Luigi’s Mansion 3

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a 2019 action-adventure video game developed by Next Level Games and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. It is the third installment in the Luigi’s Mansion series, following Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (2013). The game sees players taking on the role of Luigi who must explore a hotel run by ghosts and save Mario and the others after they are tricked into visiting it for a vacation by King Boo. 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 of Luigi known as Gooigi, and expanded multiplayer functionality that allows for players to engage in cooperative and competitive gameplay both locally and online. The game received positive reviews from critics and was nominated for several awards, winning the award for “Best Family Game” at The Game Awards 2019. The game has sold 14.25 million copies as of March 2024.

The Mario Bros. have been invited to The Last Resort, a luxurious high-rise and Art Deco-styled hotel nestled in a mountainside area, and decide to visit it for a vacation, accompanied by Princess Peach, Luigi’s pet ghost dog Polterpup and a trio of Toads that serve as the former’s entourage. After arriving and settling in, Luigi wakes up during the night to find the hotel transfigured to appear haunted and the others missing. He discovers that the hotel’s ghostly owner, Hellen Gravely, lured the group there as part of a trap by King Boo, whom she idolizes and had freed from Professor E. Gadd’s custody after his recapture in the previous game.

King Boo announces his plot to take revenge on Luigi and his friends for his past defeats by imprisoning them in portraits, but Luigi narrowly escapes to the basement through a laundry chute. With the help of Polterpup, who also avoided capture, Luigi explores the basement and comes across E. Gadd’s car in The Last Resort’s parking garage and finds his latest Poltergust inside it. Using the device, Luigi follows Polterpup to the lobby and finds that the professor was also captured. 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 Strobulb, snag them with his Poltergust, and weaken their health down to zero in order to capture them. In the single-player story mode, players explore a large hotel with seventeen floors – each floor consists of a different theme and atmosphere, as well as a variety of ghosts, including a boss ghost that the player must defeat. Some of the first floors, such as Floor 2, do not have a theme.

Unlike the story mode of Dark Moon, which focused on pre-defined mission structure of gameplay across several areas, 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. 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 (green, purple, orange or blue) of Luigi or Gooigi. ScareScraper focuses on cooperative teamwork between players to clear out each of the five or ten 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 inflatables to collect coins that drop in a pool, avoiding mines that are dropped as well or lose the coins in their possession and pop the inflatable making them need to blow another one up allowing their opponents to steal them.