There’s nothing quite like Japanese horror. What makes it so terrifying is the eerie uncanniness its stories wade into so comfortably, so willingly. It’s hard to articulate without just defaulting to “atmospheric” — a quality my Western-centric horror brain simply wasn’t built to process.
J-horror, both in film and in video games, has always been a hard no for me. Silent Hill gets a pass purely on the merit of its deeply American setting, but I will never forget buying Siren for $5 a couple of years ago, getting absolutely scared shitless by the opening minutes, and never touching it again. Maybe I’m still traumatized from accidentally walking in on my parents watching The Grudge when I was five. Who’s to say? But in an effort to conquer my fears, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE sadly made me wet my pants — figuratively.
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Suffice to say: this game is scary as hell. Technically, the second remake of the second entry in the Fatal Frame franchise, Crimson Butterfly, follows the same basic blueprint as the rest of the series. You play as a pair of twins trapped in a cursed village that just so happens to sit on top of a portal to hell, and it’s on you to uncover what set off that whole grisly chain of events — and figure out how to save your own skin while you’re at it.
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