Ghastly Multiplication: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny

This paper offers a close-play and close-reading analysis of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, a 2003 PlayStation 2 survival horror game developed by Tecmo, to argue that the videogame uncanny is produced not merely by borrowing literary or filmic techniques but through the interplay of operational demands and affective experience. The authors define the uncanny as the familiar made unfamiliar and examine how the game's mechanics, including its camera-based combat, shifts between third-person and first-person perspectives, and the restriction of player movement during camera mode, generate a distinctly ludic form of this effect. Drawing on Freud, Jentsch, Mori's uncanny valley, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the authors interpret the game's central avatar, the twin sisters Mio and Mayu, as doubles whose relationship mirrors the player's own uncertain identification with the avatar.

The analysis centers on the game's recurring motif of twins and the Crimson Sacrifice ritual, in which one twin kills the other, and on the mechanism of compulsive repetition, through which reloading saves, replaying stages, and pursuing alternate endings delegate the drive to repeat trauma partly to the player. The authors contend that the player's desire to complete the game represses the uncanny in the service of operational success, only for it to resurface as anxiety about responsibility for the avatar's fate. They also observe that the game often shifts control of the avatar to the software during cutscenes and moments of heightened tension, intensifying the sense of automaton-like agency. The paper's conclusions emphasize that play and reading are intertwined and simultaneous in the experience of the game, so that the uncanny cannot be understood solely through the conventions of the survival horror genre or through transmedia comparison with film and literature.