Luigi's Mansion 3 (2019)

I wasn't sure if Luigi's Mansion would be for me - I had not played the previous iterations and what I read and heard was mixed. My girlfriend and I decided to buy it as we are always on the lookout for fun co-op games to play through together. We went in with middling expectations and I think that's what allowed us to extract the fun out of it, so to speak.

The game looks great - as you would expect from Nintendo and the premise is interesting enough. The player as Luigi, is tasked with rescuing some Toads, Mario and Peach from a Haunted Mansion. You progress floor by floor in the mansion, gathering elevator buttons as you progress through a stage. The crux of the gameplay is around sucking up stuff with your special vacuum. The stuff can be random stuff, money or even ghosts. You have a light to stun enemies, you have a stun jump, you have a magic beam that materialises invisible objects into existence and a bow and arrow mechanic in the form of a plunger. The controls are very clunky, we never really felt like we had 100% control over Luigi. It often made performing simple tasks quite fiddly and frustrating.

When playing co-op, Luigi is joined by Gooigi, a version of Luigi that is usually stored on Luigi's back in the vacuum. He has some different abilities that make him unique and useful for solving puzzles, though the person playing him is certainly second fiddle. When playing single player you can swap to him when required, but I can't speak to how well that works given I played entirely co-op.

The puzzle solving was usually fun and rewarding but the difficult spiked significantly a couple of times. Some mechanics were introduced haphazardly where others were far more clearly signposted. I found myself often just spamming all of my abilities til one of them worked, not selecting based on logic that made sense to me. This frustration also extended to the collectibles. They are usually something that I really enjoy in games and relish the challenge of finding all the collectibles before I move on. Luigi's Mansion 3 had a plethora of secret/bonus/optional areas and content to explore, but it was very often only rewarded with money, something that is plentiful in the game and not worth seeking out more often than not. Some may find that this made finding a hidden reward even more gratifying, I just found it frustrating to spend 5 minutes figuring out a puzzle only to be rewarded with something I could have spent 30 seconds gathering.

All of that being said, it was a mostly enjoyable game. The combat didn't grow too stale, most of the boss fights were interesting and the creativity is where the game designers really excelled. Solving main story puzzles was generally rewarding and the narrative was on par with what we have come to expect from Mario titles.

Overall, I would recommend this game as a co-op experience in small instalments (maybe 45 minutes to an hour). Just be sure to quit out at a place where you aren't likely to forget what you were doing. I probably wouldn't buy a future Luigi's Mansion title, unless there were significant changes to the formula, but I enjoyed this title for what it was.

LM3 is a good videogame that wish I liked more than I do.

This was my first time playing one of the green guy's ghostbusting adventures, so I had no expectations other than what the word Nintendo implies: polish and charm, with great gameplay and a threadbare story. It delivers, I guess.

LM3 is undeniably charming. The animation work is oustanding, both ingame and during cutscenes. The environments are detailed, and reward you for interacting with them in a variety of dumb ways. If you see something and think "I wish I could..." then you probably can and will be showered with cash for doing so.

The levels become more interesting as you progress. It begins with typical hotel environments, then becomes more absurd with each level. A movie studio is particularly clever, especially when it builds to a bossfight straight out of a Godzilla flick.

I am now smiling while I think about this game, so maybe I geniunely like it. But for some reason the act of playing it always left me a little cold.

The core gameplay never really sucked me in. The constant hoovering up of coins and cash just felt like busywork akin to all those lego games. The ghostbusting was fun, but the controls felt imprecise, and I was often just blindly firing plungers hoping I would hit my target.

But then there is Gooigi. I am mostly writing the word Gooigi, so someone might read the word Gooigi, and therefore be living in a world where Gooigi is a thing. It is a fun word to say out loud, or even just think about. Your choice, but try it.

I have now forgotten the point of writing any of  this. Probably something about Gooigi. It always comes back to Gooigi.

Gooigi.