Backtracking is a blogging project that I began in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born, up until the present. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
First, an important aside. My original choice for 2002 was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I had started into it and made some solid progress. But while I was underway, the BDS movement singled out Microsoft (owner of Zenimax → Bethesda → Morrowind) as a priority boycott target. You can (and should) read their reasoning here. Obviously, I don’t expect my readership to actually move the needle, but attention is attention, and the idea of giving anyone any reason to keep their Xbox Game Pass subscription didn’t sit well with me. Maybe in the future I’ll write about Morrowind, but not right now.
Why I Chose This Game
Fatal Frame is a cult classic survival horror game, drawing from the lineage of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series’ and their more esoteric predecessors. Truth be told, I don’t gravitate towards supernatural horror (zombies, ghosts, etc.). And while I do dabble with horror games, my forays involve summoning a lot more courage and composure than I would naturally have on hand.
So why pick Fatal Frame? Just to challenge myself? Well, maybe a little. Horror more broadly has been a growing interest for me over the years, especially when it intersects with science fiction. I’ve greatly enjoyed indie horror titles like Mouthwashing and Iron Lung, and I had keen enough affection for the stylish and terrifying Signalis and the doppelganger nightmare ECHO to write about them in past years.
So, despite my ambivalence towards ghost stories, Fatal Frame felt like a viable pivot: a glimpse at the beloved PS2 era of strange and experimental survival horror titles. There are, admittedly, more esoteric ones than Fatal Frame, but it strikes a nice balance between obscure and beloved. And while its sequel is probably the most well-regarded, anyone reading along with Backtracking knows that I’m loathe to start a series anywhere but the beginning.
What I Thought
Fatal Frame follows Hinasaki Miku, a teenage girl with a sixth sense for the supernatural who ventures to a strange, remote mansion in search of her missing older brother Mifuyu. The dilapidated mansion, which we learn is called Himuro Manor, turns Miku’s search into an investigation into the past, delving through a grim history of mysterious deaths and brutal rituals that haunt the place.
While exploring the manor, Miku learns of traumatic events that befell several generations of inhabitants, from the recent research of a novelist in search of inspiration, to the prior investigations of a folklorist, all the way back to a history of occult rituals decades prior. Each of these unfolds as distinct layers of the mystery, uncovered piecemeal through notes about notes about rituals, found while gradually exploring the manor.
The layered structure of the story works well. Slowly unearthing an ever deeper and darker past helps break the game into acts, draws parallels across the time periods, and brings the story further and further into the surreal folklore and occultism at its roots.
More importantly, Fatal Frame delivers all of this with spectacular atmosphere, drawing liberally from the Japanese cinematic horror tradition that emerged in the 80s and 90s to unnerve and terrify. Restrained jump-scares intermingle with haunting camera tricks, unsettling background elements, and enemy designs that are unique and striking (despite being filtered through the same spectral aesthetic). The sound design is profoundly upsetting throughout, incorporating a variety of unsettling ambient noises, creaking floorboards, haunting moans of the damned, and so on. The English voiceover is admittedly as corny as you might expect from this era of translated survival horror, but to me it truly has its own sort of charm.
Fatal Frame's distinctive camera is the only tool Miku has to keep the undead spirits at bay, making it not only a plot point, but a load-bearing facet of both the mechanical elements and horror direction of the game. When controlling Miku normally, we see her walking around in 3rd person, flitting between fixed camera positions that often unnervingly obscure what’s ahead of her. When she holds the camera up to her face, though, the viewpoint changes to 1st person, her movement slows, and she can look around through the camera's stark, grainy viewport. This helps Himuro Manor feel like a fully-formed 3D space, complete with all the ominous, shadowy corners one might expect.
During encounters with spirits, the camera is a double-edged sword. Enemies will circle around the room, glide through walls, and fade in and out of view. The longer you can keep them in your viewfinder, the more you can charge up your shot before finally snapping the shutter and dealing damage. But with the limited field of view through the camera, you’d better not lose track of that enemy, lest they sneak up on you. This wonderful, disjointed duality between aiming and moving is a staple of survival horror, an iconic element of early Resident Evil titles — but the perspective switch adds a unique, disorienting layer that helps escalate the tension of these encounters. Seeing Miku from the outside but also through her eyes has an interesting effect on how the player is positioned relative to the terrors she encounters. It blurs the role of guiding our character and embodying her, which I found to be evocative towards situating me within Himuro Manor.
The perspective switch adds another little bit of spice: having emerged in an era before the ubiquity of console first person shooters, Fatal Frame’s control scheme is… odd. There’s an awkward shift between the 3rd person mode (left stick moves) and the 1st person camera mode (left stick aims, right stick moves). It’s easy to see this as a fault, but I loved it; it made the earlier encounters in particular just a little bit more harrowing as I found my footing. After all, if games like this can use constrained movement to ramp up tension, who’s to say they can’t also benefit from a bit of control scheme jank?
Survival horror’s other key facet is resource scarcity; scraping by with limited ammunition and healing items as you attempt to solve mysteries and fend off threats as efficiently as possible. Eventually, infamously, many of these games begin to crumble under the weight of carefully-stashed resources that a cautious player inevitably retains. The horror aspect wears thin as this overstocked player trivializes the later moments of the game. In my case… well, I would say that I was less cautious and more meandering, arriving in the later parts of the game with dwindling resources just when the manor became extremely sparse with replenishments. I had a hell of a time with some of the late-game fights, but I did find them ultimately conquerable with enough patience and attention. Oddly, the overall effect was similar; the horror wore off for me on a frustrated attempt #10 in the same way it might for a player who trivialized attempt #1. This unevenness is not unexpected for survival horror, but it was an unfortunate lurch in my playthrough that I probably should have anticipated, and maybe speaks to my inexperience with the genre.
All told, though, I enjoyed my time quite a bit. Fatal Frame was consistently creative with its storytelling, compelling with its art direction and sound design, and clever with how it used the strange and shifting space of Himuro Manor. This one was worth gritting my teeth through to the end.
Reflections
Horror can be very hit or miss for me, and I’m unlikely to reach for survival horror in particular. I would have had a much worse time finishing Fatal Frame without a couple of emulator affordances here and there that helped me overcome my late-game resource lacks. Brief peeks at a guide helped me get past a couple of esoteric progression moments as well. I'm glad I had the tools to see it through to the end.
As always, the theme I keep coming back to is this: putting in the effort to stick with games that are less familiar (or not as accommodating as I’m used to) continues to be rewarding. It feels like I’m developing my taste — or even my skill — as a thoughtful, critical player. I expect the games in this series to become (understandably) a little less unyielding as I move through the years, but I hope that the patience and attentiveness I’ve built up will continue to aid my insight and enjoyment. Plenty of art deserves a little bit of effort and grace in order to comprehend and appreciate it.