Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Luigi's Mansion 3.
Luigi's Mansion 3 is a parade of lively animation, gorgeous art deco interiors, and models you feel like you could reach out and touch. But today, I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about what it feels like to interact with Luigi's Mansion 3. The game is a unique beast. Mechanically, it doesn't have any direct contemporaries, and it's a rare example of Nintendo letting an outside company develop a high-profile title for them.
If you've not had the privilege of playing a Luigi's Mansion entry, their premise is that Mario's cowardly brother must brave a haunted house, solving light puzzles and capturing cheeky ghosts. Most of this, we do with Luigi's handy vacuum cleaner: the Poltergust. The third instalment in the series takes place inside a towering, twisted hotel, and in it, Luigi's trusty Poltergust can not only suck and blow but also fire a plunger, shine a torch, and project "dark light" to reveal hidden setpieces. So, do those levels and powers add up to a compelling game? I think so, but there are a few caveats. In the interests of exploring game design, here are three things I do like, and two I don't, about the play of Luigi's Mansion 3.
The Good: Roleplaying Through Each Area
When players can apply their verbs to a broad range of objects and characters, they can push and pull on a wide variety of environments. Luigi's Mansion's suction and propulsion mechanics can be used to open, close, drag, dump, and dislodge all sorts of items, and as such, they're poised to bring every floor of its haunted hotel to unlife. The game is primed to align what we do with where we are, even when our setting keeps changing. Let's look at some examples.
Castle MacFrights, the hotel's sixth floor, convinces us we're medieval combatants by theming its play around shielding. In fights, we must use our plunger and vacuum to steal shields from enemies, and in puzzles, we must cling to barriers to guard ourselves against flying arrows. The boss of the level is a knight who we must squeeze out of their armour before we can suck them up.
In the Egyptian Suites, we can use our vacuum cleaner to deform the ambient sand, shaping ramps and excavating treasures. Combat involves luring brain-dead mummies into walls and then unravelling their bandages. The final fight of the stage is against a would-be Cleopatra, who erects a forcefield of sand for us to drain away.
My favourite of the floors is Paranormal Pictures. There are four sets in this zone, each of which corresponds to an iconic type of Hollywood scene, from the hero dousing raging fires to some poor schmuck being shrunk down and straining to interact with everyday objects. TVs allow us to teleport between the sets, and supernatural cameras turn rooms of props into real medieval towers and blazing buildings in a metaphor for cinema transporting us to other places and bringing fiction to life. We must act out each of the scenes correctly to restore the self-esteem of a disillusioned director. Appropriate for a cinematic area, the boss fight completely changes how the camera operates as we fight a kaiju in a model city. You won't see this level of dedication to theming in many other titles.
A lot of these mechanical metaphors are big-picture in nature, but sometimes, the realisation of the environment comes down to smaller touches. We might use our Poltergust to suck all the steam out of the Kitchen or follow a treasure map to find a gem in the Pirate-Themed Restaurant. These are just some of the ideas that Luigi's Mansion 3 uses to hitch its settings to its play. I wish there were more of this ludic theming because when it works, you're not just in a greenhouse; you are a gardener. You're not just among sand dunes; you're sculpting them. These interactive analogies take a game that could flatly provide one form of roleplay: fumigating a ghost-infested building, and instead, dish up an adventure in which we wear many different hats.
There's a very "design school" idea that the best developers introduce and intertwine mechanics over the course of multiple levels. For sure, this is how you create the most depth in your play, but in doing the opposite, Luigi's Mansion finds the optimum way for it to conjure environmental character. If the Basement's water mechanics extended into the Dance Hall or the Master Suite's gameplay was established in the Shopping Centre, the moving parts wouldn't be tailored to the zone they were emulating. By changing the mechanical palette area by area, Luigi's Mansion 3 finds the right actions for the right places.
The Bad: The Controls
Broadly speaking, good controls let you feel like the inputs are an extension of your hand and bad controls leave you fumbling. Luigi's Mansion 3 hosts the latter; it's a Mario 64 with mittens on. The problem arises from the game being a 3D action-adventure where we have no agency over the camera angles. As in a 3D shooter, a lot of the play involves aiming a device towards a target, but most games in the 3D shooter model have their camera lock to our aiming reticle for ease of movement. Aim left, and the camera turns left; aim right, and the camera turns right. Luigi's Mansion has a fixed side-on camera which makes us feel that bit disconnected from Luigi because where he is aiming and where we're looking can be two different spots. Imagine a Contra with 360 degrees of movement, and you're about there.
Piloting Luigi becomes a self-contradictory operation on a couple of levels. Firstly, let's look at how we rotate our plucky plumber: tilting the right stick along its horizontal axis. Nudging it right turns Luigi clockwise, and left turns him anti-clockwise. Most of the time, he'll also snap to one orientation if we make him walk in that direction with the left stick. So, there's a clash between how the left stick and how the right stick reposition our avatar. For example, if we press the right stick to the right, expecting Luigi will point towards the right side of the screen, we might find that he begins turning the other way. See, if he's facing towards the camera, pressing right on the right stick turns him clockwise, which will spin him towards the left. However, if Luigi faces away from the camera and we hold right on the right stick, he will begin angling towards the right. It's as confusing as it sounds.
Secondly, the designers must let us wheel Luigi around in a split-second, in case we need to turn tail or confront a spirit sneaking up behind us. However, we also need slow-moving precision to aim at individual props and enemies. The developers cover both bases by including what we'll call a walking mode and an aiming mode. You already know walking mode: by default, if you move Luigi in a certain direction, his aim aligns to the same direction. However, hold B, ZL, or ZR and move Luigi, and his aim stays fixed, even as his feet shuffle across the floor. So, sometimes the left stick turns Luigi and sometimes it doesn't.
Whenever I was catching ghosts, it felt like there was one more ball to juggle than the controls allowed. We need to remember where Luigi is standing and where he is aiming across three axes. We have to keep in mind whether he is in walking mode or aiming mode and if his vacuum is currently sucking, blowing, firing its plunger, shining its torch, or spewing "dark light". It's a monster to wrap your head around even in the stillness of the puzzle sections, but with mischievous ghosts breathing down your neck, you can tie yourself in knots.
Using your Poltergust at the same time as moving becomes its own headache. Tutorials and prompts teach us to use gadgets like our torch and plunger by hitting the face buttons, but we can't hold a face button and aim those projectiles at the same time because our right thumb must either be on the right stick or a face button. It can't be on both. There's somewhat of a workaround for this because you can use L and R to control the plunger and torch, respectively, but the UI never foregrounds that, and there's no shoulder button that can turn on the dark light while we aim it.
It doesn't help that, with a distant camera, you can't always tell precisely where Luigi's hoover nozzle is pointing. He only gets blurrier when the camera has to zoom out to accommodate two avatars on screen, which sometimes happens when you deploy the new second player character: Gooigi. And this 3D movement with a camera that's trapped in 2D can be murder on your depth perception.
I don't want to blanket denigrate control schemes that have a learning curve. Adapting to new ways of manipulating a game can be the first step to new kinds of interactions. But while Luigi gets easier to manoeuvre with time, you can never lock into a groove with his handling. The aiming, in particular, struggles to strike a balance between slippery speed and pinpoint slowness. And I don't think that such a demanding input format suits an otherwise accessible game. Far from adding to the experience, the imprecise controls render the title unable to demand accurate or well-timed input from the player, curbing its potential as an action experience.
The Good: The Money
Every game allows us to choose our next move from a pool of possible actions within its systems. Games with prominent tactile elements do best when their items push us to perform the actions with the most gratifying game feel. Nothing feels better in mainline Mario than jumping, so how do we collect coins and bop powerups out of blocks? We jump. In Minecraft, swinging our pickaxe has a satisfying momentum, and so, that's how we extract ores and stones from blocks. In Luigi's Mansion, our vacuum is our primary tool. It's an appliance that excels at gobbling up masses of items at once, so the ideal collectable would be something that scatters easily over the environment, and we must quickly gather together.
This is where the splashes of coins and clouds of bills come in. They spill all over the place, and collecting them is time-sensitive, making them perfect targets for the Poltergust. The developers even thought about creating a physical difference to distinguish these collectables. Coins, gold bars, and pearls must be dragged across the floor, moving with a palpable weight, but floating bills you can suck right out of the air in an instant. It's an activity that not only looks and sounds excellent, but in which the Switch's force feedback comes into its own.
"HD Rumble" might sound like a goofy marketing gimmick but line your pockets in Luigi's Mansion 3, and you'll find otherwise. It allows for subtle pulses in the Joycons as the money comes flooding in. You can feel those coins and bills register as singular knocks instead of one long burp of rumble. The hotel is a veritable treasure trove of these sensory morsels. Wealth flows from under couch cushions, atop ceiling fans, and inside plant pots. It leaves the skyscraper bursting with surprises that reward our curiosity and give us the satisfaction of sweeping up a mess. Plus, giving the player a task to polish off in quiet zones is vital for a game to retain a fun but spooky atmosphere.
The Bad: The Money
From a practical perspective, money is only as useful as what you can spend it on. Luigi's Mansion 3 is a smorgasbord of currency but is scant on items you can exchange that currency for, especially for experienced players. You can buy bones that auto-revive you if your health hits 0, but the play is forgiving, and I only used about four of these during my time with it. There are also "Finders" which pen the general location of collectables onto our maps. When I was mopping up the last few gems, these detectors were indispensable to me. However, even after buying far more dowsing rods than I needed, I still had a small retirement fund for Luigi left over, and it's worth thinking about how these map markers change our relationship to the collectables.
In other games, the items we purchase may expand our potential experiences by allowing us access to new areas, new verbs, or the ability to fight foes who previously wiped the floor with us. The Finders work to the opposite end, removing activities from the play. They mean we do less exploring and observing on the way to our rewards because we already know where the collectables are. And I'm not opposed to a shortcut like that in itself, but when all we can buy with our thousands of Gs are non-essential items, collecting the money feels like a fun but ultimately shallow task. What's more, the system may cajole players into buying these skip items they don't really want because they feel their money should go somewhere.
I applaud Nintendo for still making games that thrive on the purity of core loops rather than the RPG mechanics that increasingly saturate mainstream gaming. However, any game with a strong economic emphasis needs a substantial material component. Fights must get easier with consumables or new equipment, or levels should have walls that can only be knocked down by the right items. Luigi's Mansion 3 wants to be an adventure in which you can't get ahead based on what you buy, yet sweats currency from every pore.
The Good: Structure
On the micro-level, Luigi's Mansion 3 is often unsure of how to shake up its encounters, but on the macro-level, it's always keeping you on your toes. There's a decades-old template for action-adventure stages: the player chews through successive screens of puzzles and battles until they reach an intimidating boss. They then beat the boss, collect whatever MacGuffin the level has to offer, and move onto the next area. Luigi's Mansion 3 establishes this structure, but just like the troublesome poltergeists haunting its halls, it's not long until it gets playful. Here are some examples.
In the Egyptian Suites, we must beat an opening area before making our way to a hub. We then solve timed puzzles in two side tombs off of this hub before escaping back to the surface and battling the boss in the starting zone. In the Second Basement, we initially wade through flooded tunnels, but we can drain that water once we reach its end. Later, we return to the Basement, but with new dry areas uncovered.
In the Fitness Center, we can see the boss's throne room from the first chamber, but we can't take the most direct route to it because the door is blocked. So, we must go the long way round. On the magic-themed floor, the connections between the rooms become non-euclidean: a door on the south wall of a room could take you north. The Dance Hall is a couple of straight lines leading to a boss room, but that's because the boss room contains an unusual number of hidden annexes, and the rest of the environment conceals some wonderful collectable challenges.
When we always know what comes next, we can end up sleepwalking through a game, aware it has nothing new to show us. But if a developer makes every new level a mystery, it keeps us guessing. In this title, each floor has an elevator button that wins us access to the next. However, for a bunch of those floors, we don't know exactly when we'll pick up that key, so there are always stakes.
We don't even have to believe that getting the button will be easy for us to be surprised when it slips from between our fingers. When we find a switch in the Greenhouse's entrance lobby, we know we won't be able to just walk up and collect it. We've not seen a ghost or solved a puzzle yet. However, our awareness that something must keep us from collecting this key creates anticipation. Sure enough, it relocates four floors up, and we must climb the level before we have a chance at winning it from the boss.
This subversion makes it only more surprising when, not long after, the game again yanks a button away from us at the last second. When we complete Paranormal Pictures, we have solved rooms full of puzzles and defeated the boss, so we're less likely to expect Polterkitty to run off with our prize, but that's what she does. The structure of the game is delightfully winding.
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When all's said and done, you can't help wondering if Luigi's Mansion 3 would have achieved its full potential if it had been a first-party Nintendo title. Still, whatever shortcomings it might have, it's a contagiously animated action-adventure with an eye for the unlikely. The next time you play a video game, be on the lookout for roleplaying opportunities, tactile fun with collectables, and offbeat structure. Just like Luigi, you might be surprised what you find when you explore. Thanks for reading.
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