Luigi’s Mansion – Earning Your New Home

There’s something surprisingly satisfying about dungeon-crawling through a house. Not spelunking a cave, not hacking through a forest. Just going room to room, vacuum in hand, a deliciously mundane setting for a Mario universe game. Every new hallway feels like peeling back the wallpaper of a very haunted renovation job. And when you light up a room and see it stay lit? That’s progress. You begin to feel like you own the place. Like clearing a level in DOOM, but instead of a shotgun, you’ve got a hoover and the world's most anxious man.

For a launch title on the GameCube, Luigi’s Mansion pushes its host console hard. Every surface gleams, shimmers, creaks. Drawers open. Curtains flutter. Fireplaces roar. Nearly everything in the mansion can be fiddled with, poked at, vacuumed up. It's not just dressing, it's all mechanics. To find out I could vacuum up a table cloth arose a joy in me seldom found in modern games. A showcase of just how much tactile feedback can be squeezed out of a single analogue stick. Even if, ironically, that stick doesn’t quite do what you want it to.

The controls never quite feel right. There’s an awkwardness to Luigi’s movement and aiming that doesn’t disappear even seven hours in. Some games you master the controls; here, you put up with them. But the jank becomes part of the texture. Luigi certainly isn’t comfortable in this house so why should you be?

These ghouls are full of charm. Each one is essentially a micro-puzzle. You don’t just suck them up, you have to lure them from safety. And these aren’t terribly difficult puzzles, like hoovering up the food of a big ol’ fatso ghost so he lowers his guard and lets you suck him up. It’s obvious but classic Nintendo “Aha!” design, the kind of logic Eiji Aonuma would smile at. Each ghost has a personality, a gimmick, a little story. It’s never just combat.

Luigi himself might be Nintendo’s best-animated character of the era. He mutters, shivers, calls out for Mario in little stuttering loops. His knees knock, his teeth chatter, and when you finally catch a break, he wipes his forehead with exhausted relief. He sings the background music under his breath. He tries to keep himself together. The game doesn’t lean into horror, but the sound design makes you care. You want to protect him, not because he’s your avatar, but because you see him straining. There's no real reason to call out Mario's name with the A button, but you keep doing it anyway to hear those funny little wails.

E Gadd is a freak. His voice clips are absurd little joys, the kind of nonsense syllables that burrow into your brain and refuse to leave. Just the way he says Luigi's name is hilarious.

The game gently suggests you catch all those Boos, invites you into every room, and before you know it, you’ve 100%ed it. There's no grind here, just a tightly designed house for you to colonize with light. The only issue might be the blackout at the start of area 4 but it passes quickly. 

It’s not scary. It’s not supposed to be. But there’s a kind of intimacy in the way you’re always hearing Luigi’s heartbeat, his muttering, his breath. It reminds me, the adult player of this game that's almost as old as I am, of being up too late when I was little. When a dream could startle you awake and leave you traipsing across your landing teeth clattering against each other terrified of that which your mind has conjured. Peering out onto the street at some unknown hour expectant to see some horrific entity looking to end your particular life or at least rough it up a bit. The game isn’t spooky, but it has that Halloween spook that puts you in a festive mood, against even the best calendar’s wishes. It’s childhood terror recollected in tranquility. A fond look back at when being afraid was simple, and overcoming it was fun. As you light up each room, the fear fades, replaced by something domestic. When you survive the ordeal you can move in, making yourself at home in the precarity of a nightmare.