E3 2019: ‘Luigi’s Mansion 3’ Takes On A Haunted Hotel Mario

While games like Pokemon and The Legend of Zelda may have been getting most of the attention at Nintendo’s E3 booth, I had high expectations for Luigi’s Mansion 3. The original was a fun, if not basic take on family friendly survival horror, but it was the second game that blew the lid off of the concept with an array of new features. With a much more powerful system to work with and a few years between games to reignite that creative spark, adding a little goo to the formula seems to be doing wonders for Luigi’s next adventure.

In a suspicious fortunate show of good faith, Luigi and his friends are invited to a new multi-story hotel. For whatever reason, it seems like Mario characters can’t help but be kidnapped. While Mario’s weakness seems to be haunted mansions, the entire Mushroom Kingdom entourage gets captured this time around aside from Luigi, including Mario, Princess Peach and her army of Toads. As the guy who’s deathly terrified of ghosts who coincidentally is never captured by them, Luigi is once again armed with the newest E. Gadd technology as he traverses the hotel and rescues his friends. Only this time, things are poised to get a bit more sticky.

At first glance, Luigi’s Mansion 3 follows many of the same beats as its predecessors. Returning to the roots of the original, this game focuses on one large environment rather than multiple smaller ones like in the 3DS sequel. Focusing as much on exploration as it does on fighting ghosts, Luigi will have to search every nook and cranny of the hotel to find switches, keys and lots of money that will surely play into the rewards at the end of the game. Using his flashlight and vacuum as his primary tools, they can be used for everything ranging from flipping money out of buckets to defeating an army of ghosts. This has been made even more fun by allowing Luigi to get more aggressive with his foes by allowing him to slam them on the ground to drain their health faster. In the past, ghosts were sucked in by stunning them with the flashlight, then holding the suction button while moving the stick away from the frantic ghost. If their health persists even with some expert suction, that slam can give the boost needed to finish off stubborn ghosts for good.

What made Luigi’s Mansion 2: Dark Moon such a great sequel is that it took everything that worked in the GameCube original and improved on it. New attacks, abilities and environments more completely realized the potential that the first game introduced, all with memorable enemies that made sure we used those techniques to the fullest. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is looking to take the puzzle heavy pseudo-survival horror franchise even further thanks to Luigi’s expanded move set. First, a plunger can be attached to his ghost sucking vacuum and used as a grappling hook. Often needed to grab hard-to-reach switches, pull down weakened structures or lower enemy defenses, this quickly became an essential tool in our ghost busting arsenal. If Luigi becomes too overwhelmed by enemies, he can put his cowardice to good use and let out a yell that repels surrounding ghosts. Who knew you could use a ghost’s greatest tool against them?

However, we can’t talk about this third game without touching on Gooigi, the highly promoted companion that Luigi can summon at will. Using a special fluid held in this new Poltergust G-00 model, it can craft a fully controllable copy of our hero, except much more permeable. This allows our goo copy to slide through obstacles such as spikes completely unharmed, which can either be controlled directly by the player or by a second player in co-op mode. Perhaps more important is the fact that Gooigi allows for multiple solutions to the puzzles presented. For example, during the demo, I had the option to either use the wind generated by my vacuum to turn a gear or have Gooigi stay behind and turn it while Luigi proceeded below. If the full game continuously provides options such as this, then the sometimes restrictive linearity of the previous games might be a thing of the past.

Once we reached the boss, an armor clad ghost in a gladiator type setting, it was time to put each of our new tricks to use. Using the plunger to remove his armor, charging up our flashlight to stun him once he was unable to reflect our light and slamming him to make his final defeat come faster, Luigi’s limited movement speed was made up for by the amount of tools he has at his disposal. It’s looking like we’ll have to use each one to their fullest if we want to survive this latest haunt.

As someone who has loved the previous games, Luigi’s Mansion 3 might be the game I was most impressed by at Nintendo’s booth. With so many improvements and additions on top of the amount of personality these games display, the demo shows that we’re on track to have a sleeper candidate for one of 2019’s best games. Let’s just hope this trend continues with the full campaign, the co-op mode and the online multiplayer modes that have been promised. Can Luigi overtake his brother as the dominant Mario Bro? Probably not, but at least we’ll have a good game to look forward to when Luigi takes the spotlight back this holiday season.