It can be difficult for a survival horror game to make its mark on a genre already full of bloodthirsty zombies and narrow-beam flashlights. The original Fatal Frame managed to stand out because of a dark, strongly Japanese atmosphere and a unique gameplay mechanic that involved using a camera imbued with special powers to dispatch spirits to their eternal rest. At its core, Fatal Frame II doesn't deviate much from the formula established by its predecessor, as it treads the same ground of mysterious, ancient Japanese rituals and features innocent young girls pitted against perpetually unappeased ghosts. This Director's Cut version of the game builds upon last year's PS2 release, adding some new and enjoyable gameplay modes to both enhance your experience and test your skill, as well as a new ending, new extras, and more.

Crimson butterflies? You'll find out why they're around, what they are, and why they're terrible.

There are two protagonists in the game, the twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura, though you'll control Mio nearly all the time. After the twins become lost in a forest, they stumble upon a village that was supposed to have mysteriously disappeared on the night of a special festival. Unfortunately, their return path seems to have vanished, so the girls have no choice but to venture into the old, ruined village in search of help. They eventually find an old camera that seems to be able to take pictures of things that aren't really there, and soon enough they're caught up in the village's curse, reliving the terrible events that caused the quiet town to be forever shrouded in darkness.

You find the camera soon after arriving in town, and the device serves a wide range of purposes. It can be used to defeat hostile spirits, reveal clues, unseal doors held closed with spirit power, and catch hidden ghosts. It can even just take snapshots, if you like. You need film to take pictures, and, unlike in the first Fatal Frame, the camera thankfully comes preloaded with a mysteriously inexhaustible supply of low-grade film. This allows you to hoard the more-powerful film you obtain for combat, and snap pictures of clues and the like to your heart's content. Otherwise, the camera handles just as it did in the previous game. Pressing the B button causes you to enter a first-person camera view, and lining up things in the capture circle allows you to photograph hints or damage spirits. The capture circle glows green for hints and hidden spirits, and it glows red or orange when you have a lock on hostile spirits. You'll acquire upgrades for your camera throughout the course of the game, and to use them, you'll spend something called "spirit points," which you'll earn in battle and by taking special photos.

Take that, Casper!

Fighting ghosts is the real highlight of the game, as you square off against some pretty creepy foes. When you're close enough to a spirit to inflict damage, the capture circle in the camera view glows orange and starts to hum with static. The closer you get and the longer you maintain the lock, the more powerful your shot will be. There are certain moments when the capture circle turns red (called "shutter chances"). Shots taken at these times inflict heavy amounts of damage. Battle, therefore, becomes a matter of patience and a test of nerves, since you'll often have to allow a spirit to get dangerously close to you to get the best shot. To make things even more interesting, there's an instant within the shutter chance known as the "fatal frame." If you time this shot correctly, you'll not only inflict heavy damage and knock the ghost back a few paces, but you'll also have the opportunity to chain in a second photo for a combo.

That extra level of strategy and timing makes a photo shoot with a ghost all the more entertaining, and the only problem is that your foes are, in the great majority, slow-moving and highly predictable. Each spirit has its own attack pattern, so once you've seen a particular ghost a couple of times, hitting shutter chances while avoiding injury becomes a breeze. Camera upgrades, such as spirit tracking, stunning, and blasting, only skew things more in your favor, so when you factor in an item that allows you to avoid getting hit, battle can become decidedly unbalanced. Two of the different modes in the Director's Cut help alleviate this somewhat--they're the first-person (FPS) mode and the survival mode.