Luigi’s Mansion

Luigi’s Mansion was a launch title for the GameCube back in 2001 and it still holds up today as a great little game: it excels in its whimsy and charm, creating a playful horror atmosphere that is a perfect match for its funny protagonist. However, the whole experience can get a little repetitive by the end, thanks to a stiff structure that has very few surprises in store for us.

After discovering he won a mansion in a contest he didn’t even enter, Luigi follows the directions on the flyer and ends up finding it right in the middle of a spooky forest. Inside the mansion, he’s soon greeted by a professor named E. Gadd, who tells him that the building didn’t exist until a few days ago, when it suddenly appeared next to his lab. E. Gadd warns Luigi of the ghosts that haunt the place and tells him about his brother: “A guy with a red hat kind of like yours went up the mansion without even stopping to chat… and he never returned.”

It doesn’t take long for Luigi to realize that the mansion is haunted, but luckily E.Gadd has developed the technology to capture the ghosts and trap the in paintings. He believes the mansion was built near his lab to taunt him, since King Boo broke into his lab and freed all the ghosts the professor kept prisoner. It’s these spirits that haunt Luigi’s mansion.

In a great touch, the weapon the professor hands Luigi, called Poltergust 3000, looks like a glorified vacuum cleaner, which frames the action in a way that pays homage to the Ghostbusters movie. Luigi’s Mansion, after all, goes for the same tone, mixing comedy with horror to craft a light-spirited adventure. Take E. Gadd’s design, for instance: with a single tooth standing out of his mouth and a ponytail that defies the laws of gravity, the professor is at the same time off-putting and ridiculous. He even wears an enormous pair of glasses with a spiral design on the glass just to reinforce the insanity of it all.

The language of horror mixed with the whimsy of comedy is what defines Luigi’s Mansion. Each time Luigi enters a room, there are close-ups of the door knobs, showing his hand slowly approaching to turn them, which not only builds suspense and shows the character’s hesitation, but also works as a reference to the door animations in the original Resident Evil games. On the other hand, we have the quirkiness of Luigi’s personality infecting the game: while we explore the mansion, we often hear him humming along with the game’s brilliant theme song – and, sometimes, when he’s in a haunted room, it’s the ghosts who will hum the melody.

Luigi can capture them with the Poltergust 3000 and it’s through this fantastical vacuum cleaner that we mostly interact with the world, not only battling the ghosts, but also collecting money, pulling and throwing small objects around, and taking out fires. It’s a multipurpose tool that the game fully explores, sometimes even introducing new forms of interaction, such as giving it elemental properties – it can spill out fire, for example. The first puzzle around the Poltergust involves noticing the conspicuous purple fire emanating from the candles in the parlor. There’s nowhere else to go in the mansion: we are locked in this room until we realize what we are supposed to do with our special vacuum cleaner.

Capturing ghosts is like playing tug of war with them. First, we must stun them with the flashlight (just turning in their direction does the trick) and then use the Poltergust to suck them in: the ghosts will try to escape its clutches by flailing madly around the room and we are supposed to press the sticks in the opposite direction of their movements to decrease their health. When it hits zero, they are finally sucked in.

It’s a “combat system” that works well because it makes each encounter a bit different (the ghosts will move randomly), it makes us consider the layout of each room (so we don’t get stuck in furniture while moving around to capture the ghosts), and it makes the ghosts dangerous when there’s more than one, since Luigi is vulnerable when moving around trying to capture them. This also pushes us to try to suck more than one at the same time, which requires luring them across the room until the ghosts are properly lined up to be stunned by the flashlight. Some more elaborate rooms make these battles more interesting too, such as the Projector’s Room, where we see the ghost’s shadows projected on the screen and must plan accordingly.

The game’s biggest strength, however, lies in the design of the special “portrait ghosts” that haunt the mansion. They each have a unique name and a puzzle centered around their personality, which must be solved before we are allowed to play the ghastly tug of war with them. Take Lydia, for example. We see her by the bedroom’s mirror, brushing her hair, too enthralled by her own beauty to notice Luigi pointing his flashlight at her. Nearby, there’s a draft coming from the window, which is partially blocked by a curtain. What happens if we remove the curtain, pushing it with the Poltergust, to let the wind blow right onto Lydia’s face, messing up her hair? The bulk of Luigi’s Mansion is figuring out these wacky ghosts, discovering how we must interact with the environment to make them vulnerable.

However, the problem with Luigi’s Mansion is that it can get predictable with its structure. We will enter a room in the mansion – which can have a portrait ghost or the common ones –, we will defeat them, and gain a key for the next room, where we will battle more ghosts, and earn another key. Rinse and repeat until the next boss, which often offers an elaborate set piece instead of a puzzle. We progress through the mansion in a linear manner as well, with each key we acquire marking on the map the room we must enter next.

Luigi’s Mansion is a game that would have benefited from more surprises, more hidden secrets, and especially more puzzles centered around the mansion itself to give it personality – these puzzles do exist, but are too few and far between. There’s a room in the mansion, the Observatory, that extends supernaturally beyond the confines of the building with a puzzle revolving around the moon: the game needed more of this fantastical break of expectations.

Playing Luigi’s Mansion, after all, can fall into a tedious routine sometimes. The worst example is the Boos that appear after we clear each room from the ghosts that haunt it (the lights turn on to signal we did it). To capture the Boos we must simply suck them with the Poltergust: we don’t need to push the sticks or even stun them with the flashlights beforehand, we just need to press the button that activates our weapon and point at the Boos. Their gimmick is that they move to other adjacent rooms after a while, which just adds annoyance to the fight, as it asks from us nothing but patience. Capturing Boos is not only incredibly bland – they are a less engaging version of the simplest ghost in the game, after all – but also incredibly repetitive – one Boo is just like any other Boo, and there are around fifty of them in the game.

Another problem with Luigi’s Mansion is that by exploring the mansion we acquire a lot of money in the form of gold coins, jewels, and even bills: money is the main collectible and reward for exploring and defeating ghosts. But the issue is that they define the final score, but the score itself unlocks nothing. As with any score, it provides an incentive to replay the game to get a better one, turning Luigi’s Mansion into an arcade game, but it does nothing else besides that. And since there are no online leaderboards to compare our results to others (in the GameCube original, it’s an understandable omission, but not so much on the 3DS), the whole thing can feel anticlimactic, like an empty reward: we are constantly gaining money, but doing nothing with it.

Finally, there are some underutilized mechanics in the game as well. Luigi has a camera in the form of a Gameboy, but it serves almost no purpose, to the point where the player can even forget it exists, especially in the 3DS version, where its icon doesn’t appear on the screen. It’s required in just a couple of puzzles, but we can use it to make Luigi briefly comment about the objects in each room – but these comments are hardly that interesting, being limited to variations of “uh, this is strange indeed,” and so can also get repetitive. The elemental properties of the Poltegurst are also quickly forgotten after being introduced, with the game barely attempting to find new uses for them, which is a pity.

Luigi’s Mansion is indeed a game full of charm, but there’s not enough of it to mask the repetitive nature of the experience. Luckily, its small length prevents it from ever becoming a chore.

June 19, 2024.