Nice and cheery title, isn’t it? The Tormented. You know, it’s a Friday afternoon here and I could be happily bouncing along as an orange smiley blob on Loco Roco, or dazzling people with my r-r-rapping skills on the cheery Parappa the Rapper, but no. The Tormented. Well, I’d best crack on then and delve a little deeper into why exactly I am spending a gloriously sunny not-quite-weekend-yet day walking around empty haunted Japanese houses in search of some rather scary ghosts instead of sunning myself in a pub beer garden with a frosty pint and a packet of Quavers.

You see, I have been a bit of a fan of this series ever since I played the first episode way back in 2002. I happened upon it completely by chance in a local videogame store at some ridiculously cheap price and thought it might be worthy of a punt, and a good few sleepless nights later I pretty much summed up that I’d got my money’s worth. The sequel – 2004’s Crimson Butterfly – was better still, ramping up the tension and chucking a whole load of new nastiness your way at every possible opportunity. The prospect of a third slice of ghost vs. camera jousting was therefore rather tantalising indeed.

So, what’s the rub this time around? A young girl named Rei lives with another named Miku (who was the central character in the first Project Zero game), and is still haunted by the memory of a car crash that killed her fiancée Yuu. One night Rei falls asleep and has a bizarre dream in which she awakes in a strange, empty house and sees Yuu walking deeper inside. A bit of running about later she bumps into a rather unfriendly ghost and awakes to discover a tattoo glowing on her back. The story progresses from this point in the familiar Project Zero manner, with all sorts of cults and strange traditions revealed piece-by-piece through collection of books, letters, tapes and film reels.

As you probably had been thinking if you hadn’t played a Project Zero game before, this all sounds a tad bit Silent Hill. If anything, The Tormented mirrors the way in which Silent Hill 4 flitted between reality and the strange otherworld, with the line between fact and fiction becoming fuzzier as events progress. The game contains a number of chapters that are divided up into taking place when Rei falls asleep, and in between them you control her in her apartment, giving you time to explore Yuu’s room, talk to Miku or develop photos. The progression through the story is mostly linear and you will follow a pretty set path through proceedings, but as with most games of this ilk there’s plenty of side information and background info that can be additionally gleaned to make the whole thing clearer.

Whoa Nelly, hold on there. If you’ve not played a Project Zero game before, you may need a little explanation of how you go about your business. Those of you expecting to stroll around the place sending ghosts back where they came from with a brutal blast of the nearest sawn-off shotgun are set to be a little perplexed when you come to realise that your main weapon is a rather magical camera. As you stroll around the creepy houses that make up the game’s locations, ghosts will occasionally appear and will mostly attempt to attack you. By switching from the third-person viewpoint into a first-person camera viewfinder, you have to aim your targeting reticule at the ghost in question and snap it to inflict damage. Holding off until the last moment will see the reticule turn red and a ‘Fatal Frame’ shot dished out, which not only stuns your opponent but does a hefty slice of damage too.

Throughout the game you gain points for good shots and the like, which you can then use to power up your camera to allow you to deal with increasingly tough ghosts. The general pacing of this seems to have been done to a tee and you’ll rarely find yourself in a situation where you’re wielding an overpowered camera or struggling with an underpowered one, and the option to switch between different strengths of film gives you a few tactical decisions to make. Waste your precious and rather powerful Type 90 film on the ghost woman with a dozen arms, or take a little longer and finish her off with the standard Type 14? It all comes down to your choices and how well you think you can stand up to the ghosts around you.

Another thing that Tecmo have got right is the amount of film and heath drops that are littered around. You’re always aware that you’re going to need to stockpile a few of each to make progress, and although initial experiments with certain chunks of the game might leave you with not much in the way of film or energy, it’s more than manageable to progress to the end of each chapter with a good amount of both if you take care. In fact, the way the game is divided into chapters if anything has eased the issue of sparse pickups, with health being charged back up to full whenever a segment ends.

It’s the story itself that’ll take the main stage, and rightfully so. I found it more genuinely unnerving than being driven more than a few miles by my sister, and there are moments when the game will chuck you a bizarre sequence of images that just-and-just show something happening, leaving you to make up your mind as to what you think is going on. The story also nicely dovetails the previous games whilst adding its own angle, meaning that you’ll bump into familiar characters and locations as you play through. More than just a cheap way of adding some extra padding content-wise, returning to locations once visited in previous games is rather creepy whilst being infrequent enough to make their appearance welcome.

So, there’s got to be a downside right? As with most things, the answer is yes. The first thing that really hampers The Tormented is the general lack of any strong indication as to what you’re being expected to do on occasion. At times you will find yourself put at the start of the chapter and guided to an event by a wandering ghost or a lack of other options in terms of unsealed doors. Other times will see you wandering the house searching for anything, eventually leading you to a room or an item that triggers an event. It could certainly be levelled that the game often leaves you not entirely sure what it is that you are doing next, and although the exploring and such is good fun there’s a limit as to how many times seeing the same rooms over and over will entertain you.

This could be down to the way the game looks. There’s nothing wrong with it in terms of detailing and character models, but pretty similar textures are present right through the house you explore, with most of the rooms looking rather identical apart from scattered furniture and items. Given the game’s slightly claustrophobic nature Tecmo were hamstrung to a degree, but it would’ve been nice to see a couple of extra outdoor environment perhaps, or a dash of colour here and there.

But hey, none of the above is a complete game-killer. As a freaky psycho-horror experience, Project Zero 3 offers just as much in the way of thrills ‘n’ chills as its predecessors. Whether it’ll sell well this time around is yet to be seen, but if there’s even the tiniest piece of justice in this industry The Tormented should become the game that breaks the series properly on these shores. Worth missing out on beer and cheese crisps? Most definitely.