As with Dark Moon, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is being developed by Vancouver-based Next Level Games with supervision from Nintendo producers in Japan.
Luigi explores a hotel this time, not a mansion. He gets there one day via a bus that’s driven by Toad and also carries Mario, Peach and two other toads. Somehow those other characters go missing, the hotel’s elevator breaks, the place gets all spooky and Luigi has to explore each floor, vacuuming up ghosts while searching for the elevator’s missing buttons so he can go to other floors.
Dark Moon’s mission structure, which required players to start the same level multiple times to pursue various objectives, has been replaced with a more traditional free-flowing approach to exploration.
The game controls very similarly to Dark Moon. You see the game world from a so-called dollhouse perspective and walk Luigi through it, having him point his flashlight or vacuum at objects to interact with them. The vacuum, also known as the Poltergust, can suck or blow, which you’re using not just to vacuum ghosts, but to pull at curtains to reveal secrets or make propellers spin to raise or lower elevators, etc.
As in Dark Moon, you also have a Dark Light, which you can shine on invisible objects to make them appear.
New moves for this game include a burst, which entails Luigi pointing his vacuum at the floor and blasting it briefly so he hops straight up and things near him are blown away. You can also now shoot a plunger from the Poltergust, have it stick to something and then use the vacuum setting to tug at the plunger. I used this to pull open a wall that was obscuring a hidden collectible. I also used it to rip a shield that was being held by a ghost.