I feel like I desperately wish that this could be my favorite video game. It checks SO many boxes for me but also fumbles so badly in important areas.

Making the main character a photographer who loses their love for the artform due to grief was genuinely a stroke of genius. I absolutely adore the idea of her having to rediscover her passion to affirm that she still has the right to exist. The camera obscura and the main heroine are finally used together for a grounded, thematic purpose instead of just a convenient gameplay one.

The vibes in this game are immaculate. Every time I return to the apartment hub the sense of loneliness just totally washes over me. Total silence except the faint sound of raindrops and your own footsteps. Even though you have a rooommate, she's also grief struck and totally despondent. The only thing you can get out of her most of the time is "It's raining again...". A self evident meaningless platitude. Having a safe haven hub in general does so much to flesh out Rei as a character. She's the only character in this series to me who feels like she actually has a life outside of being a pretty ghostbuster. The ghosts slowly starting to invade your personal space throughout the game works so well tonally and thematically, and the fixed camera frames the scares so well. A far cry from the later games in which the camera is lazily taken away from the player to point out something "scary" happening.

Unfortunately, the big asterisk here is obviously that everything I'm gushing about is actually a relatively small amount of the actual time you will spend playing. The runtime is frankly much too long for survival horror, and much of that time will inevitably be spent aimlessly wandering around the mansion. Very often the objective you're given is "find the object in this photograph" and your response will be "how could you possibly expect me to to that". So many of the rooms look identical to eachother and the map is far too big for its own good. The level design would have MASSIVELY benefitted from something closer to the second game where relatively smaller dungeons were separated by outdoor segments.

The inclusion of Kei also just fucking sucks. This game SHOULD be a celebration of the series and an examination of 3 women who've lost a loved one, and instead it's 2 of those and some jackass I've never heard of. His design sucks and his gameplay sucks even more. He has an absolutely pathetically weak camera obscura in exchange for... being able to crouch in place (which is totally worthless and you're better off never using it). Thanks. So glad we lost out on Mio for this.

In the end, I know that if I replayed this game I would be frustrated. But this is just one of those times that I'm more than happy to look back on it admiring what it did well. There IS an absolutely perfect survival horror game hidden in here, and the parts where that emerges really stuck with me.