Fatal Frame III: The Tormented [PS2]

Horror fans have had a packed year in 2005, with tiles such as Outbreak File #2, Ties That Bind, Haunting Ground, Obscure, and the revamped Resident Evil 4 all bringing their own brands of terror to an audience of hungry (and deranged) game players. This year's final fright fest, however, might indeed be the creepiest of the bunch as Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is one of the most surreal and twisted spook house adventures you can play.

Loosely related to the previous games in the series, Fatal Frame III tells the story of Rei Kurosawa, a 20-something freelance photographer who's still trying to get over the death of her fiancé two months earlier (tragically, he was killed in a car accident and she was the driver). Unfortunately, the grieving process isn't going so well considering that Rei ended up photographing her departed lover Yuu while on assignment in a haunted house. This shocking moment immediately sends Rei into a daydream state where she enters a familiar-looking burial ground populated by creepy ghost people. Eventually Rei wakes up from her waking sleep, but the seed of a plotline have already been planted. From that moment on, the creepy begins.

And it's a damn fine creepy at that. A lot more coherent than Crimson Butterfly's eerie (but disjointed) narrative, the tale of The Tormented has a lot of different layers to it that satisfy on a number of levels. Not only does the story have several ongoing mysteries (like Rei's manifestation of a bizarre and ever-growing tattoo and the identity of a frightening half-naked body-painted she-ghost), but it also has enough cheap scares to fuel you in-between. There are plenty of nods to players that conquered the first two Fatal Frames too, with fan favorite Miku Hinasaki making a triumphant (and very hot) return.

Speaking of Miku, she's one of three playable characters at your command (Though Rei is the main focus, she's only playable for a third of the entire game). But what makes these three personalities cool is that each one has their own unique abilities that will change things up from mission to mission. Yuu's friend Kei Amakura, for example, can push heavy objects that Rei and Miku can't, as well as jump across large gaps (he's also the uncle to Fatal Frame II's Mio and Mayu). MIku, on the other hand, is small in stature and can reach areas that the other characters can't. Miku's the most useful player in combat too (thanks to her spiritual powers), and is by far the character with the coolest outfits.

Regardless of which character you play as, though, Fatal Frame III offers a good number of missions with plenty of ghost hunting and puzzle solving. Unfortunately for those of us who have played through just about every survival horror game on the planet, the brain-teasers never really offer anything new and rarely move beyond your typical tile-sliders and key-based fetch quests. To mix things up a bit, Tecmo has incorporated an interesting "two-world" relationship element that makes it impossible to advance in one reality without first uncovering something in the other. If you're confused, don't be -- a good portion of the gameplay revolves around the idea of slipping back and forth between a nightmare dimension and reality. It reminds me a lot of how The Ring: Terror's Realm was handled several years back on the Dreamcast... only this game doesn't suck.