Eurogamer meets Luigi
Well, the man that does the voice, anyway.
Although Spring might not have arrived in any meaningful sense, I suspect a lot of people spent the long Easter weekend engaged in the traditional spring cleaning session nonetheless. I certainly did - vacuuming down cobwebs, removing stray pieces of wallpaper, and blinding ghosts with my flashlight.
Wait - that's Luigi's Mansion 2, isn't it?
No matter, if any game can capture the sense of pottering around the house on a bank holiday, tidying up odds and ends, it's this one. I'm surprised you don't see E. Gadd busting out the grout whitener, really. Luigi's Mansion 2 is a reminder that while games can be perfectly comfortable summoning chaos and depicting the end of the world, they're also pretty good at evoking a sense of domesticity and allowing you to revel in the guilty pleasure of restoring order to the environment.
Ghosts aside, the Luigi's Mansion adventures really are a little more domestic than most, in other words. They're the Mushroom Kingdom equivalent of a close-up, allowing you to slow down, to focus, to take in the scenery in greater detail as you chase spiders about and tackle the dusting. This sort of thing allows the performances and animation to take center stage, too - which is handy, really, as I spent last Thursday afternoon chatting to Charles Martinet, the legendary voice of Luigi - and his brother Mario - and the man who brought a wiry, almost electrical intensity to the role of Police Station Reporter #1 in the 1988 thriller The Dead Pool. We discuss all of this - apart from the stuff about The Dead Pool - below.