A Ghost Hunt Best Shared – But Not Online
Luigi’s Mansion 4 arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 with polished ghost-catching mechanics, a sprawling haunted hotel setting, and the kind of co-op mode that made its predecessor so replayable. What it did not arrive with is online multiplayer. In a year when most major Nintendo titles ship with at least some form of internet play, the absence is loud enough that it has become the dominant conversation around an otherwise well-received launch.
The game supports local co-op, letting a second player join as Gooigi – the gel-based doppelganger introduced in Luigi’s Mansion 3 – on the same couch or via local wireless. That is genuinely fun. But a growing number of buyers who expected to play with friends across different households are discovering that option simply does not exist, and the discovery is landing differently depending on who you ask.
What the Game Actually Offers
Local co-op in Luigi’s Mansion 4 works well. Gooigi can pass through grates, navigate water-free zones, and serve as a second vacuum when boss encounters escalate. The Switch 2’s hardware handles split-screen without noticeable performance drops, and the two-player dynamic adds real strategic texture to puzzle rooms. Nintendo built the mode with care, and it shows in how fluidly the game accommodates a second controller mid-session.
The ScreamPark mode – a collection of competitive and cooperative minigames – also returns with local support for up to eight players. It is arcade-style, deliberately shallow, and better suited to a party setting than extended play. For households with multiple Switch 2 units and players in the same room, there is a reasonable amount of multiplayer content here. The catch is that all of it requires physical proximity.
Why the Omission Stings in 2025
Nintendo’s relationship with online play has always been complicated. The company has historically prioritized local multiplayer as the “correct” way to play together, an approach that made cultural sense in the Game Boy and Wii eras but sits awkwardly now. Most of the people who grew up playing Nintendo games in the same living room have since moved to different cities, different countries, and different time zones.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 launched in 2019 and included online co-op through a later update, though that functionality was always limited and somewhat clunky. The expectation heading into Luigi’s Mansion 4 was that Nintendo would build on that foundation rather than abandon it. Instead, the feature appears to have been cut entirely from launch, with no confirmed plans to add it via update.
This matters more for a game like Luigi’s Mansion than it might for a single-player-focused title. The entire Gooigi mechanic is designed around partnership – coordinating abilities, splitting up to solve environmental puzzles, covering each other during high-pressure ghost encounters. Playing that mode alone, with the AI cycling Gooigi, works mechanically but lacks the spontaneous chaos that makes co-op worthwhile. The game is structurally built for two people. The infrastructure to connect two people remotely is just not there.
Nintendo Switch Online subscribers – who pay annually and have been told that membership enhances the multiplayer experience across the library – have particular reason to feel the gap. The service exists, the subscriber base exists, and the game design clearly anticipates a co-op partner. The missing link is a deliberate product decision, not a technical limitation.
The Community Split
Buyer sentiment around the launch is genuinely divided rather than uniformly negative. Players who have someone to play with locally – a partner, a sibling, a roommate – are largely having a good time. Reviews from that demographic tend to focus on the hotel’s inventive floor designs, the improved Poltergust mechanics, and the boss encounters, which are some of the most visually inventive in the series. For them, the online question is an abstract complaint about a feature they were not planning to use.
The frustration concentrates among buyers who purchased the game specifically expecting online co-op, often based on the series’ recent history. That group is vocal on social platforms and in Nintendo forums, and their complaints carry a specific quality: not general disappointment, but the sharper sting of a feature assumed present that turned out to be absent. Some have called it a regression. Others are waiting to see whether Nintendo follows the Luigi’s Mansion 3 playbook and patches online support in post-launch.
Nintendo’s Silence and What It Signals
Nintendo has not publicly addressed the omission or indicated whether online co-op is being considered as a future update. That silence is being read in two directions. Optimists point to the Luigi’s Mansion 3 precedent, where online functionality arrived months after launch and was welcomed even in its limited form. If the development team built the co-op architecture with eventual online support in mind, a patch remains plausible.
The less optimistic read is that Nintendo decided the feature was not worth the investment for this title – that the audience for Luigi’s Mansion skews younger and more local-play-oriented than franchises like Splatoon or Mario Kart, and that engineering stable online co-op for a story-driven single-player game with a secondary gel clone did not clear the cost-benefit threshold. That logic, if it is the actual logic, would mean online support is not coming at all.
What makes the situation particularly interesting is that Nintendo Switch 2 launched with improved networking hardware and a stated commitment to a stronger online offering than its predecessor. Luigi’s Mansion 4 is one of the console’s highest-profile launch window titles. Shipping it without online co-op is either an early signal that Nintendo’s online ambitions are still narrower than players hope, or it is a timed omission that will be corrected before the holiday window when the game’s audience will be at its largest. Neither Nintendo nor the game’s director has given any indication of which scenario is accurate, and that ambiguity is doing real work in shaping how launch buyers feel about the purchase they have already made.
