Do Resident Evil and Silent Hill seems tame to you? Now there is Fatal Frame for you to deal with.
First change, and a pleasant one, that instead of western nightmares and zombies, Fatal Frame takes its monster inspiration from the Japanese movies like Ring, The Grudge and others - and if you only saw US versions of the movies and not the original Japanese ones, you do not know what these movies are about...yet, as you can repair it by playing Fatal Frame. The game does a very good job of exploiting classic Japanese mythology and modern Japanese horror movie-based plots and scenes, so if you are fun of such things, this game is a must have. Story of the game is both dark and deep, full of forbidden rituals, revenge-seeking souls and other things. All parts of the mansion and all of ghosts are also beautifully crafted, and can be sometimes really surprising in their appearance. You an expect ghost at every corner and none come, but right at the moment where you let your guard down and relax, some nasty hungry soul will appear right at the place you just searched and deemed secure. Also - as all enemies are ghost of various sorts - they have special abilities of its own, including ranged attacks, surprising teleportation, extra fast movement and of course, walls behind your back does not guarantee safety this time around. As every child knows, ghost can walk - or sometimes glide - right through practically anything, attacking sometimes from places which would serve just as a distant background in any other game.
Which takes us to the other main difference from Resident Evil and similar games. Maybe you wonder at this point, how can you actually kill a ghost? That you can shoot zombies head out with a shotgun makes sense, and even big fat ugly mutated beast must be logically be at least slowed down by good old rocket launcher, but ghost? I mean, there is nothing physical to shoot on it right?
Right. That is the point. No shotguns, rocket launchers, not even a baseball bat or wood plank from a fence. No weapons at all actually. Only thing your character, shy girl with some psychic powers named Miku Hinasaki, which searches the mansion for her lost brother, have at her disposal is old photo-camera. So basically this time you are locked in haunted mansion full of ghost trying to kill you in various manners and possibly sacrifice you in various ancient rituals along the way trying not only to survive and find your brother, but to solve mystery of the mansion as well, armed only with camera, and all you can do with all these ghost (not all of them are hostile, but you need to catch photos of the non-hostile as well if possible) is do their photos.
To make it easier, your camera is not an ordinary camera, and really can harm ghosts, and also serves as a solution to many puzzles, as it generally lets you see the unseen. It can be also upgraded in several ways and you can learn it some special kinds of attacks as well, so it can for example freeze your enemy, make it more visible (for the ghost which tends to disappear to often, as you can not catch them if they are not visible) or automatically locate them, which is also very useful for advanced enemies. How much harm will you do to the ghost will also depend on the moment when you will shoot them, the best shoot possible is named Fatal Frame, thus the name of the entire game. The window of opportunity for such shot is really short however, and usually the opportunity to do it is right before it strikes you, so failed shot means that they will hit you - and in the case of Fatal Frame, almost any hit really hurts. In some cases one hit can kill you entirely, and you can save only at savepoints as is usual with this kind of games, so you need to be careful. And in some cases, you can not harm the ghost at all, and only thing you can do is run in panic - as the agility of the Miku is not very high, so do not count much on outmaneuvering the enemy.
All in all, Fatal Frame is very atmospheric and immersive game, certainly much scarier than any of Resident Evil or Silent Hill games. Although it is of course only the alteration of the classic formula in new environment, and does not bring much new to the genre aside of the need to depend on only one "weapon" and unique enemies, if you are fan of the genre, you should definitely not miss it.