Fatal Frame 2 Remake f-d me up

OK, so before I start this... critique? praise? rant?... I love horror. I've loved it for much of my life. I got a kick out of finding scary stuff to watch when I was too young to be watching it. I started playing horror video games when it became possible to make anything remotely "scary" around the time of resident evil and silent hill. I was playing all the most violent games available before that too. I just wouldn't bother calling them scary.

I'm also "old" now, as my daughter reminds me on a nearly daily basis. She's 11. Her friends are between 11 and 13. Maybe, you're starting to see where this is going. When I was in my early 20s, I played the original Fatal Frame on XBOX and *loved it.* I had picked that weekend to try to quit smoking and I'll say that this game didn't exactly help - I failed miserably, actually - but I still had a great time. There was something new about this type of game, even back then, even relative to Silent Hill. The sense of vulnerability; the sense that little things took just a tad too long making you feel like you would miss the moment; the body language of the main character and the ghosts; and the fact that you actually never had anything you would normally consider a weapon, nor anything to hit or shoot at with it... OK. So that was about as creepy as an old XBOX game could get on a CRT Monitor with a 17" or so display and some tiny logitech speakers.

Fast forward through much of my early career and then a blur of early parenthood and... I guess I've changed? As a father of only 1 daughter, I now have a fiercely protective instinct way beyond what I would ever imagine. I hate to say it, but I could see myself being the kind of dad that is casually polishing his gun collection any time a boy comes to visit and then putting him through a 4 hour interview and truth test after acting like a chill dad and getting him drunk enough to spill his dirty secrets. And this protection extends to her friends. Anyone that is anywhere near me is under close guard and kept safe. End of story. If I have to throw myself in front of a bus, even just to get the driver's attention so he has a chance to slow down, if any young girls are in the way, I don't think there would even be a moment of hesitation. I've lived enough. If I can ride a bike down a German highway at 250 kph just for fun, I can jump under a bus to save these lives. I can take out a predator and go to jail for it. F' it.

But I still like horror! So, when I got a recommendation that the FF2 remake (I had played the first version of FF2, still have it on my shelf and wasn't all that impressed) was a complete overhaul of the original, and probably creepier by any reasonable standard, I thought "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED" and tried the demo. I set the difficulty to "Battle" and gave it a whirl.

2 hours later, I wrote a post on FB, confessing to my friends that this was going to suck. Like really suck. Even when I was writing it, my skin was still crawling. It was at least half an hour since I had run out of demo. Every single thing about this game was designed to trigger my deepest instinct to protect and then watch myself fail, psychologically and physically, to protect these little girls - starting with Mayu wandering off when there's nothing you can do about it.

I actually took a few days to think about it. I reflected on whether this is really something I needed to be putting myself through. I reflected on whether desensitizing myself to violence in this way wouldn't harm my role as protector, as I had evidently become re-sensitized to violence to play that role. Maybe for a reason? Did I need to even have a game that would make me chase my kid out of the room if she happened to wake up at night and wander around the house?

I got supportive notes from my friends, explaining that, after becoming parents their perspective had also changed. They no longer needed to prove anything to themselves by looking at this kind of crap. That it was OK to cop out here and to just see myself as "having outgrown the need to do this kind of thing." I could draw on the fact that I have a decent career, a good marriage, a smart child and a fast bike and let this one slide.

I agreed completely.

Then I bought the full version and went for it.

After the first 2 hour session, I realized that I couldn't actually feel my left index fingertip anymore. Of course, I haven't played FF in 2 decades and I'm not used to the camera controls but I'm still an avid gamer. This level of harm to my own body was new to me. I had apparently been clutching the camera controls hard enough to do nerve damage as near as I can tell. I'm surprised the controller still works but it's a very tough brand, known for holding up to punishment and having replaceable parts. Every single time I sat down with this game for the next week, my skin crawled within minutes and kept crawling until I fell asleep. It was visceral. I couldn't desensitize to it. It actually kept getting worse. I think I pretty much lost it around the dolls.

Oh my god, these f*ing dolls.

I got to a point where I would not walk Mio into those 2 last big houses for anything in the world unless the main plot-line actually called for it. It didn't get easier until near the end where the bosses become actual "enemies" rather than just other poor women and children who got mangled in the fray. I seriously felt more in familiar territory and relaxed knocking out the final couple of bosses than I had felt entering various houses near the end of the game. By then I'd also accepted that there was no good way out of this, so the ending was actually acceptable. I'm replaying it now, just to see "Battle" mode become an easy walk and find better endings before I shift to nightmare. I try not to spoil myself on exactly how to find those endings.

But man, I have no idea if you can relate to this but I can assure you that, if you're a dad, this is a completely different game, than if you aren't. Especially if you're responsible for girls - in my case mostly Asian or half-Asian girls - around this exact age, this is a genuinely difficult thing to put yourself through. love challenging myself. I'll pick the hardest difficulty available on the hardest games I can and find I'll keep finding way to push myself also outside of gaming. But this was tough.

There are so many details about this that are just perfect to trigger your instincts. The fact that when you want to be quiet, your footsteps always make just that much more noise, especially on stairs. The fact that you have to give up hope as you go through it. The fact that, on a first walk-through, on battle, you'll die quite a bit so you will fail in your role as protector. The fact that the actual act of falling to a ghost is basically designed to mimic the body language of r*pe to the maximum extent possible, regardless of the gender of the ghost - the falling down that precedes it.. the list goes on. This is a f*ing masterclass of horror, centered around the mechanisms of maximizing a sense of helplessness and vulnerability. Focusing on classic j-horror creeping dread, rather than jump-scares and gore. Man, this is messed up.

And I still can't feel my left index finger.

Hats off to the creators and graphical and audio designers of this game.