Luigi's Mansion

Luigi's Mansion launched alongside the GameCube in 2001 and put the perpetually nervous Luigi in the spotlight instead of Mario. After winning a mansion he never entered a contest for, Luigi finds it crawling with ghosts and must explore it armed with a flashlight and the Poltergust vacuum, which first stuns spirits with light before sucking them into its tank. He's assisted by the eccentric Professor E. Gadd, who built the vacuum and whose lab is where Luigi stores every captured spirit.

The series is defined by its blend of horror atmosphere and slapstick comedy - Luigi trembles with fear while players solve room-by-room puzzles, shake furniture loose, hunt for hidden treasure and expose ghosts by lighting them up and stripping away their cover. The recurring antagonist is King Boo, a fixture of the wider Mario universe and the series' defining rival.

A sequel took over a decade to arrive: Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (2013) on 3DS expanded the format across several smaller mansions with their own missions and added the cooperative ScareScraper mode, pitting players together against mounting waves of ghosts. Luigi's Mansion 3 (2019) on Switch relocated the action to the sinister Last Resort hotel and introduced Gooigi, a gelatinous double controlled by a second player who can slip through grates and spikes. The original game also received a Nintendo 3DS remake (2018) with upgraded visuals and new cooperative content.

The series remains one of the few where Luigi is the true star, and it continues to charm players with family-friendly scares, clever use of its environments and increasingly elaborate puzzles. Critics and players alike praise its atmosphere and humour, which keep it one of the most distinctive branches of the Mario universe.