With horror games of both the independent and blockbuster variety experiencing such a boom in recent years, it was only a matter of time before Koei Tecmo revived the Fatal Frame franchise, which hasn't seen a proper new entry since Maiden of the Black Water debuted on the WiiU all the way back in 2014. Granted, a remake of the series' most beloved entry may not seem all that impressive, given that more recent Fatal Frame games have seen their own ports and rereleases in the intervening years, but Crimson Butterfly REMAKE is more than just a shiny new coat of paint and a modern control-scheme. As the subtitle implies, this is a top-to-bottom reimagining of the entire Fatal Frame 2 experience. It's also a worldwide release available on every modern console, unlike the previous Crimson Butterfly remake that was confined to the shores of Asia and Europe and limited by the gimmicks of the Wii's motion controls.

I love the Fatal Frame games for their folk-horror ambiance and unique mix of first- and third-person gameplay, and Crimson Butterfly remains the best of the original series, to be sure, so while I would certainly have loved an all-new adventure to experience for the first time, I can't completely blame Koei Tecmo for taking a page from Konami's playbook and giving the whole world a chance to fall in love with the franchise's most beloved title. Mayu and Mio's dark descent into the underbelly of Minakami Village is the stuff of gaming legend for Millennials like me, but don't confuse my nostalgia for a dull critical eye. If anything, the Fatal Frame legacy has only made Team Ninja's job harder, here. If you're going to assemble your own take on a bona-fide survival-horror classic, you have to know exactly what parts of the original must be preserved while also being willing to make the new game your own. Otherwise, what would be the point of remaking the game at all?

I played my review copy of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake on my personal gaming rig, which has 32 gigabytes of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. While I have seen rumblings about the locked framerates and film-grain filters on console versions of the recent demo that could dampen the experience, the game runs excellently on my hardware. I mention all of this because, from a presentational standpoint, Crimson Butterfly Remake is a knockout. When you are having Mayu duck and weave through the gorgeously designed and perfectly lit corners of Minakami Village at a silky-smooth framerate and 1440p resolution, it's impossible not to be taken in by the haunting and genuinely scary atmosphere that this game has crafted. Exploring the levels is even more compelling than it was back in 2004, thanks to the additional side-quests and secrets that have been built into this expanded game world.

The sound design is equally on point. Every creak of rotting wood and groan of rusted metal amplifies the tension of Mio's quest, which is to say nothing of the otherworldly screams and distortions caused by the many ghosts you will be doing battle with through the viewfinder of the Camera Obscura. Horror is the genre that is the most reliant on evocative music and finely-tuned sound design, and Fatal Frame excels in this department. The English dub of the game is quite good, too, striking a good balance between the era-appropriate melodrama that defined games like Fatal Frame without ever tainting the all-important atmosphere.

There is one aspect of Crimson Butterfly Remake that is not as well-honed as its narrative and presentation, though. As I covered in my original preview of the game, Team Ninja has added a lot of new mechanics and complications to the game's action and use of the Camera Obscura. On paper, these additions make for a much richer and more rewarding ghost-hunting experience, which is a far cry from how you'd ever describe the fighting in any of the survival-horror classics from the early 2000s. Four different filters that you unlock throughout the game provide different contextual powers that aid combat and exploration. The Exposure filter can change the environments and uncover hidden pathways. For example, the Radiant filter will break the blood seals covering various doors and containers all around the village. These filters all have different strengths, film reload speeds, effective ranges, and so on; all of this, and I haven't even gotten to the game's incorporation of stealth mechanics and a new Willpower meter that you have to manage alongside your health.

In survival-horror, fancy and complex action isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it must be balanced to perfection so that the atmosphere's incredibly delicate equilibrium of mood, pacing, and tension is not destroyed. If you're too weak and helpless, then the "survival" element of the sub-genre becomes an exercise in frustration and fear-numbing repetition. If you're too strong and capable, however, then there is no way to generate proper scares with all of the enemies lurking about. While I maintain that Silent Hill f is a modern masterpiece, it very much struggled to maintain this proper balance in its more modern combat systems, at least before the patches came out to tweak things.

Crimson Butterfly Remake will need some post-launch tweaking too, I fear, because the combat ends up being all over-the-place across its dozen-or-so hours of play time. In the early chapters, especially, your Camera Obscura lacks the power needed to pose a real threat to the spirits of Minakami, and a lot of the encounters last way too long. It often felt like it barely mattered what film stock I used or what few upgrades I dedicated my spirit stones to; regular enemies would take too many hits to bring down, and it made exorcisms go from frightening to frustrating really quickly. The worst moments always came when a spirit became Aggravated, which is a new and random status effect that restores an enemy's health bar and makes them doubly hard to damage at all. I imagine this system is meant to be a Fatal Frame parallel to similar tricks in Resident Evil games that keep players on their toes and ensure that no two runs ever play the same. It doesn't work. Aggravated Spirits never made me scream, or shudder, or panic with fright. They just made me spit out curses and resign myself to a boring battle that was now going to last twice as long.

Weirdly, once you do start getting more filters and upgrades, combat starts to swing the other way into becoming overly simple, but not consistently simple. You can equip charms and new filters to deal with Aggravated Spirits, for example, but the random nature of the mechanic still means they are a pain in the ass. Later, some enemies become absurdly easy to take down with the powerful-but-slow Radiant filter…only for another enemy to pop up a few minutes later as you backtrack through the village with an impossibly chunky health bar. While I never hated the action, and I eventually unlocked the right combo of upgrades and filters to make the back-half of the campaign more manageable, the moments of actual fun I had snapping pictures of ghosts became more fleeting as the game played out.

Thankfully, I come from the old-school of survival-horror fanaticism, which means I don't actually need the combat to be any good to have a blast exploring creepy environments and uncovering more of the cursed backstory behind all of these hauntings. The camera exorcisms in Fatal Frame II aren't terrible, either; it only needs some major rebalancing to get the most out of what all of these new systems have to offer. It's a shame, too, because if the entire package of Crimson Butterfly Remake hit as hard as its presentation and atmosphere do, we might have had the all-time great new horror game on our hands. Despite its disappointing combat, the pitch-perfect aesthetics and classic folk-horror vibes make this journey back to the haunted grounds of Minakami Village one that is still well worth experiencing. As it stands, Crimson Butterfly Remake will have to settle for the title of “Very Good (But Flawed) Reimagining of a Very Good (But Flawed) Classic.”