Reviews from

in the past


Kind of short with a steep difficulty curve. Other than that, it's easily one of the scariest pieces of media ever made, and one of the best horror games.

Fatal Frame rewired my brain. I can't play games without an inverted x-axis anymore. If I play a game that doesn't allow inverted horizontal control, it throws me off and the adjustment period takes a while.

This is a game that I played with my best friend. We got on a discord call, I streamed my screen to her, while also streaming it on Twitch. Bonding over our shared love of film and physical media, experiencing the scares and storytelling together, I loved playing Fatal Frame this way.

Fatal Frame has a genuinely eerie setting, tense, nerve-wracking, unique game play (pulling off a fatal frame shot is very satisfying) and enjoyable puzzles with just the right amount of complexity. Highly recommended.

Fatal Frame creates a very horrifying atmosphere. The sounds that play in rooms, the music that changes whenever a ghost is nearby, the way the controller subtly vibrates whenever something supernatural occurs, and the camera angles really help you get immersed. Because of this, it’s terrifying to play. I haven’t felt this tense playing a horror game in a long time. And part of it is due to the way you fight ghosts.

In Fatal Frame, you use a camera to defeat ghosts. Taking pictures of the ghosts makes them disappear. Here comes the scary part, since you need to take a picture of the spirit, you need to stare at them directly. You have to stare at the enemy dead in the eye and watch them inch closer and closer toward you. Some ghosts aren’t that much of a threat since they usually stay still, making it easy to take a clear shot of them. However, that doesn’t apply to all of them. Some ghosts can move very quickly to avoid getting captured on the camera. Some can even disappear for a brief moment to attack you from behind. I loved this. Fights with ghosts always felt tense because of how tricky they can be to take a picture of. The samurai ghost was my favorite because he’s fast and is the only ghost able to use a weapon, which made him stand out from the rest.

The story is alright. Although, I didn’t play this game for the plot. The story has you playing as a girl named Miku to find your brother in a haunted mansion with a dark past. I think what hampered the plot was the voice acting. It’s atrociously bad, and not in a funny way. It feels like Miku doesn’t care about what's going on due to how emotionless she sounds. No hate to any of the VAs. The game is old, and poor voice acting during this time was common. It just, unfortunately, makes it difficult to get invested in the narrative. I like some of the ideas and how disturbing it gets when you learn the mansion's past, but overall it's the weakest aspect of the game.

Fatal Frame is a fantastic horror game and created an experience that I’ll never forget. There was a portion of the game where I ran out of healing items, and that was the most scared I felt in any horror game in a long time. I highly recommend trying out this game if you can. It's a classic!

thank god these guys were on earth till instagram existed

i did 75% of the boss rush portion at 1 hp, i think i'm him


Fondly recalling a situation where me and my friend were softlocked by a ghost that follows you between rooms, we didnt quite understand the combat so we were burning through ammo faster than the game was designed for and this ghost prevented us from moving forward to somewhere we could replenish the camera.

I like the concept of each night, there's different set of victims that the story focuses. However, I found the main story to be fairly weak and it's not helped by the fact that the game's ending was just plain stupid.

The entire game takes place inside a single mansion, told within three separate nights. Now, this is a great setting especially for the game's genre. Supernatural adversaries and haunted mansions are simply the perfect mix. However, the game stumble with this in execution. Since the mansion is not as big as the one seen in Resident Evil, almost every single nook and cranny of the setting could be explored in its first chapter, and leaves little to no new rooms to discover for the remaining chapters to following. This means that there's pretty much no progression felt in the game, and it's a shame considering how much a potential the Himuro mansion have.

The game provides a variety of creepy ghosts to take picture of, however, this variety could barely even be felt due to the game's baffling decision of forcing you to fight off the same ghost models right after finishing it off in literally the room before where you are. Sometimes you'll even face off the same ghost three times in a row!

The game never provides a sense of progression due to its absurd amount of repetition of areas and enemies. And the puzzles in the game doesn't help either, with many of them not providing any kind of rewards after completion and instead just puts you back into the beginning with you trying to solve another puzzle because the first puzzle had nothing to provide.

Healing items are also quite rare to come by which kind of feel absurd considering how high the damage output of almost every single ghosts. Not to mention, many encounters take place within a small room with no breathing room, making it so damage is pretty much inevitable.

This game probably contains some of the, if not, the most jankiest controls ever implemented in a video game. Controlling your character is so stiff and rigid that you can actually feel the character stop with each step. It's also incredibly easy for the character to stick to the walls, making the already awful movements, pretty excruciating.

I find it to be difficult to progress through the game in some instances without depending on online walkthroughs. The hints for some of the puzzle solutions, especially with the photograph hints, are so vague that the game could pretty much do away with them and it wouldn't impact the game substantially at all.

The game desperately needs more time in the oven. Just every time about the game feels so under polished that it makes playing through the game such a slog. And this is a shame because the game is actually scary too bad the gameplay hampers everything.

An interesting twist on survival horror combat where you are forced to look at horrifying ghosts in the face and have to take camera shots on a knife's edge to exorcize them efficiently. It manages to get under my skin thanks to some incredible ghost design that makes them inhuman in proportions as well as how they move. Neat game.

I have a special place in my heart for survival horror games where you can hold down the run button to move your character forward. I'm hoping that in the sequels they reduce the deceleration on it because all I could think about while playing this was how much I wanted to drift Miku around the corners of the Himuro Mansion like a car.

this game was....rough to say the least,that's not to say the game is bad though and it's understandable as this is the first game in the series but there's many things that didn't aged well or simply annoying,but also there's many things this game does right and still aged well.
The controls takes time to get used to(especially after playing Fatal Frame 4),but once it clicks it was manageable,the enviromental designs is still good while it can be frustating that the entire game takes place around just this mansion but i think it creates this tense and danger atmosphere that speaking of which this game excels at,thanks to the composition of fixed camera angles.
That being said this game unfortunately didn't manage to scare me once,even when the ghost movements are surreal it still doesn't scare me,and the story and dialogue definitely didn't aged very well especially the dialogue because of the cheesy voice acting and goofy character models.
Overall i'd enjoyed this game while the flaws are more noticeable after playing the fourth entry but it's still solid.

(Played before 2023)
A flawed gem. I think the setting was cool and I think the combat/gameplay fights were really fun, and battling ghosts didn't get old. My problem was how many areas were completely reused, and I think the story is week and has a lot of flaws that don't make any sense. Definitely hits a lot of spooky vibes and I love how some jumpscares are nothing, and others spawn enemies. Also it is aboslutely not based on a true story lmao

Neat. Not really scary as much as it was vibes. Lots of spirits and cult shenanigans. The camera fighting was kinda hard to use and didn't work as well as I thought it would, which made the game a bit frustrating at times. Other than that though the game is worth checking out if you are into the kinda horror that this game has.

Didn't think this game would be scary, but it was spooky. Great time playing it though!

A truly spooky game. I procrastinate on playing the sequels bc I haven't re-upped on my pissy pampers no cap

When you go home at night and pass by a street where there is no one and you hear nothing, don't you feel that you have to look behind you every so often, or that you look everywhere, as if you feel you are being watched? Fatal Frame is that same feeling, but constantly, and I don't say this as an "average horror review", but because the controller literally vibrates when there is a ghost nearby, and if it's not hostile, you just have to take the camera out and aim until the static tells you where it is.
While that's just for the collectibles, since hostile ghosts usually make a sound, playing this game without a controller is the worst thing you could think of (though tbh I guess it's not something emulators let you do lol). While it sure is easier to aim with a mouse, when you eat a jumpscare (not screams, but a loud sound and a ghost showing you where to go lmfao), or when you're fighting, the controller starts vibrating intermittently to simulate the protagonist's heart and make you think you feel that way too and I love it. It makes the fights with the ghosts SUPER TENSE, since you don't just have to fight in a mansion, aka hallways/rooms with spaces for 1-2 people, making everything super claustrophobic by having to fight ghosts that move around a lot and--yeah, idk how it works really well, but I love it.

Another thing I love is that if you're afk a ghost spawns sbddsbsbsbs
the other time i was with a friend on discord because i was scared and out of nowhere he said "haha look at this little meme" so i did that and also replied some dms, the thing is that out of nowhere i hear the sound of the ghost talking + the joystick vibration and i shit myself, i legit the fastest alt + tab in the west because i was low on life lmfao
my friend ended up getting scared of my scream XDD
If you pause the game, the screen fills up with more and more handprints of blood, which I found super cool to keep the player immersed and as a way to say "not even pausing is safe"

I have to say that the puzzles, the speed of the character/camera and the super limited resources were brutal. Like sure, they give you items that basically fill up all your life if you run out, so you don't die, but you can only carry 1 and I found more of those than ammo for my camera lol but still, I was scared to death because I had to shoot accurately with a crappy stick on the gamepad, so I suffered a lot.
And speaking of suffering a lot, did you know that when emulating it in PCSX2 there is a bug where the ghosts are invisible? Well, I didn't know it until the final stretch of the game 😭 in my head invisible ghosts = all the sense in the world 👍 and it wasn't until I saw a playtrough in youtube bc I got stuck in a puzzle that I said "wait.... why can this person see the ghosts???? " so nothing 🥲 i fixed the bug by changing a few things in the video renderer and ready, but a shame bc all the ghosts have their own designs, while i just saw them as pngs when they moved bc they left an aura that followed their body asdbababsbsbasdb legit i had to use that and the sound and thank god both headphones work, i can't imagine people in 2001+ playing this with the tv speakers, a horror not knowing where the fuck is the ghost.

Anyways, highly recommended. Some people complain that the voice acting is a bit low budget, they really try to do it right instead of doing it wrong "for the sake of the script", so it's not like silent hill 2 where it's done on purpose.

Amazing game that i have wished to play for so, so long.
I am so glad i finally got to.

With an amazing atmosphere, game mechanics and creative defense system, Fatal Frame one shows us the story of a girl named Miku, who goes on a haunted mansion to find her misssing brother, Mafuyu.
As we get deeper and deeper into the story, we can see the fates of many of the people who have tried to concur the mansion spirits.

I love this game, simply because it really terrified me.
With the camera angles, the shaking of the controller, the music, the whole world building and weird sounds and ghost popping up, it just really impressed me.
What i didn't like about this game was how hard it was. It was so hard for me to beat a single ghost, without using 21093819283 camera lenses (of the good ones), so i always had to go to the checkpoints and just get more of the normal lens that the game gives you when you just go to camera that you can interract with to save your progress.
It was really fufcking hard, and for a first try to beat it, i gotta say, i truly thought it would be much easier, but it ended up irrating me a lot of times.
Even though i was in the verge of just putting the game away, i couldn't stop thinking about it because it was just so interesting to see the story of Miku and her progress, even though i gotta say it's not THIS interesting or impressive...
The voice acting is really messy and overall just super stone-ish, but I know it probably wasn't made on purpose like in the Silent Hill games.... But it didn't irrate me this bad.

I enjoyed it!
Nice one, now up to the second game of the fatal frame franchise!

It's a really well crafted horror game, the jumpscares hit you just right without it being annoying and overused. The combat is quite challenging but you still feel like you have a chance of fighting back, and the overall atmosphere I just dig, because I love Japanese horror. I feel like this is Japan's Silent Hill, which is weird because Silent Hill is also made by a Japanese team, but marketed towards western audience.

These ghosts get way less scary when you think any Instagram hoe would solo ghostbust them. They're lucky this is 1980 or else this would turn into Luigi's Mansion very quickly

Got a B rating on my first playthrough. I've had this for years and just recently beat it. Impressive atmosphere, great combat and some great scares make this a must play for horror fans. That said, expect tons of backtracking and some of the stiffest voice acting from that generation.

fatal frame is for the girls only

Incredible game. Somehow remains scary even while involving toughish combat segments and pretty tight healing resources. Absolutely phenomenal atmosphere, “puzzles” and gameplay mechanics. Absolutely recommended

A really solid first effort, doesn't come together 100% in the end but a lot of great ideas. Must have blown minds when it first came out, even today the atmosphere can be thick with dread. Trekking across the mansion while low on health items is classic survival horror.

This review contains spoilers

eu amo fatal frame. muito. e como comecei pelo 2, sempre achei que o 1 era um pesadelo: falavam que as pessoas não conseguiam terminar pelo medo, que o recomendado era jogar a partir do 2.

graças a isso tive uma surpresa muuuito boa quando decidi pegar pra jogar o fatal frame 1. agora mais crescidinha eu pude aproveitar tudo que não conseguia da franquia como um todo: ótima ambientação, mapa, cutscenes e principalmente muito muito muito divertido. essa é a palavra pra esse jogo, divertido.

a história é ok, não se compara mesmo com os outros mas é interessante e envolvente o suficiente. os personagens são mortinhos mas ehhh quem liga. o mapa pode ser intimidador mas não achei dificil de navegar - se eu consegui qualquer um consegue - os puzzles a maioria é bem intuitivo e apesar de serem todos parecidos, não achei que teve uma frequencia a ponto de ser incoveniente nem nada assim.

a estética desse jogo é linda demais, o menu é a coisa mais caprichada, a ost é ÓTIMA. muito legal o uso de musica e ruído pra mostrar quando tem um fantasma por perto e isso é algo que os próximos jogos perdem um pouco então apreciei bastante

sobre lutas: achei um pouco desproporcional as dificuldades, com alguns fantasmas sendo tranquilos e outros sendo muito mais rápidos que você, fazendo ser impossível não levar dano. o ultimo boss é outra coisa que me incomodou, eu fiquei o jogo todo cagada de medo economizando todo filme forte possível, sendo que na hora ela só precisava de 4 fotos pra morrer e nem era do filme mais poderoso me senti meio otaria mas td bem!!

[SPOILER DO FINAL] ok agora preciso comentar tb. os personagens ja nao são ponto forte desse jogo mas meu deus o irmao da menina RESOLVER FICAR COM A FANTASMA NO FINAL E MORRER PRA NADA DEPOIS DE VC PASSAR O JOGO TODO SE MATANDO PRA IR ATRAS DELE? VAI SE FUDER CANALHA [FIM DO SPOILER]

enfim é isto overall uma experiencia super super divertida e to muito feliz de estar de novo fissurada nessa franquia, só reafirmou que é com certeza o que eu mais amo de videogame neste mundo iupiiiii

the first game i actually finish in the "survival horror fixed camera" genre of games, it's a rather great starting point and attracting to complete the other games in the series.
some glitches are VERY annoying like the geometry when you get stuck in invisible stuff, and by the last one or two hours... i was waiting for the game to gather its stuff up and all.
The theming and the storyline are great, the Japenese Folklore Horror is very interesting and the camera system is well-thought of and quite unique.
Overall, a rather decent game with its flaws that i'd recommend for anyone wanting to get into the survival horror genre.
looking forward to play the rest of the series!

This review contains spoilers

fun besides bitch blind ghost stupid btich ghost takes all my health bar fuck (im only on night 2)


I enjoy it quite a bit despite getting bullied by my friends on discord throughout the whole game.

A good idea with a not so great history, the first game of a marvelous saga, if you discart some points of the story and focus on the main objective and final goal, you probably are just playing this to catch up with the story of the second game.