"This game gives the kind of scare you'd never get in resident evil"

I've been a pretty big fan of horror games ever since I first played resident evil. I'd heard about this series from a friend, and I have to say it didn't sound like the most frightening of ideas. Also, it sounds odd, but the idea of fighting ghosts also made me sceptical, as I've never really found them that scary in movies or cartoons; I think Casper the friendly ghost kinda ruined that for me. However, I gave the series a go, starting with this one, and it's one of the better games I've played on the PS2, and have since played the third one.

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Storyline (9/10)
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The game starts off as two sisters stumble across a haunted village and can't seem to find a way out. You play as Mio and find that Mayu seems to keep wandering off in a trance. Soon you come across a camera that allows you to see ghosts, and when a picture is taken can exorcise them. As the game progresses you find out what happened to the village and why it's haunted, as well as the background to the different ghosts that inhabit. Mayu continuously gets drawn off into dangerous areas as if possessed and you find yourselves living out the past of the shrine maidens.

Although it just sounds like a typical haunted house game, the tension is built up very well and has some genuinely scary moments. There is a lack of colour in that most the game has this greyish filter across the screen, which although it makes everything looks washed up, it improves the eerie environment of the village.

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Gameplay (8/10)
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The controls for moving Mio about are pretty similar to those of resident evil, and are fairly easy to pick up and play. The camera controls can be a bit fiddly at first, but after a bit of experience with using it, they become pretty instinctive, which is what you want from a game. The difficulty progresses at a good pace, in that it never gets too hard too quickly, and when it does get hard there's always a way of figuring out of to get a victory.

As mentioned, the game does have some extremely tense and scary parts to it, which will probably make you want to put it down and not play it for a while, or not depending on how much it effects you :). There are some pretty frustrating puzzles however, which can ruin the experience as you wander around aimlessly looking for a clue and using up your ammunition. There are also some bits where what's expected of you isn't very clearly explained, so you find yourself dying a lot and having to resort to looking up a walkthrough.

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Graphics (8/10)
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The character designs for this game are very, very good. The fact that they look like distorted humans is excellent and fits in with the storyline, as if they looked like normal people it wouldn't work quite so well. The choices of ghosts are also varied and some of them look really good. The village itself is well designed and the houses look really good on the insides and out. Some of the cutscenes are really well done, however, some / most just gave me a headache due to the colours and choppy nature of them. Although I do appreciate why they were like that.

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Sounds (7/10)
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Some of the sounds in this game are really good, in fact most of them, however, the problem is that there's not a huge variety of them and thus you'll hear the same few sounds over and over. Unfortunately, no matter how good they are, too much of them makes the, grate very easily. Also some of the boss battles are very long, and in these cases it's not just a case of having the same sound played frequently, it's that you'll hear just one or not sounds exclusively until the battle is over. This kind of kills the mood and the tension in the battles, thus making them less scary and more just annoying.

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Summary (8/10)
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As mentioned, I've played resident evil, and have to say I didn't ever really find it scary. I've seen Silent Hill played, and I have to say Project Zero falls into this class of horror as far as I'm concerned, it's a lot more psychological horror than resident evil ever manages to contain. I really liked playing this game, however, I do have a problem with it, I finished it on normal mode without too many hassles, however, the leap from normal difficulty to hard is extremely high. This means that most of the unlockables have remained unlocked for me and it's not through lack of trying.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/05/07