Ghosts are a close-up. Eventually they are, anyway. After they’ve been a sudden movement at the back of the frame, a shimmer or glitch that may or may not have happened, you cut in close and you hold the image tight and you take it all in. Anybody there?
At these moments, ghosts are the rocking chair that may have just moved, the painting or moose head whose eyes have flickered to track you as you pass. Ghosts are details, which means that games have often struggled with them. Action games particularly have often lived in the wide shot, the camera way back, the broad approach to scene-setting applied. Up until the last few decades, most props were stuck to the tables in games, most doors were all-but painted onto their walls.
As it happens, doors are a pretty good place to start when approaching the Luigi’s Mansion games, a series that’s fairly bursting open with ghosts. With Luigi’s Mansion 2 coming to the Switch this week, I’ve been looking back at the series as a whole, and these games work eager magic with doors. I can still remember firing the first game up on the GameCube and that moment where Luigi, who’d just won a haunted mansion in a competition he didn’t enter, first reached for its brass door handle. A reference to Resident Evil? Maybe. But also a statement of intent: close-ups, details, the glinting play of light on metalwork. Here was a game in which the little domestic things would matter.
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