SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A riveting adventure despite fiddly controls, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is powered by fantastic level design, clever puzzles and plenty of Nintendo’s signature charm.
I have a confession to make: I’m really a big fan of the Mario franchise. But playing Luigi’s Mansion 3, I think I now understand why people love it. Even though this game’s focus is on Mario’s twin brother, it’s still quintessentially Nintendo; a passion project, and the product of wonderfully unrestrained imagination. Over the course of roughly twelve hours, it throws everything it has at you, from extraordinary level design to clever puzzles, making sure to leave nothing out. Somewhere along our discussion about whether games can be art, we might have just forgotten that they should be fun too. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a good reminder of just that.
After being invited to stay, Mario and company head to the Last Resort, a luxurious high-rise hotel, for a much-needed vacation. However, Luigi soon discovers that something sinister is afoot. The hotel’s owner Hellen Gravely has teamed up with Luigi’s nemesis King Boo, hatching a plot to imprison everyone in framed portraits. After narrowly escaping imprisonment, Luigi must explore the hotel’s many levels and fight off its mischievous ghosts to free his friends from captivity.
After the first hour, most of which is taken up by a tedious introduction, the game kicks into gear by establishing an addictive gameplay loop. Luigi has to journey from floor to floor in search of buttons for the hotel’s elevator, which allow him to move up through the building. Each level is a stunning cartoon diorama with hundreds of little details, and a showcase of extraordinary imagination. Memorable ones include a beach with a ghost shark who tries to beat you by possessing an entire pirate ship, and a gym featuring ghosts doing yoga and a swim coach ghost who attacks Luigi by tossing volleyballs at him. To say that “just when I thought they couldn’t show me anything else, they did” would be wrong. I soon began expecting to see some wickedly imaginative design, and whether it was new hotel levels or some truly unique, memorable boss battles, Nintendo delivered time and time again without fail until the credits rolled.
It’s cartoonish, silly and undoubtedly targeted at kids, and yet it still manages to be entertainment of the highest order. Using a special piece of gear called the Poltergust – a hybrid between the proton pack from Ghostbusters and a high-power vacuum cleaner – Luigi can do battle with the hotel’s rather irritating, yet oddly endearing spectral inhabitants. The game’s remarkable production value is placed on display. Sucking them up makes a comic suction sound effect not unlike something you’d hear in Tom and Jerry, and the controllers rumble in perfect time as you whip them back and forth with earth-shaking ground slams, demolishing the nearby crockery. It’s a joyfully cathartic experience that never grows old.
The Poltergust is a remarkably inspired piece of kit: a Swiss Army Knife for ghost-hunting, capable of firing suction darts at possessed garbage bins and helping Luigi bounce off the ground in a burst attack, and just as much a puzzle solving tool as a weapon for pacifying mischievous wisps. The game’s puzzles reward outside-the-box thinking. Gooigi: an animated clone of Luigi, is easily the best new feature. He’s made of green jelly and so he’s able to squeeze through bars and sends himself shooting through pipes to reach areas inaccessible to Luigi, for example. Since he melts into a sad puddle whenever he comes into contact with water, solving puzzles means taking advantage of the ability to swap between the two with the press of a button. For even more fun, you can play local co-op with another person controlling Gooigi, which if you’ve missed the likes of Lego Star Wars, you’ll find scratches that itch incredibly well.
All of this would have made Luigi’s Mansion 3 an essential buy, but unfortunately it never quite gets there. For the most part, the game controls decently. However when it comes to aiming the Poltergust, the controls become extremely fiddly and awkward. It’s difficult to aim exactly where you want, and in a game whose boss battles and puzzles often depend on quick, accurate aim, I found it to be a major source of frustration. During boss battles, I’d hoover up projectiles to fire at bosses to stun them, have the game assist me by latching on their weak points, and then still miss entirely because I’d accidentally nudged the joystick a tiny bit during the last millisecond. Aside from that, you’re pushed into backtracking through the hotel and there are a lot of collectibles to find, unnecessarily lengthening the game’s story mode.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t recommend it, because it is still a wonderfully weird and incredible piece of entertainment. It’s truly rare to find a game where it’s obvious that the people behind it followed a time-tested philosophy of deep mining their imaginations for the wackiest, coolest, outlandish ideas and then bringing them to life without any reservation. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is silly, incredibly charming and perhaps most importantly, it’s very very fun.
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