"Luigi’s Mansion 3” is a not-so-traditional open world game that uses this style to its advantage. In “Luigi’s Mansion” you have to use your surroundings, along with your many gadgets, to save your friends and escape.

Luigi, Mario, Peach, and the Toads go to a hotel for a free vacation. Little do they know it’s a trap; King Boo has escaped and wants revenge. He traps everyone in a painting except for Luigi. Luigi escapes and finds professor E.Gadd’s car. He opens it to find The Poltergust 3000 – a machine created by E.Gadd to originally aid Luigi in capturing King Boo. With the help of the Poltergust 3000, Gooigi – another invention by professor E.Gadd   – and his Ghost dog, Spook, Luigi must travel the Hotel, save his friends, and stop King Boo.

“Luigi’s Mansion 3” has you use many different mechanics to solve puzzles to progress onward; because of this, it can take a long time to figure out a puzzle. On floor B2 you come across an Engineer ghost who locks you in a room. You are so distracted by the many pipes and things going on that you don’t see the fake wall in the back. First you try to use Gooigi to travel through the pipes and escape the room, but this doesn’t work. Then you start to wander the room aimlessly hoping to find something that can get you out. This part took me a significant amount of time to conquer and is a good example of how the designers challenge the players. The also make it difficult to fight the boss, considering you don’t have any idea what to do.

Another part where you encounter issues is the boss fight on floor 6. King Macfright is a heavily armored medieval ghost who appears to be indestructible, no matter what you try to do. In this battle timing is everything; you have about half a second to use your strobe and stun him. Because of the small time frame it’s difficult to realize that he lowers his shield just when he is about to hit you. This took me a long time to realize because of the facts I stated just earlier. However the designers do a good job taking advantage of the play style and making it more fun because of that.

The game is a sort of side scroller and open world in the sense that you are looking in on the rooms and can only see one wall; they use this to help show off the mansion's design and help show you what to do. On floor 11, the Twisted Suites, you use mechanics to take down a ghost cat. The game uses very clever hints to solve the challenge. For example, this level says, “Don’t look away or else the cat will pounce on you.” Here, the player finds the cat won’t come down until Luigi is facing away. You must turn into Gooigi to attack the ghost right when it is about to pounce. 

In all, “Luigi’s Mansion 3” is a well thought out game. However, like every other game, there are areas for improvement.