FATAL FRAME: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse

This game was provided to us by Koei Tecmo for review. Thank you!

A group of teenagers have come back to the island they had mysteriously disappeared and reappeared as children to confront the evils that live there and recover their missing memories. Armed with a flashlight and a camera able to capture and seal away the horrors in front of them, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse will have you explore and confront what’s in front of them to uncover what’s been lost and discover the vile truth about this place.

Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is a remaster of the fourth game in this series, but it is a standalone story so no need to have played the others. The remaster boasts some new updated graphics with a new shadow rendering technique, new photo mode, and new costumes to enhance the experience further. It’s also worth noting that this is the first time this game has been localized outside of Japan, which is always an exciting prospect.

There is something about horror games like this that really get me freaked out and Fatal Frame doesn't pull any punches! The atmosphere is amazing, the story is great, and the ghosts, wraiths, and spirits look genuinely scary. I definitely jumped a bit seeing some of those nurses appear out of nowhere! The camera combat does feel a little out of place, but I didn't find it breaking the immersion of the game. My biggest complaint is the movement and loading when going through doors into new rooms. Camera movement and physically moving around feel a bit slow or falling behind, while the small "cutscenes" when going through doors is a bit obnoxious.

Even with this, I did enjoy the experience. The overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety while exploring the creepy world made my time in-game worthwhile. I do wish the movement and camera controls were fixed up a little more, but the overall experience was positive! And it can play really well on the Steam Deck!

Mask of the Lunar Eclipse - Performance

Starting up Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, everything started off very strong. I was getting 60 FPS and the battery drain was on the smaller side, but I did notice one little thing. The game window would actually shake back and forth pretty quickly. This was slight, so I had to take a moment to just make sure, but once I saw it, I couldn’t stop seeing it. The fix is simple though. Go into your settings and just change the display mode to “Borderless”. This will solve the shaking and you may have to change the Window Mode between Borderless to Windowed (or vice versa) when starting the game. I would stay away from Fullscreen since it has lowered resolution. “Borderless was a true 1280x720.

There are a couple of other odd things I noticed in regards to the settings. First, any setting changes didn’t really seem to fix performance much. I found one spot where the framerate dipped to 54 from 60 while on high settings and a TDP limit of 8. I changed the settings to low and even brought the resolution down, but the framerate only went to 58. Turning TDP limit to 9 seemed to get rid of any performance drops, but Mask of the Lunar Eclipse also drains more battery than it needs to, almost always sticking to a 15W drain. The good thing is it stays at 60 at high settings and is completely playable!

I did see if turning the game to 40 FPS would be better and while it did help with conserving battery, it also showed some minor camera stutters. It also made the cutscenes run considerably slower (20 FPS) so it felt much slower than it should have been. It’s a compromise, but if you’re willing to do it, you can set a TDP limit of 6 and keep your settings on high, lowering drain to 11W with the gameplay itself still feeling smooth.

I didn’t encounter any controller issues or visual bugs, keeping the experience pristine the entire time I was playing.

Conclusion

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is a fantastic survival horror game that succeeds in creating one of the scariest atmospheres I have seen in a long time. Yes it has some issues with movement and camera controls, but they are eclipsed by the intriguing story and constant state of fear that exudes from just moving around. The pros outweigh the cons for this game, especially with how well it can run on the Steam Deck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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