Luigi's Mansion 3
is an action-adventure game developed by Next Level Games and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. It is a sequel to the 2001 and 2013 GameCube and Nintendo 3DS games Luigi's Mansion and , the third entry in the Luigi's Mansion series, and was released on October 31, 2019. It is the fourth video game where Luigi is the main character after the first two Luigi's Mansion games and Mario is Missing!. The game sees players taking on the role of Luigi who must explore a haunted hotel, incorporating different themes on each floor, and rescue his friends from the ghosts that inhabit it, after the group is tricked into visiting it for a vacation by an old foe.
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 generally favorable reviews from critics and was nominated for several awards, even winning the award for "Best Family Game" at The Game Awards 2019. As of March 31, 2020, the game sold over six million copies worldwide.
Gameplay
Luigi's Mansion 3 is an action-adventure game, in which players control the character of Luigi from a fixed third-person perspective, as they capture ghosts across a large hotel setting. The game features two modes of gameplay – a single-player story mode, and a set of multiplayer game modes – in which ghost catching functions in the same manner as previous installments: players stun ghosts with Luigi's flashlight, snag them with his Poltergust, and weaken their health down to 0 in order to capture them.Single-player
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. Unlike the story mode of , 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, including special gems on each floor, alongside the capture of Boos, 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 a darklight function that can reveal hidden items and animate certain portraits. New to the series include new functions to the Poltergust – an area burst attack that can help keep multiple enemies back; a suction cup attachment, which allows the player to fire a plunger onto obstacles and then remove them by using the Poltergust on the plunger's cord; and a slam attack, which allow players to slam ghosts they are capturing into 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 animated goo clone 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 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 dissolve if he comes into contact with water or fire.
Multiplayer
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 of Luigi or Gooigi. ScareScraper focuses on cooperative team work between players to clear out each of the 5/10 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 floats to collect coins that drop in a pool, avoiding mines that are dropped as well or face losing the coins in their possession and allowing their opponents to steal them.Plot
, his pet ghost dog Polterpup, his brother Mario, Princess Peach and a group of Toads receive an invitation to the luxurious high-rise hotel of the Last Resort, and decide to visit it for a vacation. The princess and Mario are talking, the Toads are playing catch, and Luigi is sleeping with Polterpup. After arriving and settling in, Luigi awakens during the night to find the hotel deserted, transformed into a haunted building, and the others missing. He discovers that the hotel's ghostly owner, Hellen Gravely, had lured the group to the hotel as part of a trap by King Boo, whom she had freed from his imprisonment after Luigi's last ghost-catching adventure in . King Boo reveals he is enraged with Luigi and wants to end things with him once and for all. Learning that the others have been imprisoned in portraits, Luigi is forced to flee to avoid the same fate, and narrowly escapes to the basement by using a laundry chute. With the help of his flashlight and Polterpup, who also avoided capture, Luigi explores the basement and comes across a car in the underground garage carrying a new Poltergust model G-00. Using it, Luigi makes his way to the lobby, following his ghost dog, and finds that Professor E. Gadd was also captured.Searching the lobby floor, Luigi comes across his Dark Light bulb in a safe and uses it to free E. Gadd, who asks him to take him into the basement. Setting up a portable lab in the garage, E. Gadd explains how he had been tricked into visiting the hotel and was captured by Hellen, who stole his 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 floor 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 the professor with two new gadgets: the Virtual Boo, a device that allows E. Gadd to communicate with Luigi; and Gooigi, a doppelgänger of Luigi made of lime-green goo. Left with no choice, Luigi begins his search for the missing elevator buttons in order to visit each of the hotel's fifteen floors.
As Luigi makes his search, he comes across and defeats a variety of different ghosts, including Hellen, while reclaiming the elevator buttons and rescuing the Toads and Mario from their portraits. After rescuing his brother, Luigi finds himself following Mario to the roof and finds Peach's portrait through his help. Upon freeing Peach, the group find King Boo waiting to deal with them. King Boo recaptures E. Gadd and the Toads in front of their faces, throwing them into a painting. King Boo swiftly imprisons everyone except for Luigi, who is saved at the last second by Polterpup. Luigi finds himself forced to defeat King Boo once again, aided by Gooigi. During the battle, an increasingly livid King Boo enlarges the portrait 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 due to the battle. After freeing his friends from the portrait, the ghosts Luigi captured are released and slowly return to being friendly after King Boo's control over them fades away after the large gem from his crown vanishes. E. Gadd, seeing them upset that the hotel was destroyed, elects for the group to build a new hotel, whereupon Luigi and his friends depart after its grand reopening. Depending on how many coins Luigi collected, the hotel will be a different size. Luigi then returns to sleeping on the bus.
Development
Luigi's Mansion 3 is developed by Next Level Games, who previously developed Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, and is published by Nintendo. The game was originally planned as a Wii U title, with early prototypes introducing the Slam and Burst as new abilities; however, development started for the Nintendo Switch system in earnest following the completion of Next Level Games' . The change in setting from a mansion to a hotel was done so that players could have "three-dimensional exploration" with Kensuke Tanabe explaining that they "wanted players to be able to visualize how the hotel was set up". Despite the new setting, the team deliberately made the choice for some of the settings to "make it as unexpected and even un-hotel-like as possible". The team noted that as long as they connected the settings through a traditional hotel setup they could get away with the diverse settings. Some features that were previously present in or planned for the Nintendo 3DS remake of the original Luigi's Mansion were expanded on for the third installment, such as same screen local co-op play and the aforementioned new abilities.Luigi's Mansion 3 was announced during a Nintendo Direct presentation on September 13, 2018, with the title at the time being listed as tentative and planned for release in 2019. Prior to the game's formal announcement, Luigi's new gadget, the Poltergust G-00, was shown for the first time in the August 2018 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Nintendo Direct as part of the trailer announcing Castlevania content for the game. The Poltergust G-00 was also incorporated into Luigi's moveset, now being able to grab opponents from a distance with the Suction Shot and pull opponents in with it for his Final Smash.
Luigi's Mansion 3 was a part of Nintendo's E3 2019 showcase, with a new trailer highlighting the premise, gameplay mechanics, and game modes, including online multiplayer. A demo was also made available to play on the show floor. Nintendo of America's Nate Bihldorff stated that the game's primary campaign would be longer than that of Dark Moon. He also stated that the finalized title was changed to a simple number "3" rather than a subtitle because the time gap between the second and third installments was much shorter to the point of calling the series an established franchise, as opposed to the 12-year gap between the first and second installments. A new trailer shown during the September 4, 2019 Nintendo Direct showcased some areas of the hotel setting and debuted the ScreamPark, a new party-oriented game mode for up to eight players on a single console. Luigi's Mansion 3 was released on October 31, 2019.
Expansions to the multiplayer modes via downloadable content were announced in December 2019 and will roll out its contents in two waves. DLC Pack 1 was released on March 3, 2020, with DLC Pack 2 planned for release sometime before May 2020.