There's a moment around the mid-way point of Luigi's Mansion 3 where you open a door into a room that's not really a room and you think - wow. This absolutely sells the themed hotel setting of the game, but also sort of negates it completely. The room is, knowingly, I suspect, an actual sandbox: a vast puzzle-filled desert which stretches across the game's Ancient Egypt-themed floor - and it is brilliant. But why do mansions or hotels at all when you can do this?
Ever since our first glimpse at Luigi's Mansion 3 - the medieval castle level revealed at E3 - it's been clear this was going to push the series further from its traditional mansion format than ever before. I remember thinking, well, okay - we've had two quite traditional haunted house games already. It felt like the right time for Nintendo and developer Next Level Games to try something a little different - even if its themed hotel take on a medieval castle felt less like a themed hotel version and more like the real thing.
Just as Luigi's mansions are strange halfway houses for its ghostly residents, this third installment feels a mix of the series' more traditional formula mixed with an injection of the new. And while the game can ape the GameCube original well for a couple of floors - your trusty Poltergust vacuum slurping ghosts and money from every crevice - it's not until you start exploring some of its themed areas that the whole thing comes into its own.
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