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It’s curious. While Hollywood horror is increasingly looking east for inspiration, the Japanese games industry seems stuck looking westwards, unable to see the rich vein of homegrown chills that’s lying there to be exploited. Even with the international success of The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water, not to mention their American remakes, Capcom and Konami are still chasing Western nightmares. Silent Hill was last seen marooned in smalltown Americana, and while Resident Evil is shifting locales, it’s only doing so to a remote European setting. Where does this leave those of us looking for a game that captures the strange visions and morbid gloom of Hideo Nakata or Takashi Shimitsu? With Project Zero 2, that’s where.

The original Project Zero was something of a cult curio in its first PlayStation 2 incarnation. As a vulnerable Japanese teen, you were left searching a derelict mansion for clues to your brother’s disappearance, uncovering dark secrets and fighting for survival along the way. As the mansion was literally crawling with vengeful ghosts and malignant spirits, this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. In fact, while the combat-trained protagonists of the Resident Evil series come armed to the teeth and ready for action, your fragile heroine had only one item to protect her: an antique camera that saps ghostly energies before they get a chance to drain your life away.

Project Zero worked. It was simple. It was scary. But it never prepared you for the sequel. Crimson Butterfly is a perfect example of a series realising its great potential. Searching, puzzle solving and spook photography remain the order of the day, but the scale is that much larger. This begins with the setting. No longer is there just one haunted mansion to contend with, but a complete rural village of the damned, filled with abandoned houses, strange temples and mysterious side alleys.

Now most rural villages have one downside or another, whether it’s a lack of decent restaurants, rising youth crime or high radon gas emissions. However, this rural village really is cursed. Since the failure of a dark ritual hundreds of years ago, it has become a lost location, appearing only momentarily to suck in unwary travellers, who find themselves not only stuck in a place without anywhere to buy a pint of milk, but in a burg where half the houses play home to ill-meaning spirits, and where ghastly spectres wander freely re-enacting oddball ceremonies.

As a result, the agenda for Mio and Mayu – twin sisters with a mysterious past – is escape. For the vast majority of the adventure you find yourself playing Mio, (Mayu having the sort of good luck and common sense that you would normally associate with, say, Zoe from Eastenders) and as the game unfolds it’s up to her to untangle the web of mystery that ties her and her sister to the village.

I know. It sounds dull. It sounds like ‘Alone in the Dark with David Bailey’, but then gameplay isn’t actually the core strength of Crimson Butterfly. The puzzles veer between painfully simple and wilfully overdone, with much too much reliance on the old spot-the-door, find-the-key routine. And while the combat gets trickier as events progress, with ghosts disappearing and reappearing in the most threatening of manners, it’s not actually all that satisfying. Even the camera enhancement system isn’t that great a hook. While getting more powerful shots from a longer range is great, finding upgrades never gives you the same thrill you get from finding the Particle Beam in Halo 2 or the Master Sword in Zelda.

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