like the ghosts in this game - easily the most creative and interesting ghost fights in the series, these ghosts are wild. Definitely very few "walk slowly toward you while moaning" fights, the attack and movement patterns are generally quite engaging. Some of them are real sneaky, slippery buggers and will test your camera skills to the limit. The final boss is also EASILY the best final boss since Reika Kuze in Fatal Frame 3, I love the way this fight looks and plays out. Conceptually and visually excellent fight.
The story is...ambitious. I 'enjoyed' it but not for the same reason I genuinely enjoyed Fatal Frame 2/3/4's stories. Most of the game boils down to: a depressed Japanese woman says she's going to go up the spooky death mountain, another depressed Japanese woman tells her not to go, but she goes anyway so now we have to go look for her before she dies. You even collect more and more depressed Japanese women in your home base as the story goes on! I bet someone's bound to be into that. No joke, almost every single chapter objective is "Find " lmao. My enjoyment of this story largely came from how much crazier it is than any other game in the series. There's a guy who's uncomfortable around women (that's you! they put you in the video game!), there's a tomboy love interest (I legit thought she was a boy for like, four hours...), ghost marriage - hell there's even ghost incest. Bet that got your attention. There's even a security camera footage Five Nights at Freddy's episode where you protect sleeping girls from troublemaking ghosts. This is a real thing that exists in a Fatal Frame game. I don't know how these girls managed to get any sleep when I was in and out of their rooms all night fighting wailing ghosts with a loud shutter camera, but good for them I guess.
I also really like the environments here - there's a wide variety of locations, easily the biggest Fatal Frame map so far. The downside is that you don't spend a lot of time in any given location but you do revisit them from time to time, so you get to draw on map knowledge from earlier in the game. There's a train station, the obligatory run-down shrine, a misty forest, a construction tunnel; all sorts of classic Japanese horror locations, it's practically a J-horror tour. But something is indeed lost when you aren't spending the entire game in a single mansion, you don't develop a close relationship with any of the locations and that robs them of their character.
Perhaps the best thing about the level design is the new wetness system (no, not like that). Basically the water is cursed, and if you get too wet you're in trouble. Some areas of the maps are partially flooded, slowing down your movement, and sometimes it rains, making any outside area inherently dangerous. This is a cool idea, I like it a lot. The series hasn't really experimented with this kind of design and it's great, it adds an extra level of tension to certain areas. And it recreates that feeling of going out in a rainstorm without an umbrella, except now you can catch vengeful ghosts instead of just a cold.
Ultimately this isn't a bad game, it's anywhere from mediocre to good and whether that's good enough for you is up to you to decide. There are some other minor things that bug me, like grabby ghost hands being way more frequent (they were perfect in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, now they're just annoying) and the fact that there are NO SAVE POINTS ANYWHERE (autosave only, suckers) but I can look past them and still have a good time going on a wacky ghost photography adventure with good combat.

I wanted to drop a positive review here because I'm a huge FF fan and would love to see more remasters or even a new entry. The positive recommendation is for the franchise. For MoBW itself, I'm somewhat ambivalent as it is full of contradictions that failed to congeal together into a cohesive horror experience. The game just felt... amateurish in its executions, which is strange for the seventh game in a long-running series. The game kept flip-flopping between being immersive and annoying, scary and silly, intriguing and boring. I burst out laughing when the boobs' of a priestess ghost bounced distractingly the moment she popped into view right in front of me. Good to know that the specters maintained their suppleness in life in this game. At least you couldn't accuse KT of losing their touch when it comes to the ladies.
And for the love of God, someone PLEASE mod the stupid ghost hand out of the game! It wasn't scary in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, and for unknown reasons they kept it here for no other purpose than to troll and waste your time every time you tried to pick up an item.
I won't go into details over the list of things that I found disappointing with this entry, but being an FF fan means knowing that beggars can't be choosers. So if you're an FF fan, please get MoBW to support the franchise. If you're a horror game enthusiast, there might not be enough here to quench your thirst (even if you're looking for ANOTHER kind of thirst), but this game's atmosphere and story might hook you just enough to captivate you to give the previous, far superior games a try.
Now KT, bring us the remasters for FF2 Wii and FF1-3!

Since Fatal Frame first came out, I've played every single game without missing a beat. The story is horrifying, the deep lore, and how each world(game) interconnects with each other is unique. Even exploring the area, the ambiance alone keeps you on edge. Since there are times where you do get fully relaxed and that's when you realize you shouldn't have. This game is filled with puzzles and "combat". The protagonist is given a camera in which to protect yourself, however unless you spend your points wisely, it could change how long you can survive. Recommend using a controller 100%, but other than that, it's playable enough ^^. If you like ambient and unique horror styled games, you should feel free to give this game a try~ Definitely recommend the first two in the series!!