Traditional, slow-paced survival horror games seem to have fallen out of favor with most publishers and mainstream audiences this generation, but that isn’t stopping Tecmo Koei from re-releasing one of the genre’s best games on PSN this week.
The latest episode of the Playstation Blogcast has revealed that the original Fatal Frame will be joining PSN’s lineup of “PS2 Classics” on Tuesday.
Fatal Frame was originally released for the PS2 in 2002, and was one of the system’s first survival horror games. Players are cast in the role of Miku, a young girl gifted with the ability to see ghosts, who ventures into a haunted house in order to find her missing brother. Fatal Frame’s unique first-person combat system and moody atmosphere were praised by critics back in ’02, and it is still widely regarded as one of the scariest games ever made.
Hopefully Tecmo Koei will follow up Fatal Frame by re-releasing Fatal Frame 2 and 3 on PSN as well; as good as the original Fatal Frame is, 2 and 3 are arguably even better.
The last game in the “main” series, Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse for the Wii, was released in Japan in 2008, and sadly never made its way to Western shores. The only continuation of the series we’ve seen since then was last year’s loosely related and poorly received ARG spin-off, Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir for 3DS, which was developed as joint project between Tecmo Koei and Nintendo.
I’m really excited about this news: even if it’s just a re-release of an old game, its good to hear that Tecmo Koei hasn’t given up on the franchise yet, and I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll eventually see another new game in the franchise eventually. As much as I love Resident Evil 4 and the first Dead Space, I still find myself missing the old-school, slower-paced style of horror games that seem to have disappeared from consoles during this generation, so even though I’ve already played through Fatal Frame multiple times, I’ll probably end up buying it again on PSN just to show my love for the genre. Anybody looking for a quality survival horror game should also do the same.
