Photography 201: Advanced Decomposition. Let's Play Fatal Frame!

No ghosts attack in the library, but there’s some film in the closet where Ogata died.









Out in the lamp hallway, we still can’t get into this closet. I think it may be shut for the rest of the game.



This door was boarded up last night.



It seems to be locked from the other side.





Upon entering the fireplace room, the grandfather clock – the unwound, broken one in the corner – starts bonging midnight.









Did… that door just pop open a crack?

I hate this kid. So very much. He runs at you, and he teleports. Sometimes he teleports up to the rafters – that’s the best place to catch him, as it’s always a zero shot. Other times he just disappears for several seconds. While he doesn’t technically go invisible, he does like to hide inside nearby objects, like the samurai armor or clock. It makes him a lot harder to spot. I broke out the Type 37 film for this one.

The best strategy is to just stunlock him if you can, because he recovers slowly from damage. When you defeat him, he repeats that he needs to give the mirror to “that man”.











Yeah! That’s what you get for stealing my plot coupons!

The site of this kid’s demise is the clock, unsurprisingly.









”Isn’t Mikoto ever going to come find me? We’re playing Demon Tag, and she’s supposed to be the “Demon”. Did she quit, maybe? Hey, I wonder if Mikoto likes me? If she ever comes and finds me, maybe I’ll just ask her!”

Aww, that’s adorable. Also really weird. Who writes journal entries in the middle of playing Knock-off Hide-and-Seek?



The stairs in the alcove are whole again.





“June 13th
“Mikoto found an odd camera. She said she found it in the mansion when she was playing Demon Tag. I tried asking her exactly where in the mansion, but she just keeps saying a girl in a white kimono gave it to her. I can’t find out any more about it.

“June 14th
“I had a look at the camera Mikoto found yesterday, but I didn’t see anything special about it. It was probably left here some time ago by somebody that came to investigate the mansion.

“June 15th
“The weather was wonderful today, and Yae seems to be feeling better. The three of us decided to take a walk in the mountains. Yae hadn’t been out in a long time, and she really seemed to enjoy it. She had fun with Mikoto’s camera, taking pictures with it all day long.”

The door to the tatami room is now locked with a spirit ward.

Looks like the rope hallway, which is conveniently nearby.





Again, ward spirits are visible through the camera before you take the picture.





Well, that was easy. But before we head off to the tatami room, let’s check out the entrance to see if there’s any useful stuff.







Well, the mask is gone. Damn it, Miku, I tried to get you to pick it up earlier!





Nothing else of interest here, so back to the rope hallway.



The door to the grand hall isn’t boarded up anymore, either.

This is Long Hair Woman. She’s a pretty rare ghost, which is good because she can be tough. She likes to be invisible a lot. She strafes back and forth and circles around you. She’s also faster than Miku’s camera can track. When she gets close she’ll grab you, so keep your distance. Don’t go for zero shots here, just snap her when you can.





I usually wind up taking damage fighting her.



There’s not as much loot here as there was during the previous night, but it’s still worth the trip.

We can’t get to the circular hallway just yet.



It seems to be locked from the other side.

All right, that’s enough lollygagging. We have a newly unsealed door to open.

Upon returning to the fireplace room, we can hear a stringed instrument being played.



There’s a dude in there!



Now there isn’t!

The folklorist is waiting for Miku to open the damn door already.



Munakata: Mikoto…

You have to step into the room in order to get him, but he sticks around for a while. It’s not a tough capture.







“It looks like the ghosts of the women with the gouged-out eyes react strongly to sounds.

“If I’m really quiet, I can get away without being noticed.”

Wow, what great advice! If only someone had mentioned that before I’d fought four of the damn things!

I’m guessing that the game designers realized that it might not occur to people to not move while fighting Blinded and decided to throw players a bone before the really hard fights with her. Still, though.

Munakata’s spirit is hanging out in the little library area.



And the camera is reacting!







Another key hunt – joy!





“June 2nd
“Since we moved to Himuro Mansion, my research is progressing even more quickly than I had hoped. The other day, I found some documents left by the last master of the Himuro line. They say he went on a murderous rampage, and then committed suicide…

“This mansion is filled with tricky devices and mechanisms. And there seem to be some rooms that aren’t shown on the house plans… I’m absolutely certain there are many more documents hidden around the place somewhere.

“June 5th
“I know people in this area are standoffish by nature, but the locals here are especially reticent when it comes to talking about the ritual. The Rope Shrine Maiden, the Holy Mirror, the Calamity… I’m sure the ritual must be the key to understanding all of these legends.”

You know, even if you don’t believe in the supernatural it’s a well-known fact that that last master went nuts and murder-suicided the entire family. People aren’t going to want to talk about that family for a reason.





”June 18th
“These past few days, Yae has been taking pictures with Mikoto’s camera all over the mansion. I asked her what she was taking pictures of, but she just kept mumbling, ‘I can see them,’ as if she were delirious. She wouldn’t say anything else…

“June 19th
“Ever since the day we walked in the mountains, Yae hasn’t been feeling very well. Today she’s in bed and very ill.”





Let’s check out the anteroom to save and loot the room.







We’re gonna have quite the marble bag when this is over.

The door in the back of the room isn’t nailed shut anymore, but it’s still locked.

Okay, time to check out the hallway outside the tatami room!







There’s more music playing in here, too. Also, Blinded. Again. Luckily, Miku’s brother told me how to fight her!











This is the weird gap between walls in the circular hallway downstairs. It’s not far.









There’s also something in the crevice. I can’t find the screenshot, but my notes say it was a stone mirror.

Before checking out the new room, there are a few things to do here.

First, we can unlock the doors leading to the burial room and grand hall, which will make getting around a bit easier…





And now to check the storage room for useful items.

The password on the door has changed.



The answer is of course the strangely specific minimum age of the Rope Shrine Maiden, as given in the Blind Demon Ritual document.

Even though the hint only mentions years and months, the password is 7925.



There’s not quite as much swag in here this time around.













If you didn’t get the folklorist’s diary during the first night it will still be in this location tonight. It’s your last chance, and to my knowledge there aren’t any other documents available over multiple nights like this one.



We already have it, so there’s nothing there now.

New room time! Yay!



Savoring the mystery… (I don’t know why I screenshotted the outside of the door)







Miku: These photos!

Miku: They’re exactly the same as the ones Mom took! Were they taken with this camera?













THE PLOT THICKENS!



Lady’s Diary Scrap

“June 24th
“Mikoto is missing. She said she was only going to play Demon Tag here in the mansion. I don’t think she would have gone outside… She had that camera with her… None of Mikoto’s four friends have come home, either. It’s as if they’ve all been snatched up away by ghosts…

“June 27th
“It’s been three days since Mikoto was snatched away from us. Everything has been so strange! Ever since we moved to this mansion… Ever since we got that camera… If I lost my sanity now, too, I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. I could be free…

“I can see them… I can see them now even without the camera…”

Is Yae making a conscious decision to go mad here, or just making peace with something she knows is already happening by giving herself permission? Either way, I think she had a few more issues than just suffering from the dreaded Vague Unspecified Weakness Disease.



More inaccessible closets. I blame Ogata.





The record player begins playing when the key is obtained. From it, a woman’s voice says, “It can’t be..! How can a camera expose something that doesn’t even exist!”

For the sake of interesting gameplay mechanics, sweetie.

Oh, and here’s the instrument that was being played earlier. It’s called a koto, and this room is the koto room.



Time to head back to the tatami room and open the library safe!





It contains a valuable flashback!

The Munakatas are a really cute family.



Munakata: I came to research the Himuro family’s secret ritual because…





Places we haven’t seen before!





Munakata: This blinding mask is the key to the door.

Blinding mask? What’s a blinding mask?



GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY THAT AIN’T RIGHT





Munakata: The altar’s got to be behind this door.

And you want to go there why, exactly?











”The Mask of Reflection

“The mask worn by the Himuro family master is called the “Mask of Reflection.” The legend goes, “It can become the face of an angel or a demon,” meaning its facial expression reflects the nature of the one who is wearing the mask.

“Inside Himuro Mansion is the Mask Room, where all the masks used for the rituals are kept, and the Mask of Reflection serves as its key. The document mentioned that the mask, when worn by the master, turned into the face of a demon at the last ritual.”

Munakata will appear immediately after you’re done reading the stuff in the safe.

Munakata: Yae… why did you have to take your own life?

Well, she did decide to go fruit-loops…

And then the folklorist appears again almost immediately, and vanishes quickly. You have to be on the ball to get this one!





Munakata: If you hadn’t found that camera, Yae…

Yae didn’t find the camera, Mikoto did. Go on, blame your missing daughter for your wife’s untimely death!

So Munakata walks sort of vaguely in the direction of the balcony and disappears. As an indicator of where you’re supposed to go next, it kind of sucks. If you weren’t quick enough to get his picture or interested enough in the title to notice that the photo is called “Observatory Man” you might wander around the mansion forever trying to figure out where to go next. But we did take his pic, and we did read the title, and now we’re going out to the balcony for a plot-mandated cut scene.











There’s Yae, swinging from the cherry tree. Hi, Yae!



Miku seems unusually upset by this. You’d think she’d be used to gruesome ghosts reliving their deaths by now.





Miku: Mom?



Well, shit.

Miku’s mom is flailing around wildly, taking picture after picture with the Camera Obscura.























Miku: Mom!

Miku: Why..? What happened..?





Yae’s gone. She wasn’t sticking around for Miku’s PTSD flashback.





Looks like she left something at the base of the tree, though! And now we have a destination again.

I got attacked by a random Wandering Man on the way to the atrium. Afterwards I realized it had been a while since I’d checked my points. Turned out, I had enough to max out the power!

Munakata: Yae… how could this be..?

















Miku: Mom..!







Okay, time to stop juxtaposing old and recent tragedies, even if they are strikingly similar, and try to NOT DIE.



Yae has a lot of tricks of her sleeve. First, she’s really fast. She likes to swoop back and forth almost faster than the camera can track, flickering in and out of visibility. She can also rush Miku and chase her for quite a distance. If she suddenly rises straight up and out of sight, she’s about to re-hang herself – on Miku’s head. She can also teleport behind Miku, and this is usually a precursor to a rushing attack. If you lose track of her, get out of finder mode and run until you work out where she is. A higher grade of film might be wise here.





When she dies, her spirit demands, ”Where did my daughter go?”

The final photograph you take of her also morphs into a hint photo.

Now we can see what was lying underneath the tree.





“Dear Ryozo, It’s all my fault… It’s all because I let Mikoto use the camera that day! And now evil spirits have gone and taken her away from us… It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.”

But… if Mikoto had the camera the day she disappeared, and she’s the only one out of the four children to return alive, you may have actually saved her life by letting her take it. What tragic irony!









It’s pointing girl! And she has a name! And it’s the same name as the crazy demon rope lady’s! Wait… if Mikoto was originally given the camera by a girl in a white kimono, does that mean it came from Little Kirie? Was the ghost girl trying to protect Mikoto? It is all too mysterious.

Anyway, the photo showed dolls, so let’s go back to the doll room.







It looks like the stand is missing one of its figures. Where could it be?



Maybe the other side of the room?



This puzzle is stupid and badly translated and I needed to have it explained to me before I got it. You need to select the doll that the doll behind the one who is facing you is facing and holy crap is that sentence a convoluted mess. Let me try again. The doll facing you, the one in the middle. The doll behind her (at her “back”) is facing a different doll. The one at the upper right. That’s the one you need.



Not that it matters if you solve this puzzle properly, because you can just pick up all of them in turn until you stumble upon the right one without penalty.

When I put the Kagome doll on the pedestal, the drawer opened slowly. There is a strange mask inside the drawer.



Hey look! It’s that mask we could have had in the first five minutes if Miku knew that the first rule of adventure games is to take everything that isn’t nailed down!

And then I got attacked by a random Bound Man.

Next Time: Why Blinded Is So Very Pissed Off. Hint: It’s not because the sweets in the fridge that she wrote her name on got eaten by someone else!

Blinded is pissed off because Miku has been wandering around her damn house for days, shooting her with a camera!

Which begs the question... weren't those old-timey cameras really loud? Blinded should basically be an unstoppable killing machine.

Oh, yeah. Whenever you use the camera, Blinded knows exactly where you are. You have to move a few feet to the right/left while she's still stunned to confuse her. If your shot isn't charged enough to stun her, you're gonna take damage as soon as she recovers.

So, now that I only have one more upgrade left on the basic functions, we've got some options. I can either unlock all the bonus functions and then work on upgrading them, or focus on mastering them one at a time.

Here's the list of bonus functions again:

Pressure – Pushes ghosts back
Slow – Slows down ghosts’ movement for a limited duration
See – Make ghosts more visible for a limited duration
Paralyze – Stop movements of ghosts for a limited duration
Search – Searches for locations of ghosts and tracks them automatically

Upgrading will increase the effect of the function and/or the duration. And remember, we only have as many function charges as we have spirit stones (I think about 25-30, currently).

Lemme know how you guys want to spend our points!

None of those sounds like their effects will be especially screenshottable, so I vote for getting a point or two into all of them and hearing about where each one comes in handy.

Paralyze seems like a good thing to invest in.

If Search is also helpful for finding those non-battle snapshot ghosts, it might be good to invest a few points in that. Otherwise, Paralyze.

Search affects hostile ghosts in battle only. Functions that would make it easier to snap vanishing/hidden ghosts would be neat, though.

Last time, we learned that Miku and Mafuyu’s mom committed suicide. It’s implied that using the camera to see spirits drove her mad, and Miku found her body. This tragedy is also amazingly similar to how Yae, the folklorist’s wife, died. Similar enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks in Miku, anyway.

Maybe that’s why she’s so… hmm… inexpressive? She’s hopped up on Paxil!

Anyway, we’ve got the Angry Mask now, so let’s go hang it up in the entrance hall!



We won’t be taking the short way through the kimono room. What’s the point in a one-way secret passage? In a mansion that supports up to a hundred people, you’d never know if it would be unlocked when you got to it.

Well, the long way it is. For the record, that’s doll room > atrium > burial room > walkway > tatami room > fireplace room > rope hallway > entrance.







It’s another secret passage!



Like the one in the doll room, this secret door is only active from the side that the mask is hanging on. Unlike the one in the doll room, you can take the mask with you if you want. Who knows, it might be useful somewhere else!











I always have the hardest time finding ghosts hidden near the ceiling.







Looking at our map, we can see that this hall connects to the lamp hallway via another secret passage, and either has two little rooms or one very large room with two exits. There’s also another door to the northeast whose existence Miku seems to have intuited, since it doesn’t connect to anywhere she’s been. Maybe her psychic powers are giving her some oddly specific information.





This door has a mask but still seems to be locked.

Didn’t we see Mr. Munakata visit a location that looked like this?

This door leads to the lamp hallway. We don’t need to go back there right now, but now that Miku has learned about adventure games, she’s going to take that mask with her.





One door left to try! And there’s our buddy the folklorist walking through it.





Before entering the room, there’s a sparkling item on the floor at the end of the corridor.











Mr. Munakata left behind a spirit flame, but we’re going to ignore it for the moment. There’s some nice film to the left of the door.

“The Masks And Their Significance in Rituals

“The Binding Ritual and the Demon Tag Ritual are performed by the Himuro family master. The master wears a mask when he performs the ritual. This is probably to eliminate the maiden of all worldly connections.

“All participants of the ritual are family members. Meaning, ‘The one who is sacrificed and the one who performs the sacrifice’ may be directly related.

“My theory is that the mask serves to eliminate the maiden’s attachment toward her family. Gouging out the eyes of the demon in the Blind Demon Ritual may have similar meaning.”

Or maybe they were just being pointlessly mean.

Here’s the mask pillar! And it has places to put masks!



This is the room with the mystery psychic door, by the way.





There’s a fourth mask hanging on the back of the pillar. Attempting to take it results in a cut scene!





Miku hears a sudden noise behind her and spins around to face one of the wall masks.







A light suddenly flickers deep within one of the eye sockets.



Miku decides to do something dumb.







Low, masculine chanting fills the room.





A woman struggles ineffectually in the grasp of two men.

Miku: *gasp*

Uh oh.

Miku: What’s that?



Abort! Abort!







Are you really going to keep watching this, Miku?









The woman screams! Her arms stiffen, then go slack.





The men let her faceplant.

She doesn’t stay down long.





Blinded: My eyes..! My eyes..!



Horrified, but unable to stop watching, Miku accidentally jostles the mask she’s looking through. It clatters against the wall.





They notice.



Miku recoils, moving faster than she’s managed in this game yet.





Miku: *gasp* What was that?

They can’t have heard me! It’s a flashback! It’s not real, it’s only a flashback! Miku stands there panting, trying to regain her composure.









Blinded: *moans* It… it’s so dark..!

This is probably the hardest Blinded fight because of the cramped fighting area, but the basic strategy is unchanged. Don’t move, snap a fully charged shot, move fast, then stop and repeat.





Now that she’s gone, let’s load this pillar up!

The door’s unlocked! There’s only one problem…





Both of the doors out of here are mask doors, and all of our masks are hanging on the pillar. Unlocking the mystery room doesn’t help if we can’t leave this one.

The north exit wants a happy mask, and we haven’t been there yet. Let’s see if we can find something to prop one of these doors open or something.











Crickets chirp loudly. We’re in another outdoor courtyard.





”I felt some especially powerful energy off of that woman in the white kimono. I think she’s probably the one behind this mansion’s curse.

“I have to find out what exactly is keeping her drawn back to this world.

“And why did she let me go when she had me, I wonder? Maybe that has something to do with it…”

Doesn’t look like any place we’ve seen before, does it? Well, I imagine we’ll happen upon it sooner or later.



Oh hey, that’s the locked door in the lamp hallway. Shortcut!









Let’s check out the garden. There’s a save point down there, as well as some loot!









Well, that was fast. Is it just me, or do a lot of these hint photos take you to a location in the same area? What’s the point?

This is a large, dark room with giant Buddha statues lining the walls. Like the little Buddha statues we found in the first night, these Buddhas each have a mutilated body part.



There’s also an altar.





Obtaining the Mask of Reflection triggers a fight with Ryoza Munakata. He moves slowly but teleports frequently. His normal pattern is to teleport a few feet to the right or left of his previous location, circling in on you until he’s within lunging distance. He may also teleport to Miku’s back, so drop the camera and run if you lose track of him. If he crouches low he’s about to howl, which is a damaging attack at any distance. Snap a zero shot to stun him and prevent damage. The best strategy for this fight is to keep your distance and try and keep him in sight. I used Type 37 film here.







There’s another door out of here, but it’s locked. I didn’t get a screenie of this, but if you check the map you can see that this door leads to the hallway that links the cherry atrium and the fish tank room.





I got randomly attacked by a floating head in the square courtyard. Being in a room with a save point doesn’t make you safe from attack. If a ghost appears, the light on the camera will turn red and you will be unable to access the save menu. Once you defeat the ghost, the light will turn blue again and the save point will function normally.



Let’s go back to the Mask Room and see if the Reflection Mask will help get us out of a locked room!







So far, so locked in. Try the Reflection Mask on the southern door.