Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir

Game Info

To start, I’d like to say I was looking forward to Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir since it was announced for the Nintendo 3ds.  Unfortunately, I was “Cursed” with disappointment from the second I started the story mode called Fatal Frame: The Diary of Faces.  Spirit Camera includes a book that is required to play the game for its AR functions.

The game starts out by giving a brief explanation to how you got the book with a tutorial showing how to use it and then it calibrates your gyro sensor.  You need to be in a well lit room to play or rather, just install a few bright flood lights in your living room and that should work.  This game is more frustrating at times than anything and has no actual scare effect due to never being able to see if there isn’t enough light.  The pages have to be absolutely flat and perfect in order for the 3ds to properly detect them. This is a problem because it is stapled like a manual.  Upon your first time entering the house within the book, you are followed back by a girl ‘spirit’ named Maya.  She reminds you what just happened and then tells you what to do next, then again reminds you what you just did!  The constant reminding of what just happened made me feel I was incapable of remembering anything.

Enough ranting for now and on to the actual game’s depth or lack there of.  The game will take roughly about 2 hours to complete 100% for almost any skilled gamer.  You scan pages within the book to encounter story plots and mini games that will require you to spin around freely to view them correctly.  The one part that seemed to have potential was exploring the house within the book.  It is on a rail-type system and you will have to literally spin your body around to explore everything while having it guide you to the proper destination.  The spirit battles you come across are pretty decent, kind of like Face Raiders, but instead of shooting you take pictures of the offenders.  When you play through The Diary of Faces’ story, you unlock all the mini games within it to be played whenever.

There are two other options, haunted visions and cursed pages, which can be selected at the main menu.  Haunted visions is a mode where you can choose to do the spirit battles even with your friend’s faces on them (hmm…Face Raiders?).  You can also use this to take pictures to see what spirits haunt the people around you and so on.  Cursed pages is where all the mini games unlocked within The Diary of Faces can be found.  The mini games just take longer to complete, which can get kind of tedious.

If more time and care was taken with this game then it could’ve lived up to its potential.  I don’t think the $39.99 price tag is justified here, it would have been better off an eShop title maybe at $9.99.  Or even if it were released as a pack of AR cards, like the ones that came with the 3ds system, with the mini games.  Also, if the AR book gets ruined or lost then the game is deemed useless.  I sincerely hope this isn’t the path Nintendo takes in their future AR endeavors.