Luigi's Mansion 3

what fun it is to vacuum everything

This is my first "Luigi's Mansion" game. I loved destroying hotel rooms with my vacuum cleaner and checking every nook and corner for hidden items or new ways to interact with the environment. The experience is usually relaxing and hardly challenging, even though there are times you will need to get into the developers' minds to find out what they wanted you to do. Finding hidden items without a guide is impossible, there's no way you can guess the required actions for a few of them.
The gameplay hardly gets repetitive as each hotel floor has its own unique theme and set of puzzles. Bosses also require different strategies each time.

The only problem is that the money and gems you collect along your journey are pretty much useless. The game only gives you the chance to exchange money for extra lives and collectibles for a couple of cosmetics.

The decision to push Luigi's Mansion further into becoming an actual game is an unfortunate one, because the actual act of sucking up ghosts - the gameplay caused by the buttons you press - was never the core appeal of the original. The original was all charm and spectacle, an impressive tech showcase that also managed to have a lot of charm both through Luigi's character and the concepts of the ghosts around him. A sequel, Dark Moon for the 3DS, didn't come out until over a decade later, when the technical prowess was old hat, and to compensate they made the ghost-catching a little more involved by adding more ways to interact with the mansion - but the ghost catching wasn't more interesting and the exploration basically involved clicking the right button in the right corner of the screen, essentially a point-and-click game on a 3.5" screen that had its appeal but never felt truly engaging.

For the new game, Nintendo and Next Level Games (who also developed Dark Moon) were put in the unfortunate position of actually having to double down on the gameplay elements, because with the game on the Switch they're asking for 80 whole Canadian dollars. With the price higher, the game simply had to have more - in addition to a few new mechanics, there's also co-op, multiple local multiplayer modes (with even more as paid DLC), the online ScareScraper mode from Dark Moon. (I haven't tried much of the multiplayer, being all gameplay and no charm. I actually get the sense the gameplay is more interesting in multiplayer - I think the co-op of ScareScraper is the right approach - but still not interesting enough to be an actual selling point.) There's multiple kinds of collectibles in each area, many of which you need to revisit in order to collect.

Now, this is all fine. I don't think the gameplay is good or unique enough to actually support all that content, but it's also rarely unpleasant. There is still that point-and-click feel from the 3DS version where some of the puzzles feel like just clicking the right button in the right corner of the room - now with even more buttons to choose from! - and the cues aren't always super clear, but there's still a sense of interacting with the environment in different ways even if the solutions are usually similar. Likewise, many of the ghosts are defeated in a similar way - knock off their eye protection, stun them with the flashlight, suck them up - but their props and characteristics are all just a little different to keep things fresh. And with 17 floors in the game, each with a different theme and environment, there's always something popping up to look at.

But it also feels like the game was designed more and more around the gameplay instead of the world, which means that some of the charm gets lost in the process. This is most evident when you compare the boss ghosts in this game with the portrait ghosts in the original. All of the boss ghosts here immediately kick off as a fight, and it's always the same deal as the regular ghosts - find out how to get their protective gear off, stun, suck. The boss battles generally feel like a puzzle, but not a very interesting or dynamic one. And I wouldn't expect much uniqueness given how simple the mechanics at hand are, especially since this is a game that's not meant to be difficult so that it appeals to many demographics. Some of the first game's portrait ghosts were like this, too, but they also felt more interesting because they weren't automatically out to get you and you generally had to figure out their personality in order to catch them or even just make them appear. You weren't necessarily catching them because you had to - many were optional - but because you wanted to. This tested a different set of skills that are both more diverse and more common than anything the actual mechanics can provide. There's a few good bosses in the Switch version - using the chainsaw against Dr. Potter was neat, and fighting the movie monster ghost was really cool. (Intentionally or not, the camera angle used reminded me a lot of Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee, which was fun to relive.) But too many rely on the same tactics.

One thing I liked about the original game was a sense of progress - once you cleared a room of ghosts, it was emptied, never for those ghosts to return, which gave you a kind of secondary goal aside from saving Mario of clearing out the mansion from the pesky ghosts. (Well, until a certain part where they all come back, which only furthers your drive to clear it all out again. Whereas in this game, any backtracking feels like filler and a waste of time, since there's not anything new environmentally on return. You're just chasing down some object in an area you've already been in what fees like a conceited effort to make the game longer - which seems weird, since I think the game would be long enough without that! You do notice some of the floors later in the game being a big short, so maybe that was to make up for that, but truthfully I enjoyed the shorter floors sometimes.) In this game, ghosts will frequently return to rooms, which makes it feel as though you never really made progress, with your only goal being to keep driving further and further towards saving your friends - fine enough, but without that same level of constant, personal progress; you don't get that same feeling of satisfaction until you find a Toad or a new upgrade.

It's funny that this was developed by Next Level Games - who just recently got officially acquired by Nintendo - since they actually developed one of the most personality-filled Mario games ever, Mario Strikers Charged. (I believe it's the only Mario game to get an ESRB rating higher than E, and it's supposedly the game that made Nintendo really crack down on portrayals of Mario. Shoutouts to Waluigi and his team of Hammer Bros signaling everyone to suck it.) I actually do think some of the charm of that game is in this, just obviously with a different tone. It just would've been better if that personality had come through in the actual gameplay a little more.