Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake doesn't open with a jump scare; it opens in a trance. As Mio, you watch helplessly as a crimson butterfly lures your twin sister, Mayu, into a fog-covered forest. There, the Lost Village swallows her whole. For over twenty-two years, this scene has haunted fans, myself included. Seeing the village emerge from the mist, modern lighting draping every rooftop and tree branch in dense volumetric fog, I knew immediately: this isn't a low-budget remaster. The dread in Fatal Frame 2 stems not only from the individually named wraiths stalking you through its haunted Japanese village – a place trapped in a festival of death – but also from the way Mayu grips your hand, dragging you toward dangers you're unprepared for. After roughly four hours with the first four chapters on PC, this remake already has its hooks in me — not only is it a faithful yet modernized take on what many consider the scariest game ever, its added visual fidelity makes the core mechanic of looking directly at what's trying to kill you that much harder to endure.
Fatal Frame 2's central mechanic remains one of the cleverest in survival horror. Your primary weapon is the Camera Obscura — a modified camera that damages wraiths by photographing them. That's it. No shotguns, no grenades stashed in a locker. You point a camera at something terrifying, and you take its picture. The series has been doing this since 2001, and it's still unlike anything else in the genre.
The Camera Obscura uses focal points: crosshairs that identify a wraith's weak spots. Aligning more of these points when you take a photo increases the damage dealt. You can upgrade these focal points with prayer beads found throughout the environment, making each shot more lethal and rewarding exploration in classic survival horror style. But your camera can also deliver special shots that require willpower, and the effect varies depending on the equipped filter. While auto-focus helps you lock onto targets, manual focus rewards precision with more serious damage. And, despite Fatal Frame 2's penalties for proximity, keeping the viewfinder pulled back and standing dangerously close to a spirit was often the better strategy for dealing more damage and taking control of a fight.
However, willpower is a limited and valuable resource. If you get too close, a wraith will drain your willpower, leaving you vulnerable to a leering attack that flashes your screen and momentarily steals control, or allows the wraith to strike you more easily than it would at range.
Film types serve as your ammunition and create their own layer of resource tension. The basic Type-07 film is infinite but reloads slowly and hits weakly, while stronger film like the Type-61 deals significantly more damage but caps at eight shots and must be scavenged, as you can't buy more when you run out. Interchangeable filters add further complexity: the Standard Filter stuns enemies, the Paraceptual Filter blinds them at range and can eventually be upgraded to see through walls, and the Exposure Filter can unlock secret items and areas by reconstructing certain scenes with the Phantom Exposé mode. Each filter has its own upgrade path covering range, reload speed, and special shot duration, and since special shots cost willpower, you're also incentivized to invest your limited prayer beads into upgrading willpower recovery at the expense of raw damage. There's a lot of strategy here for players who want to dig into Fatal Frame 2’s intricate system.
This excellent combat loop revolves around timing. You enter camera mode by holding the left trigger, frame the wraith with the right thumbstick, and slam the right trigger to activate the shutter. But your shots will typically be weaker unless you wait for it to telegraph an attack — you'll hear the wraith moaning while the screen flashes red — and then you hit the shutter for a Fatal Frame shot, which staggers the spirit and deals massive damage. Nail one while a wraith is already vulnerable and you trigger Fatal Time, a window for rapid-fire photos that automatically burns through your basic Type-07 film. The whole system punishes impatience and rewards the nerve to stand still while something horrible lunges at you, but it is slow. Deliberately so. Film reload times are long, enemies take a while to go down, and the rhythm of shooting, exiting camera mode, backpedaling, and re-entering is methodical by design — kinda like jousting, but with a camera instead of a lance. When the atmosphere is doing its job, which it usually is, the deliberateness feels meditative. Whether it stays that way across a full campaign is one of the bigger questions this preview can't yet answer.
Three difficulty modes are available: Story, Normal, and Hard (Battle). Each is meaningfully tuned, with harder settings increasing wraith damage while rewarding more Photo Points for skilled shots. Those points feed into an item shop where you can purchase healing items and equippable stat-boosting charms, creating a risk-reward scale that shifts rather than simply punishing the player. I played most of the preview on Normal before switching to Story after Chapter Three. Even in Story, enemies hit hard enough to maintain tension — meaning these difficulty modes preserve the horror rather than trivialize it.
Speaking of customizing the experience, I previewed Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake on a machine equipped with a Ryzen 3900X, RTX 4070 Ti, and 32GB of RAM at 3440x1440p ultrawide with max settings. In typical PC gamer fashion, my first adventure was the options menu itself, which deserves mention for its satisfying granularity. You can adjust vibration intensity separately for damage feedback, item searching, and even how hard Mio’s heart races during cutscenes. You can fine-tune camera behavior down to obstacle avoidance and rotation inertia; customize your graphical settings with precision; and even change the Camera Obscura's viewfinder style between a classic and modern look. If you can imagine a setting, this remake probably has it. It also ships with both English and Japanese audio, which is a welcome touch for a series with such deep roots in Japanese horror.
PC players expecting an unlocked frame rate should note that it is capped at 60fps. Considering the attention to detail in areas like viewfinder styles and vibration settings, Fatal Frame 2's lack of broader accessibility features stands out. It already offers a deep UI and subtitle scaling, customizable text colors, named character labels, and text backgrounds — a solid foundation. However, the absence of screen reading or colorblind modes is particularly striking for a game built around photographing ghosts, where visual feedback like crosshair lock-ons, screen flashes, and color inversions drive the core loop. Screen reader support for the extensive menus, item descriptions, and collectible documents seems a natural extension of the text customization already in place. Games like The Last of Us Part 2 have shown that colorblind accessibility can be addressed through audiovisual indicators that don't rely on color alone, an approach that could work here without undermining the atmosphere.
Fatal Frame 2’s engrossing story centers on twin sisters Mio and Mayu, who stumble into Minakami Village — a place that vanished from a mountainside on the night of a failed ritual. The village was built over a gate to the underworld called the Hellish Abyss, and its residents performed a gruesome twin sacrifice to keep it sealed. When the ritual failed, the village was consumed by mist, and now it's full of restless spirits who want to reenact the whole thing using you.
The story setup hooked me immediately. Every room feels handcrafted to maximize unease — items clattering off shelves in adjacent hallways, rain pattering against rooftops while ghosts stalk corridors, the distant wail of a wraith telling you exactly where it is and exactly why you shouldn't be there. The sound design is relentless. Everything is precisely mixed, which makes the jump scares land harder because the baseline atmosphere is already ratcheted tight. Reach out to pick up an item, and a wraith may grab your hand instead, draining your willpower until you frantically mash the A button to shake it off. It's a small touch, but it means even looting feels dangerous.
Each ghost has a name and backstory you can piece together through collectible documents and a spirit list that catalogs every encounter: the drowned woman on the bridge, the woman sealed in a box, the spirit in the Osaka house still searching for her lost boyfriend Masumi. It goes deep into the lore as well: by digging into the richly detailed village for scraps of lost journals and other items left behind, I uncovered that Masumi was a folklorist's assistant who vanished while surveying a forest slated for a dam, only for his girlfriend Miyako to follow him into the mist and meet the same fate.
She's the spirit I fought in the Osaka house, and I loved playing through an entire 30-minute side quest dedicated to demystifying her background. Throughout the campaign, you photograph the former residents’ spectral remnants and slowly build a picture of the tragedy that consumed Minakami Village, giving Fatal Frame 2 a level of world-building that rewards curiosity without requiring it and gives every encounter a layer of melancholy underneath the fear.
The preview build also featured the Kusabi, a massive, unkillable entity that patrols certain areas. When it shows up, you can't fight it; you hide. It drains your willpower on contact, forces your screen into black and white, and disables the Camera Obscura entirely. One extended sequence in the Kurosawa mansion strips you of your flashlight while the Kusabi hunts you through dark hallways, and it's the most effective horror set piece in the preview. It's the kind of sequence that makes you realize how much the Camera Obscura normally functions as a security blanket.
Outside of combat, Fatal Frame 2 plays like a classic Resident Evil game, and that's a specific comparison. Players navigate interconnected rooms, find keys, solve puzzles to unlock new areas, and occasionally discover that previously safe rooms now contain threats. Save points can be blocked by enemies. The structure creates a loop of dread, relief, and fresh dread that survival horror fans will immediately recognize.
Puzzles are straightforward — one has you arranging dolls on a temple altar based on clues from a photograph — but they're woven into the environmental storytelling in ways that keep them from feeling like arbitrary roadblocks. Hidden collectibles include pairs of twin dolls that unlock items at the Photo Point exchange shop when photographed together. The previously mentioned Phantom Exposé system lets you recreate old photographs found in the environment to reveal hidden items. You match the framing of an old photo to uncover something that had vanished, giving genuine reason to revisit earlier areas with fresh eyes and a charged filter.
Additionally, your flashlight helps spot items but makes it easier for enemies to detect you, adding a stealth element that feeds directly into the tension. Some areas are better to sneak through if you can’t afford to fight a wraith head-on, and running away from a fight to the nearest save point is usually an option. It’s great that you heal automatically at save points, and while holding Mayu's hand also regenerates health, she was separated from Mio for two full chapters during the preview, leaving me reliant on rare healing items and careful play. Equippable charms provide small stat boosts — the Moonstone extends your dodge window, while Mayu’s Charm increases health recovery when holding hands. They're small build decisions that add texture without overcomplicating things.
Finally, Fatal Frame 2 Remake’s controls feel deliberately stiff — you dodge on A, crouch on B, and open your inventory on X. There’s also some inertia when entering and exiting the Camera Obscura’s viewfinder with the left trigger. This layout makes sense after a while, but during the first two chapters, I often fumbled for the right input with a wraith bearing down on me. Depending on your tolerance, that's either a control issue or a horror feature.
It took roughly four hours to clear the first four chapters, partly due to combat difficulty and partly because the world rewards exploration, with plenty of nooks and crannies to dip into while scavenging for critical items and uncovering the elaborate depth of Minakami Village itself. The graphics and UI translate well to ultrawide, and fans will find the rebuilt classic scenes rich with detail. But some questions do remain about how well the rest of the campaign fares. The 60fps cap is an annoying albeit forgivable ceiling; the deliberate combat pacing could grow tiresome over a full campaign. It’s also too early to tell how faithfully the remake handles the original's multiple endings, although Fatal Frame 2's history and the deft handling of its campaign so far suggests greater narrative complexity ahead.
The Camera Obscura system remains unique in survival horror, the atmosphere is thick enough to feel physical, and the storytelling rewards the slow, careful attention this genre demands. If you loved the original, this is shaping up to be a worthy reintroduction. If you've never played Fatal Frame, this is the place to start — the entries are largely standalone, and this one was already considered the best back in 2003. Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake launches for PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series on March 12, 2026.
