Details
Luigi's Mansion 3 is a 2019 action-adventure video game developed by Next Level Games and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. It is the third installment in the Luigi's Mansion series following Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. The game sees players taking on the role of Luigi who must explore a haunted hotel, incorporating different themes on each floor, and save his friends from the ghosts that inhabit it, after the group is tricked into visiting it for a vacation by King Boo.
Alongside a number of returning gameplay elements from the previous installments, the game incorporates new features, including additional moves for ghost catching, an ectoplasmic doppelgänger assistant known as Gooigi, and expanded multiplayer functionality that allows for players to engage in cooperative and competitive gaming both locally and online. The game received positive reviews from critics and was nominated for several awards, winning the award for "Best Family Game" at The Game Awards 2019. The game has sold 12.82 million copies as of March 2023.
In the single-player story mode, players explore a large hotel with 17 floors – each floor consists of a different theme and atmosphere, and a variety of ghosts, including a boss ghost that the player must defeat. Some of the first floors, such as Floor 2, do not have a theme. Unlike the story mode of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, which focused on pre-defined mission structure of gameplay across several mansions, Luigi's Mansion 3 is more open-ended allowing for greater exploration of the game's setting, with the only restriction being that players cannot explore floors in the hotel via the elevator until they have found the button that allows access to it; the hotel's main lobby and basement are the only floors to have a staircase between them that circumvents the need for the elevator.
Treasure can be found during exploration of the hotel's floor from various objects and solving some puzzles. Luigi can find coins (worth 1), banknotes (worth 5), gold bars (worth 20), and pearls (worth 100) as well as bags of money containing many hundreds of coins. He can also find special gems on each floor, alongside the capture of Boos, a regular enemy in the Mario series, while Luigi can find hearts to recover health lost from the attacks of ghosts and other environmental hazards. Some of the features introduced by Dark Moon are available in the game, including a stun charge function that can make ghost catching easier, and the Dark-Light Device, a blacklight function that can reveal objects that have become invisible (after capturing Spirit Orbs, which cause the invisibility) and animate certain portraits. It can also bring possessed items, such as possessed chests or rubbish bins, back to normal. New to the series include new functions to the Poltergust – an area burst attack that can help keep multiple enemies back, as well as blow away furniture to reveal treasure; a suction cup attachment, which allows the player to fire a plunger onto obstacles and then remove them by using the Poltergust on the cup's cord; and a slam attack, which allow players to repeatedly smash ghosts they are capturing to the ground, both for greater damage as well as a weapon to hit other ghosts around them.
The most notable addition to the game is Gooigi – an ectoplasmic doppelgänger of Luigi previously introduced in the 3DS remake of the original Luigi's Mansion. Gooigi can conduct similar moves to those of his real counterpart, and can be controlled by the player (switching between Luigi and Gooigi) or a second player in local co-op. Gooigi can be used by the player to help in battles and with solving some of the game's puzzles, some of which require the use of Gooigi and Luigi to complete. Unlike Luigi, Gooigi can squeeze through gaps in vents and grills, and walk across spiked floors, but is weaker than his real counterpart and will instantly lose his physical form if he comes into contact with water or fire.
The game's multiplayer mode allows for up to eight players to play together locally and online. In this mode, players can engage in cooperative gameplay through "ScareScraper", a returning feature from Dark Moon, or competitive team matches in "ScreamPark". Both modes use the same style of controls in the single-player mode, with players able to control four colour variations (green, purple, orange, or blue) of Luigi or Gooigi. ScareScraper focuses on cooperative teamwork between players to clear out each of the 5 or 10 floors of a randomly generated high-rise building by seeking out the ghosts hiding on each floor. "ScreamPark" focuses on team-based matches - one side as Team Luigi, the other as Team Gooigi - and scoring points in three different match types: Ghost Hunt, in which teams score points by catching ghosts, with tougher ghosts worth more points; Cannon Barrage, in which teams score points by securing cannonballs, some held by ghosts, loading them into a cannon and firing them at targets, with trickier targets scoring more points; and Coin Floating, in which teams use inflatables to collect coins that drop in a pool, avoiding mines that are dropped as well or lose the coins in their possession and pop the inflatable making them need to blow another one up allowing their opponents to steal them.
Luigi, his pet ghost dog Polterpup, his brother Mario, Princess Peach and a group of Toads have been invited to The Last Resort, a luxurious art deco high-rise hotel nestled in a mountainside area, and decide to visit it for a vacation. After arriving and settling in, Luigi wakes up during the night to find the hotel deserted, transformed into a haunted building and the others are gone. He discovers that the hotel's ghostly owner, Hellen Gravely, lured the group to the hotel as part of a trap by King Boo, whom she had freed from Professor E. Gadd's custody after his recapture in the previous game. King Boo announces his plans to exact revenge on Luigi and his friends by imprisoning them in portraits, but Luigi manages to escape to the hotel's basement through a laundry chute. With the help of Polterpup, who also avoided capture, Luigi explores the basement and comes across an old red car in the underground garage carrying a new Poltergust vacuum model. Using it, Luigi follows Polterpup to the lobby and finds that E. Gadd was also captured.
Searching the lobby, Luigi comes across the professor's Dark-Light Device in a safe and uses it to free him. Setting up a portable lab in the garage, E. Gadd explains how he was also tricked into visiting the hotel and captured by Hellen, who had stolen his latest ghost collection from him to staff the building. Believing that Luigi's friends are likely trapped on the upper floors, E. Gadd recommends that Luigi finds the elevator buttons for the upper floors that had been taken from the main elevator after he secures two from a ghost he had defeated earlier. While exploring the floors, each featuring a different theme to them, Luigi is aided further by E. Gadd with two new gadgets: the Virtual Boo, a communication device based on the Virtual Boy, and Gooigi, an ectoplasmic doppelgänger of Luigi. Left with no choice, Luigi begins his search for the missing elevator buttons in order to visit each of the hotel's many floors.
As Luigi makes his search, he comes across and defeats a variety of different ghosts while reclaiming the elevator buttons and rescuing the Toads from their portraits, much to Hellen's anger and frustration. After saving the Toads, he reaches the top floor where he confronts Hellen, who he manages to defeat before saving Mario. Luigi then follows him to the hotel's roof where they find Peach's portrait. Upon freeing her, the group is confronted by King Boo, having lost faith in Hellen and the ghosts earlier and prepares to imprison them, E. Gadd, and the Toads in a single giant portrait. After being inadvertently saved by Polterpup at the last second, Luigi finds himself forced to defeat King Boo once again, while aided by Gooigi. During the battle, King Boo enlarges the portrait's frame in an attempt to pull in the whole hotel with Luigi still on the roof. Luigi defeats King Boo and manages to recover the portrait moments before the hotel collapses into a ruined mess. After freeing his friends from the portrait, the ghosts Luigi had captured escape from their imprisonment and attempt to attack, but they become social when the jewel from King Boo's crown vanishes, implying that they were all brainwashed. E. Gadd, seeing the ghosts upset over their home's accidental destruction, elects for the group to build a new hotel, while the recaptured King Boo is returned to his custody along with Hellen. Depending on how much money Luigi collected throughout his adventure, the new hotel (built in E. Gadd's version) will be different in size. After the grand re-opening, Luigi and his friends return home.
