New Video Game Release (Apr 13)

Video Game New Release

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir (Shinrei Camera Tsuiteru Techou) is an augmented reality horror game spin-off in the Fatal Frame series, co-developed by Tecmo Koei and Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS. The game comes with an "AR notebook" called the Diary of Faces, which the player uses in junction with the game. It was released in Japan on January 12, 2012.  Nintendo of America has announced a planned release date of April 13, 2012.  It has also been scheduled for a European release sometime in the second quarter of 2012 as well.

Gameplay

The game has three modes: Story Mode, Haunted Visions and Cursed Pages.

Story Mode (Diary of Faces)

The main story mode, during which the plot progresses. The player finds the Diary of Faces and allows Maya to escape from it. In this mode, the player must use the 3DS cameras, serving as the Camera Obscura, to find hints within the diary and battle ghosts in the real world environment around them.

Haunted Visions

There are three camera challenges in this mode:

Spirit Photography: using the 3DS cameras to take photos of the player's surroundings will result in ghosts and other abnormal phenomena appearing in the pictures.

Spirit Check: players can "diagnose" someone as being haunted by taking a photo of the player or other people, which will reveal an image of the "ghost" haunting them. Ghosts from previous games seem to appear in this mode, such as Fatal Frame II's Veiled Priests.

Spirit Challenge: players take photographs of their own face or the faces of others, which becomes a "vengeful spirit on the attack".

Cursed Pages

There are four minigames in this mode:

Four Strange Masks: The Masked Boy haunts four masks within the diary. The player must use the camera to track his movements, answer his questions, and ultimately dispel his spirit from the book.

The Haunted Doll: A strange doll haunts the player, who must identify the dolls’ true body use the camera to exorcise it.

The Boy in The Book: The Masked Boy who lurks inside the diary of faces wants to play hide-and-seek. You'll need to use the camera to find him within the book.

Spirit House: This mode takes the player into the old house of the game, where they will need to dispel the cursed entities within by photographing them.

Synopsis

Setting and characters

The game is set in the player's world; as well as inside an old, Western-styled house where many humans are trapped. The key object of the game is the cursed Diary of Faces, also known as the Purple Diary (Murasaki no Nikki), which acts as the gateway between the player's world and the Old House. The diary acts as an "AR notebook", used with the 3DS to generally progress the storyline. The player encounters several ghosts throughout the game. One of them is Maya, a girl with no memory of herself except her name, and who accompanys the player throughout the game.  Hostile ghosts include: Kaito Hasegawa, a man trapped by the Diary, now driven insane; the Masked Boy, who challenges those who investigate the Diary to a "game" of hide-and-seek; and the "Woman in Black", the primary antagonist of the game.

Plot

The player, as the game's protagonist, receives the cursed "Purple Diary" in an unmarked package.  Upon seeing the first page through a dual-lensed variant of the "Camera Obscura" (the 3DS outer cameras), the player is taken into an old house. Maya encounters and stops the player from entering one of the doors, and they are brought out of the house and back into the player's world.  Upon returning, the player assists Maya on breaking the Diary's curse, using the Camera Obscura to defeat ghosts and find hints.