Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir

Tecmo's Project Zero - or Fatal Frame as it's known in North America - IP now appears to be co-owned by Nintendo, suggests a report.

Spooky 3DS AR horror due next month.

Spooky 3DS photography horror Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir will launch in the UK on 29th June, Nintendo has announced.

The Wii version of Fatal Frame 2, or Project Zero 2 in Europe, has also been dated. The surival horror also creeps to Wii on 29th June.

Spirit Camera is a spin-off from Tecmo Koei's Fatal Frame series and uses augmented-reality to set parts of the game in the real world.

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Do you remember that bit in the remake of The House on Haunted Hill when whatsit is wandering through the basement of the derelict mental asylum, and she comes upon a forgotten operating theatre? She has her camcorder with her - we all had them, back then - and through its viewing screen, the empty, dusty room is suddenly filled with sexy nurses and wonky old doctors. She lowers the screen and the room's empty. She raises it back up and the room's full. Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir is that scene, basically, with your 3DS standing in for the camcorder.

Photography and the supernatural have a venerable intertwined history anyway, of course, dating all the way back to those Victorian scamps and their cut-out fairies, brought to life by hatpins and Box Brownies. As far as video games are concerned, it's a connection that the Fatal Frame series has been very happy to capitalise on. Spirit Camera's a spin-off of sorts: an AR-powered oddity that looks to be as creepy as it is slight.

The core of the package comes with story mode, which tells the strange tale of a spooky old notebook and an evil crone who likes to steal people's faces. The narrative is refreshingly nasty, as it happens, and it unfolds as you page through a short AR pamphlet that accompanies the game, following on-screen instructions that tell you where to point your 3DS camera as you go.

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