There’s a moment around the mid-way point of Luigi’s Mansion 3 where you open a door into a room that’s not really a room and you think – wow. This absolutely sells the themed hotel setting of the game, but also sort of negates it completely. The room is, knowingly, I suspect, an actual sandbox: a vast puzzle-filled desert which stretches across the game’s Ancient Egypt-themed floor – and it is brilliant. But why do mansions or hotels at all when you can do ?
Luigi’s Mansion 3 reviewDeveloper: Next Level GamesPublisher: NintendoPlatform: Reviewed on SwitchAvailability: October 31st on Switch
Ever since our first glimpse at Luigi’s Mansion 3 – the medieval castle level revealed at E3 – it’s been clear this was going to push the series further from its traditional mansion format than ever before. I remember thinking, well, okay – we’ve had two quite traditional haunted house games already. It felt like the right time for Nintendo and developer Next Level Games to try something a little different – even if its themed hotel take on a medieval castle felt less like a themed hotel version and more like the real thing.
Just as Luigi’s mansions are strange halfway houses for its ghostly residents, this third installment feels a mix of the series’ more traditional formula mixed with an injection of the new. And while the game can ape the GameCube original well for a couple of floors – your trusty Poltergust vacuum slurping ghosts and money from every crevice – it’s not until you start exploring some of its themed areas that the whole thing comes into its own.
The Ancient Egypt moment is followed by several others in a similar vein – and each time the elevator pings and its doors open onto a new floor you’re left guessing as to what comes next. A Hollywood film studio with a ghost director ready to cast you in his new kaiju movie? Sure. A sewer level where Luigi has to do actual plumbing while operating a boat? Why not. These settings are when the game really shines – but also when it sort of gives up its hotel premise in the process.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 – Overview trailer (Nintendo Switch) Watch on YouTube
The overall conceit still makes sense – what better way to link such thematically separate areas than as floors on a hotel elevator, used to quickly zip between them all? And yet it doesn’t really play out as I’d expected. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a surprisingly linear game, and in the 15 hours it took for me to clear its story I was forced to backtrack only three times – for prescribed, and sometimes quite laboured, story reasons. I’d expected more of a Metroidvania-y experience, with rooms locked behind doors I’d have to return to later. But there are no new power ups, no new mechanics to learn after the early introduction of Gooigi. Each floor is served up as its own discrete course, then it’s on to something different.