Autumn is one of my favorite times of year, and I love the Halloween atmosphere in particular. It has a mysterious, spooky vibe that just gets me excited. But it can be tough to find a video game to match the October ambiance that doesn’t also leave you feeling just a little icky. A lot of games go out of their way to induce inadvertent pee-puddle competitions by frightening and unnerving the player. If that’s your thing, great. But I only have so many pairs of pants, and I can’t waste them all on Resident Evil.

Luckily, Nintendo knows how to make a game with just the right balance of gags and goosebumps. Luigi’s Mansion 3, which was released last year on Nintendo Switch, is the perfect game to play with your family during the Halloween season. It’s delightfully creepy in all the right ways, and it’s full of humor to keep you smiling the whole way through.

Gallivanting with Ghosts

Luigi’s Mansion 3 has a simple, yet effective, plot. Mario, Luigi, Peach, and their Toad servants have been invited by Hellen Gravely to take a free vacation in her luxury hotel. Apparently foreshadowing is a foreign concept to the plumber gang, because that name should probably have raised some red flags. Regardless, once they’re checked in, everyone falls asleep almost instantly.

Luigi awakens later that night to discover his friends are missing and he is about to be trapped inside a painting by none other than the malevolent King Boo. Cue the dramatic music.

Turns out Hellen Gravely is a ghost (gasp!) and this hotel has more paranormal activity than the graveyard your older brother dared you to walk through when you were seven. After Luigi defeated and captured King Boo at the end of Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (spoiler alert if you haven’t played that one yet, I guess), Hellen Gravely found and released His Evilness. Gravely and King Boo have contrived to lure Luigi and company to the hotel to exact revenge. They’ll have to wait, though, because Luigi is really good at running away. He makes his escape to the basement via the trash chute, and the adventure begins!

In the basement, Luigi stumbles on the Poltergust G-00, a special vacuum designed by Professor E. Gadd to suck up ghosts. The Professor was trapped in the hotel by King Boo as well, so before you can get very far in the game, you have to rescue him. He outfits you with all of your gear and helps to guide you throughout the game.

The gameplay is really simple, but that’s part of what makes it so charming. The Poltergust has two special flashlights: one for stunning ghosts and one for revealing and breaking illusions (the Dark Light). You can also shoot plungers to stick to objects and use the vacuum function to suck things up. And, of course, E. Gadd has a new invention for you: Gooigi. Gooigi is a gooey doppelganger of Luigi that you can control. He has unique abilities, like being able to slip through pipes and bars and other things, but he has less health and dies if he touches water.

Using these tools, you make your way up 17 floors to find King Boo and your friends, battling ghosts as you go. You flash the ghosts with the strobe bulb to stun them, then you hoover them up with the vacuum attachment. You progress through the game by defeating the boss ghost of each floor and collecting an elevator button necessary to reach the next level. (As an aside, I don’t know why there are no stairs to connect the floors, but hopefully there won’t ever be a fire in this hotel.)

Each floor is totally unique, meaning that the game rarely gets stale. Not only are Luigi’s tools put to new uses on each floor, the themes and bosses are surprisingly diverse for a game with such a simple concept. Themes and bosses range from a haunted garden with a crazy old gardener to a renaissance fair floor with a Prince John type ghost to a pirate ship with a pirate shark boss. A pirate shark. How sick is that?

And none of the floors overstay their welcome. According to HowLongtoBeat.com, most players take about 13 hours to beat the game. That means that, unless you’re trying to make a completionist run, you’ll probably average less than an hour on each floor. That’s just enough time to appreciate the details, enjoy the creative puzzles and challenges, and then move on to the next level. None of the boss fights feel like they’re just rehashes of earlier battles. Almost everything feels fresh the whole way through.

I say almost everything because there are one or two things that didn’t stick the landing, in my opinion. The main one is Polterkitty, Gravely’s minion. She is just the worst. She’ll steal your elevator button just as you’re getting ready to go to the next floor and then make you chase her around the hotel to get it back. Her fights aren’t particularly interesting, and they’re kind of repetitive. She feels a bit like padding, and that was frustrating. Polterkitty always seemed to show up just when I was getting sucked into the gameplay (ba-dum-ts) and gearing up to go to the next level.

Luckily, those moments are infrequent. There are only a handful of them in the entire game, and most of the time you’re free to explore as much as you want. Even with the floors being as small as they are, there is a ton to do on each one. They’re almost as full of collectibles as they are ghosts, and it’s surprisingly satisfying to uncover the little secrets as you go. I had so much fun playing Luigi’s Mansion 3, and I think it’s a must play for this Halloween season.

Who to Play With

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is rated E for Everyone, and I’d say that’s accurate. Everyone can enjoy this game, and your family can even play it together. It’s designed to be played either solo or as a two-player experience where one of you controls Luigi and the other Gooigi. There is also a multiplayer DLC pack you can get, but we don’t have it…so we won’t say any more about that.

It’s definitely a family friendly game that anybody could play. But, if your kids are particularly susceptible to the heeby-jeebies, be aware that it is a game with a spooky atmosphere. Because it’s themed around capturing ghosts, it does have some creepy vibes to it, but nothing macabre. The eerie elements amount to creepy music, thematic set-pieces, and scores of playful ghosts that you have to capture. The scariest thing in the game is probably King Boo, but that’s only because he looks like I do when Geekling wakes me up at four in the morning on a Saturday.

All in all, nothing gets any more hair-raising than the lawn ornaments you might find in your neighborhood. We recommend it as one of the best games to play for your whole family, or even just by yourself, this Halloween season. You can grab a copy over on Amazon.