Luigi’s Mansion 3 review – supernatural beauty

Nintendo’s most cowardly hero prepares to celebrate Halloween with the best graphics on the Switch.

It’s Halloween this week but, alas, the days of dedicated horror games being released to coincide with it are long gone. There’s plenty of live service games that will have Halloween promotions, but they’re not intended to scare, only fleece you of your money via microtransactions. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the exact opposite to that, a wonderful single-player and co-op adventure that’s entirely self-contained and effortlessly charming from beginning to end.

Obviously, Luigi’s Mansion 3 isn’t really scary – it only has a seven age rating, after all – but there’s a few funny jump scares and if you’re arachnophobic some really nasty looking spiders. But in general the tone is that of a horror-themed kids’ cartoon, with Luigi in a constant state of mild terror as he tries to save his friends from King Boo and his army of ghosts.

Not only is the tone similar to an animated movie but the game features what is arguably the best graphics on the Nintendo Switch. They’re not just technically impressive, with great use of lightning and destructible scenery, but they’re wonderfully animated too, imbuing Luigi and the ghosts with such a sense of character that it overcomes any small disappointments in how the gameplay is pitched.

The most important new feature is Gooigi, a doppelgänger made of green goo. Although he dissolves in water, and can only survive a couple of hits, he can fit through grates and iron bars like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. He’s not only used for some of the game’s cleverer puzzles, where you alternate control between him and Luigi, but another player can take control at any time in co-op – using either a simplified Joy-Con control system, a Pro Controller, or two Joy-Cons together.

Thanks to the peculiarities of the GameCube and 3DS, Luigi’s Mansion has always had slightly odd controls, even though what you’re doing is fairly straightforward. Here, the left analogue stick moves you around while the right one turns you around and aims up and down. As simple as that sounds it seems needlessly fiddly at first and takes a while to get used to. You can also aim up and down with motion controls, which works well, but weirdly only vertically, which makes aiming the plunger irritatingly difficult.

These issues aren’t serious, but they do harm the game’s accessibility to new players, although luckily the amazing visuals are likely to convince them it’s worth persevering with. Well-furnished rooms can be reduced to a mere shell by the end of a particularly intense battle, as you smash ghosts into tabletops and food, clothing, and anything else that isn’t tied down goes flying.

Breaking things is, of course, immensely entertaining, but every room always has at least one major secret, whether it’s fake walls or something more complex involving turning valves or bath taps with your vacuum cleaner. The bigger puzzles though, that are needed for story progression, are rarely as complex as in the second game and we couldn’t help but be disappointed by that.

There are some good ones, with one of the floors containing multiple film studios that gets very clever, but we were disappointed it never raises to that same level again. Most of the time the puzzles are more on the level of a Lego movie game, where as long as you keep your eyes open, and keep thinking about the full range of abilities at your disposal, there’s nothing that will give you pause for more than a few minutes.

Often it seems as if all the amazing environmental detail and destructibility is going to waste, as none of it ever really has anything to do with the puzzles or combat; even though the level of detail goes all the way down to tiny ice cubes and pots of paint whose contents you can splat against the wall – but which only come up once in the whole game.

There’s a sense that Luigi’s Mansion 3 is pulling its punches, both in terms of its complexity and the general difficulty level, with more than one of the boss battles undercutting themselves simply by being too easy. We don’t think that’s a mistake but instead Next Level trying to make it more like the first game, but for us at least that seems a backwards step. At the very least you should immediately turn off the hints that will otherwise spell everything out in game-spoiling detail.