Though survival horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill have always taken up most of the spotlight for the genre, lesser known franchises such as Fatal Frame have quietly provided some excellent horror experiences for those willing to go a bit off the beaten path. Fatal Frame traces its roots back to the PlayStation 2 and while it’s been over a decade since the last new release (on Wii U, of all things…), Koei Tecmo has been getting its feet wet in recent times by experimenting with some ways to bring back the old titles for modern platforms.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake Review - Screenshot 1 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Docked)

The most recent of these is Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake, a reimagining of the most popular entry in the series that brings it more in line with modern survival horror standards. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot to love about this one and it feels like a definite improvement over the original.

Fatal Frame II takes place in the creepy Minakami Village, a decrepit and sorry place filled with the spirits of the dead. Due to a tragic and freakish past linked to an occult ritual involving pairs of twins, the village itself vanished and now only reveals itself to people lost in the forest. Enter twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura, the latter of which you spend much of the game chasing and tracking through the haunted ruins.

As you explore the village, you often come across discarded journals and reports from other victims and past residents, gradually filling you in on the lore and culture of Minakami and what led to its downfall. It’s interesting stuff, and helps to elevate the setting into being more than just an extended, forested haunted house. And though the twin sisters are a little less interesting as protagonists — Mayu especially feels like little more than a walking plot device — they still have just enough depth to them that you at least care somewhat about their plight and remain invested in their desperate struggle for survival.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake Review - Screenshot 2 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Docked)

Gameplay follows a traditional survival horror framework in which you navigate mazelike, semi-open environments rife with puzzles, collectibles, and enemies in equal measure. Story objectives often require through exploration of the current area and incentivise backtracking, but you’re rarely at a loss of what to do next thanks to smart environment design and helpful signposting on the map.

Backtracking is naturally a big part of the experience here, and the developers have done a good job of making it rewarding by offering a steady stream of helpful pickups and thrilling new ghost encounters to keep things from feeling like you’re just running in circles.

A big part of what helps add to the spirit of tension is the new camera, which tosses fixed camera angles for the over the shoulder system of a Dead Space and Resident Evil 4. This makes all the narrow passages, crawlspaces, and dark alleyways feel that much more oppressive as you move through the space with your character, and it adds some anxiety to instances where you can hear something stumbling about in the dark and frantically have to move the camera around to spot them. Plus, there’s now a mechanic where opening a door or reaching for an item will trigger a brief sequence where you can often get jump-scared by an unexpected ghost.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake Review - Screenshot 3 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Docked)

Other additions for this remake include new locations and side stories, both of which are peppered into the original content in a seamless way. The new locales add a bit more density to the environment while the side stories not only help to build out the lore, but also offer some extra gameplay content through equippable crystals that modify your stats for the combat encounters.

The Camera Obscura takes centre stage in combat, wherein you’re tasked with getting the best close-ups you can of your ghostly foes to whittle away their health. Every picture you snap will take a chunk out of a spirit’s energy, and you’ll get more points depending on the quality of the shot composition, including things like how much of the subject is centred, what filter you’re using, and the correct depth of the zoom and focus. It’d be tough to get the perfect shot under even the best of circumstances, and your foes obviously don’t sit around and smile for the camera while they wait for the flash.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake Review - Screenshot 4 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Handheld/Undocked)

Combat is thus a tense dance between safely distancing yourself to give you space for another quick shot and dodging their swipes and dives as they do everything in their power to add you to their undead ranks. Amusingly enough, I was vaguely reminded of the Monster Hunter series in terms of how the combat encounters demand careful study of your opponent and their attack animations. It’s not enough to merely point and click, you need to keep an eye out for when they’ll do something like teleporting or suddenly turning their head and have your camera ready to capture the moment when they move into place.

There’s a bit more of a skill element than merely having an eye for photography, too. If you wait to snap a picture until the very last second before a ghost strikes, you’ll trigger a Fatal Frame which acts like a sort of parry in how it stuns the ghost and opens them up for taking even more damage. Couple features like this with the inclusion of different film types that all have different reload times and damage outputs, and you have a surprisingly deep combat system for a game that ultimately focuses on its atmosphere and tension.

Tension quickly gives way to tedium, however, given the relative sponginess that many enemies demonstrate on the base difficulty. The problem here is that your camera simply feels too weak for even the most basic enemy. What begins as a frightening encounter with a ghost who got the jump on you and gave you a good scare quickly becomes a waiting game of ducking the occasional swipe or grab while you wait for your camera to reload or for them to get back into position so you can take another bit out of their health bar.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake Review - Screenshot 5 of 6

On one hand, enemies that could be dropped with two or three well-placed snapshots wouldn’t pose too much of a threat and thus wouldn’t do much to elevate the atmosphere. But on the other, basic enemies that require nearly 10 minutes to wrangle tend to drag down the pacing and make fights feel more like an obligatory slog that you start to avoid out of annoyance rather than fear.

Adding fuel to the fire, enemies can now become ‘Aggravated’ at seemingly any time, with the state triggering more often as they lose health. Not only does this turn the ghost red and make it more aggressive, but it also regains a huge chunk of the health you worked down and draws out combat even more.

Making upgrades to the Camera Obscura over time helps to mitigate some of these problems, but the combat never fully clicked for me, even after studying the mechanics and ensuring I was making the most of all my options. The sluggish combat isn’t a big enough issue that it completely sinks the game, but it is significant enough that I’d recommend other survival horror remakes over this one first.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake Review - Screenshot 6 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch 2 (Docked)

Visually, Fatal Frame 2 leaves something to be desired, with poor performance marring an otherwise beautiful and atmospheric art style. The biggest offender here is the frame rate, which attempts to keep everything moving at a capped 30fps. Though this isn’t exclusively a Switch 2 issue — I've heard reports that even the PS5 Pro has a similarly low frame rate — it's still jarring enough that it takes you out of the experience and takes a bit more wind out of the sails of some of the ghost encounters.

And while the environments themselves are rich with details and shadows and a tremendous sense of tactility that the original lacked, noticeable pop-in further exposes the flaws of the engine this is running on. It just takes you a bit out of the moment when little things like cobwebs on a wooden beam show up a good few seconds after you’ve been looking at it, or when you’re watching higher resolution textures load in about 10 to 15 feet in front of you as you’re creeping through a field.

Conclusion

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake is a solid, but uneven remake that nonetheless stands as a strong reminder of the cool ideas that this franchise brings to the table. To its credit, Fatal Frame II very competently executes on the survival horror blueprint. Locales are sufficiently spooky, materials are scarce without feeling too limited, and when you’re creeping around environments scouring for health pickups and stashed notes, there’s a grand sense of building dread. Unfortunately, this is sometimes rapidly deflated through things like drawn-out enemy encounters and some performance snafus.

If you’re at all a fan of the franchise or survival horror in general, I’d give this one a recommendation because it ultimately hits much more than it misses. But for genre newcomers, I’d first recommend playing any of Capcom’s Resident Evils from the past several years (or even something a little more low-key like Signalis or Crow Country) before taking the plunge on this one. Fatal Frame 2 isn’t quite the home run some may have hoped for, but it’s an overall enjoyable and worthwhile experience that I’d suggest picking up at some point.

Related Products

Please note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.