First Impressions: Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir (3DS)

 

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir

System: Nintendo 3DS

Release Date: April 13, 2012

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Koei Tecmo Games

I recall hearing about Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir within a year of it being released and I kind of wrote it off as a gimmicky game that was only trying to make a buck off of the 3D effect of the 3DS and the camera on the system.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, that this was part of the Fatal Frame survival horror series that revolves around the Camera Obscura used to fight off malignant spirits.  I think I had thought it was more like an app that had ghosts pop up around your house and you fought them with the camera on the 3DS, not part of some established franchise.  However, even knowing that it was part of an existing franchise might not have fully changed my mind, but only after Conklederp and I purchased a house that was built 100 years ago and while doing research earlier that year on our article about weaponless survival horror video games did I think, "Huh, I think I would like to play this game."  So I forked over the $15 and started playing it after we moved in.  Again, this was around the time that some of the 3DS buttons stopped working so I put the game back on the not-so-proverbial shelf.

Last week, after deciding that I was going to stop playing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (more on that in the actual article), I plugged this game in and restarted.  On my first attempt, back in 2017, I played for 22 minutes and made it through the first page of the book.

Okay, let me backtrack a little bit.

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir is part visual novel, part survival horror, part Alternate Reality game that uses an accompanying physical book (called "The Diary of Faces") at specific points in the game.  You progress through the game by talking to characters who appear in your actual space by finding them with the outward-facing camera.  The game prompts you when to use the Diary of Faces and is pretty patient with you while you wait for the camera to focus on the page.  There is some combat in the game that is pretty similar to the main title in the Fatal Frame series, in that you keep the camera focused on the enemy while a power bar fills up and you either attack with a full bar or ward off an attack while causing only a fraction of damage.  That is really all I know as I am now only 44 minutes in and have gone through and have flipped to four of 16 pages, so maybe a quarter of the way through?

The one thing after the last lead-up to and through the battle got me thinking about the mechanics and functionality of the game.  Spirit Camera is a survival horror game in that you have to survive various encounters with spirits, there are jump scares, and a general unsettling atmosphere created by the locations and the story.  How the game achieves this though is where I am having mixed results.  Because this is a horror game, I want to play with the lights off, to feel more immersed in the haunted pages of the Diary of Faces, but the quality of the camera on the 3DS (and probably any economically priced 3D camera developed in 2014) requires there to be sufficient light for the camera to read the pages to generate the in-game content.  And the Diary of Faces should be placed on a non-movable flat surface (ie: not your lap) because having the game can be a little finicky if the angle gets off just a bit.  TL;dr: you need to play this survival horror game in a well-lit room with plenty of light and at least one flat surface.

None of this however will stop me from playing the game.  I love the concept and I am so far entertained by the story, and most importantly, I am excited to see how the various AR pages play within the game.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

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