We heard about Bowser being involved from the fortune teller, but I didn’t expect this.
I thought the ending took place on the roof, rather than inside a painting that takes us to a slightly warped version of the roof, so I was a little confused when the roof had barely anything up there. Yes, there was passage into the Sealed Room (which is just a treasure room), but otherwise it was pretty unremarkable. And while I remembered Bowser being involved, I didn’t remember exactly how.
You might be wondering if I’ve ever played a Luigi’s Mansion game before, since they’re all on very different consoles. The answer is Yes: I’ve played the first hour or so of Luigi’s Mansion 3. Since all three are now available to play, I’ll be able to do all three. The setup for my polls is: I’ve split the Mario series into related games and categories. Each poll asks which category to stream, and I’ll play oldest title in that category that I’ve yet to stream. As a result, many of the games that are up for appearing are pretty old, but also, repeatedly choosing a category will rapidly move towards more modern games. It’s up to my viewers how quickly we move through these. (If it’s a tie, I’ll just pick the oldest game available across the tied categories.)
Here’s my one-paragraph review of the game as a whole: it’s a fun and relatively fair action-puzzle game. While many puzzle games are 2D boards where you move things around, this is certainly in a different style, but it’s a puzzle game nonetheless. The puzzles are lighter in difficulty than many of the genre can be, but that’s perfectly fine by me, because I’m not the best at puzzles in the first place! I enjoy such challenges but pure puzzle games are usually way too difficult for me. However, the Bowser fight was less “puzzle” and more “very unfair action boss”. It does not use any mechanics you haven’t seen before: we had several portrait ghosts taken down by sucking up orbs and throwing them at the ghost, including the first boss ghost. However, the orbs were much easier to pick up and didn’t explode and hurt you if you held them for too long. And “too long” was often before Bowser was even vulnerable! It added up to a rather unfair final encounter, so I’m glad I got to use a savestate to jump back to the start of the fight whenever I lost.