Reviews
[Review] ‘Luigi’s Mansion 3’ is a Delightfully Inventive Sequel
Mario’s brother is back bustin’ ghosts, and it’s arguably his best outing yet.
Family-friendly horror is tough to get right. Some warmth and comedy is usually needed to make it work, and Luigi’s Mansion 3 definitely follows that thinking. The terror is mild, but the commitment to its goofy spookies is what keeps it entertaining. It’s very much a Nintendo ghost story, where the only one truly terrified is poor Luigi, and given all he’s had to deal with, who could blame him.
Luigi, Mario, Peach and the Toads have been whisked away to a fancy hotel for a vacation, but not long after Luigi dozes off in his hotel room, he’s awoken by a scream, and upon investigation, discovers his old nemesis King Boo has transformed the hotel into a house of horrors and imprisoned his pals in paintings.
If Luigi is to rescue his friends and escape the hotel, he’ll need to once again pick up his trusty ghost-hoovering equipment and take down the spectral threat, one floor at a time.
This marks the first time the series has been on a console since the original Gamecube title (the second is a 3DS title), and that’s long enough to make the setup feel relatively fresh if it was largely untouched, but there’s a few tweaks and additions to this latest entry that make it a fairly pleasant modernization without losing the heart of it.
Luigi’s base directive is simple enough. Get the elevator buttons to ascend the hotel and rescue his friends. To do that though, he’ll need to solve increasing complex puzzles and battle all manner of eccentric specters. In each and every room and corridor of Luigi’s Mansion 3, there’s something to find. Each area is like a detail and secret-filled living diorama, which Luigi can pick apart with his trusty ghost vacuum.
This tool quickly fills out with all of its abilities, but the sheer variety of ways those abilities can be used over the course of 15 hours is impressive. The basic suck function pulls objects, cash, and ghosts towards Luigi, while the blow well…blows stuff away. Combined they allow Luigi to do a little powered jump, good for dodging certain attacks and surprising enemies.
Then you get the add ons. The torch is mostly for investigating dark corners for secrets and helping out with targeting, but it can be charged to let out a blinding flash that stuns ghosts before you drag them in with the vac’s suction. The plunger attachment acts as a kind of hookshot, allowing Luigi to pull down obstacles and open tough cupboard doors.
Star of the show though is the sentient gelatinous blob known as Gooigi. Gooigi is Luigi, but made of green goo, and he (it?) can be used as a co-op partner of sorts. Gooigi has the same abilities as Luigi, but can’t open doors and dissolves if touched by water. What he has to his advantage is the ability to walk through gates and grated pipes to access places Luigi cannot. This opens up the potential for what kind of puzzles can be created and it’s fair to say the challenge has been met in a strong fashion.
Sometimes the pair will team up to give the pulling of a tough switch an extra bit of oomph or somesuch. The best stuff comes when the pair are separated. A later level sees Gooigi stranded from Luigi by a body of water, and you must make the most of both character’s advantages to progress. The closer you get to the end of this section, the more you end up quickly swapping between the two to avoid hazards. It’s nothing massively challenging, but as with a lot of the puzzles in Luigi’s Mansion 3, it’s very satisfying to pull off.
The biggest knock on the puzzling joy is the default controls. The use of the analog sticks feels at odds with the layout of the hotel. as the right stick controls the direction Luigi points his flashlight, but it is applied in a clunky fashion. Thankfully it’s easy to muddle through this imperfection, but there’s a water-based boss fight where the flighty nature of this control setup drove me nuts, especially as it often left me vulnerable to attack, and Luigi can only take a few hits. Add in the fact you have to rewatch the intro cutscene every time (unless you get your ‘second chance’ via Gold bones) and it sours an otherwise delightful experience.
The constant warning beat when your health gets low is pretty grating too. Fine if it was when you were down to the last drop of health, but it pretty much kicks in and stays around once you reach half health.
Still, these issues melt away when Luigi’s Mansion 3 shows its endless charm off. Each gorgeously detailed floor becomes an increasingly impossible thing for the structure of the hotel, and there’s a fun theme on each that makes that return trip to the elevator a little present in itself, and apart from a small amount of backtracking, you’re constantly pressing on to something new and interesting. Personal favorites include a short trip to a haunted museum, a foliage heavy floor, and a trip to the kitchen.
Despite some small grievances with it, I still believe Luigi’s Mansion 3 is one of the best Nintendo Switch exclusives to date. It’s full of fun, humor, joyous discoveries, and clever design. It’s atmospherically spooky in patches, and doesn’t quite feel as creepy as the original did, but there’s a commitment to throwing up all sorts of crazy takes on ghosts that is so very Nintendo.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 review code provided by the publisher.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is out now for Nintendo Switch.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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