Developer/Publisher: Next Level Games/Nintendo Released: March 2013

Played on: 3DS

This sequel to the Gamecube’s fun but forgettable launch title takes the Luigi’s Mansion premise and turns it into a great little game for the 3DS. You play as Luigi of course, as is customary in the Year of Luigi, and you’ve been tasked by Professor E. Gadd to collect 6 pieces of the “dark moon” to make all the recently disturbed ghosts of the Evershade Valley sane again.

Armed with a flashlight and the Poltergust 5000, basically a vacuum cleaner that sucks up ghosts and other environmental goodies, Luigi explores 5 mansions and solves puzzles that unlock hidden rooms to reveal ghosts that need some serious busting. Each mansion has around 6 stages to complete that all take place within them, so you are often exploring the same environments in each stage, but there is enough variation in the challenges and gated sections which unlock to avoid too much repetition. The bottom screen map is nicely designed, clear and littered with clues, an invaluable device that makes navigating the often complex mansions much more manageable. The stages have no checkpoints, which can be frustrating, but each one goes for 15-20 minutes which is perfect for a quick handheld session every day. The game is less successful when you binge and play for hours, but a lot of fun to come back to regularly.

Luigi spends a lot of time wandering the 5 unique mansions trying to puzzle his way closer to finding the dark moon piece, but is quite regularly beset by ghosts. While there are the traditional large white “Boo” ghosts hidden in levels, the bulk of Luigi’s Mansion’s poltergeists are skinny, mischievous green ones who delight in either pranking each other or Luigi. To bust these buggers you need to scare them with a flashlight flash, then pull against their resistance as you suck them up into the Poltergust. It is a fun ghost-capture mechanic that gets more difficult as you encounter more dangerous variety of ghosts that need to be discovered using a “dark light”, are armoured, or take a whole lot of force to fully suck up.

Each new ghost has its own particular personality, ranging from cheeky to grumpy, and you can often peek through cracks in the wall and watch how the ghosts behave when you’re not around. Some of the game’s most amusing moments come from watching these scripted moments of ghosts interacting with each other.

The whole game is just absurdly charming. The music that weaves between horror and camp, playful sound design, Luigi’s constantly terrified behaviour, Professor Gadd’s absent-minded dialogue, that damn ghost puppy that keeps stealing my keys – everything is animated with absolute charm and a constantly surprising attention to detail. The game is very very cute.

The boss battles at the end of each mansion are epic, but are the cause of my main major issue with the game. The majority of the boss battles are great fun – long fights with huge ghosts that have multiple phases and require pattern recognition, quick reflexes and puzzle solving in equal measure. The lack of checkpointing here can be quite frustrating, but I was happy to forgive this after a number of satisfying and rewarding boss battles.

Until Shrewd Possessor. That ice bastard. You ride a sled following him down a pit, and need to shoot out glass shards to destroy him. The problems – his shards regenerate and become harder to destroy with each phase, the shards spin and move and change heights so there is no consistent place to shoot, your canon overheats if you shoot too many bombs, and when you run out of time the Shrewd Bastard kills you. This dreadful combination of elements results in one of the most frustrating boss battles in recent memory, and completely tainted what was, up until that point, an extremely enjoyable game that I’d been looking forward to replaying. When I finally beat him, it had nothing to do with my skill, and was completely luck and persistence. Now that quite some time has passed since playing, I do feel the inclination to play the game again, but the memory of Shrewd Possessor remains firmly imprinted in my brain as the very definition of frustration.

The latter third of the game does feature slightly more frustrations than earlier, but in general the rest of the game was a lot of fun, and I probably should have taken a break after that horrible boss battle and spread out my playtime across a few weeks rather than compulsively playing the game’s 15 hours in a few evenings. I had some serious hand cramp after a few play sessions, the kind I haven’t had since Metroid Prime 2, which might be indicative of a slightly demanding control scheme that doesn’t quite suit the form factor of the 3DS. Either that or I’m getting old.

Luigi holds his own remarkably well in this solo outing, the unlikely hero and his constant fear and reluctance to proceed providing a lot more relatable character qualities than his brother ever does. I’ve always been a Luigi fan, and hope Nintendo continue to use his character to try out more experimental game types in the future.

Verdict: A totally charming game with lots of fun puzzles and ghost-busting levels, I definitely recommend this to anyone looking for something to play on the 3DS in short bursts. A dreadful boss battle and latter stage frustrations mar the experience.

Should Bradley play this: No.