METERWhat I love most about Luigi’s Mansion is the details. The way Mario’s cowardly brother nervously hums the music as he staggers through creepy stately mansions. The comical animations as he falls down a chimney or is catapulted into a secret room by a Murphy bed. The cackles and goofy expressions of the ghosts as they get up to their mischief. As you use Luigi’s trusty vacuum cleaner to catch ghosts and pull out carpets to expose secret trap doors (or secret spiders), and suck up the bills and gold coins that are hidden everywhere, you can’t help but notice how every little sound, scene, and secret has been carefully arranged to give you a little dose of delight.
This ghost-busting puzzle game was a surprisingly charming sequel back in 2013 when it launched for the Nintendo 3DS. Its mini mansions and diorama-like peepholes gave Nintendo’s artists ample opportunity to show off that console’s stereoscopic 3D effects, which were activated with a little slider on the side of the screen. But now it’s out for the Switch, 11 years later, and two things have changed. First, the 3D effect it was designed around no longer exists. And second, Luigi’s Mansion 3 now exists, and it’s significantly better.
Given that Luigi currently produces less than one spooky movie per decade, we can’t fault him for a remake with graphical improvements. But Nintendo has priced Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD at nearly £50, which seems especially galling given that it didn’t even cost that much the first time around. It looks better – the interiors of all five mansions have been revamped, and the detail on everything from the sofas and cobwebs to the suits of armour is up to par. But it plays exactly the same, meaning it’s split up into mini-quests that break up the flow of the game, taking Luigi out of whatever spooky abode he’s exploring and back to paranormal investigator E Gadd’s lab in 10-minute intervals.
Gadd also constantly calls out to Luigi on a little DS-shaped flip phone, which is hilarious but further disrupts gameplay. A lot of Nintendo games have the problem of excessive tutorials in the first hour or two, but here these interjections continue throughout the game and you never feel like you have time to explore. This isn’t a scary game, but it would be more atmospheric without the incessant chatter. Perhaps it was necessary to cut the levels this way to make the game fit on a small 3DS cartridge, but it feels dated now, and another annoyance is the multiplayer mode, which doesn’t allow two people to play together on the same console. Unlike Luigi’s Mansion 3, you can’t play it with a child or a partner.
Structural annoyances aside, there’s no denying that Luigi’s Mansion 2’s design remains solid: the puzzles are great, the ghost battles are fun and inventive, and again that attention to detail leads to a wealth of adorable moments. But Luigi’s Mansion 3 does all of that. and more, for the same price, and you can explore their haunted hotel uninterrupted by anything but poltergeists.
