Luigi tiptoes into the spotlight.
Luigi’s Mansion is a long shot from other Mario games. Instead of action and platforming, the focus of this game is on exploration, atmosphere, and puzzle-solving. It’s a much slower-paced game as a result of these differences, meaning that it doesn’t much feel like a Mario game at all, something that might turn you off if you expect every Mario adventure to play like a straight platformer. If you enjoy playing around with a game that explores the personalities of Mario characters a bit more and takes a stab at a puzzle-solving style of gameplay, then you might enjoy this.
The story begins when Luigi receives a notice that he has won a mansion in a contest he doesn’t remember entering. So he shows up the building completely alone. Naturally things go wrong, and he ends up battling the spirits which dwell within the old haunted structure with the help of a vacuum cleaner provided to him by a kindly old professor by the name of Elvin Gadd. Hearing that his brother Mario headed to the house before him, Luigi hopes to rescue him from the ghosts and get out of the building alive.
Luigi’s mission is to clear each individual room of ghosts to gain entry to the next room where he will attempt to do the same. The mansion has been built to resemble an actual living space as closely as possible, this is not a game which takes place in some sort of abstract rendering of a house that only serves as a backdrop to the action. In many rooms, Luigi will discover a “portrait ghost,” an enemy which requires some sort of logic puzzle to be solved in order for him to defeat and capture it. Sometimes a ghost must be defeated by opening the window shades to disturb it, other times he needs to freeze the bathtub a ghost is sitting in to drive it out. Once a ghost has been successfully upset, Luigi has an opportunity to catch it before it escapes and must be weakened again.
What hurts this game is that all this puzzle-solving can get monotones at times. There isn’t very much in the way of hints provided, and the mansion is very large and built like a maze. This means that on occasion the player can be stuck wandering the hallways with no idea where they need to be next or what to do there. Since the game already runs at a slower pace, when things bog down they tend to really bog down. Luigi’s adventure is also a bit on the short side, which means that the game lacks some of the variety that might have made the slowest parts seem more worthwhile.
The presentation is top-notch for a GameCube launch title. The mansion is designed in incredible detail, with all sorts of little objects strewn about to make it look like as much of a real building as possible. The character models are another high point. Luigi and his facial expressions are all designed in great detail. All of the ghost characters move in a manner befitting to their unique occupations and personalities. Atmosphere is incredibly important to this game, so it’s very good that the strong audio and visual effects make the feel of the mansion come together.
Luigi’s Mansion is a fun side-trip for the Mario series. It probably felt underwhelming when it was released because it wasn’t a traditional Mario platformer and wasn’t very long. Even now it’s very noticeable how it feels like the developers stretched the gameplay around the presentation instead of building something that felt like more of a finished adventure. This game is still fun to play, the problem is that it doesn’t get varied enough and ends too soon for anything to really get built on. Bought used though, it’s worth the price just to see one of the more interesting spins on the Mario franchise.
