Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon Preview

Boobusters!

Since showing at last year's E3, Luigi's Mansion 2 for the 3DS has finally received the subtitle "Dark Moon", which is also the name of the mysterious object that Luigi must find as he once again explores a haunted mansion with his trusty vacuum cleaner. Professor E. Gadd's home has been raided by ghosts, and so he sends scaredy-cat Luigi via the Pixel Teleporter to suck them all up.


Dark Moon works by and large just as the original Luigi's Mansion did. This time around, he'll need to clean up multiple haunted houses, mainly by tiptoeing his way through each room and gathering hidden keys to unlock each door. Some of these keys will be found in treasure chests, hidden beneath a rag that needs to be vacuumed off, but some of them can just be sucked off a mouse's tail or found in a hole in the wall hidden by some rickety planks.

This requires Luigi to be extremely thorough in looking through windows and scouring each item in the room by either blowing or sucking air upwards and downwards. Carpets can be blown away to reveal floor switches and the candles on the chandelier can be extinguished to reveal coins... lots and lots of coins. Money is everywhere, with more than four hundred coins hidden in just the first four rooms.


The visuals also can't be denied. The cel-shaded environments, filled with broken windows, craggy trees, and framed paintings, have incredible attention to detail and immediately react to the lighting. On occasion, a bolt of lightning will flash across the sky and turn the scene into an epileptic series of black and white silhouettes. It may not be as creepy as some more mature horror titles, but it fits right in with Nintendo's light humor.

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon will be released some time during the holiday season 2012.