It’s fitting that Luigi’s Mansion should have such a preoccupation with mirrors, given the game’s determination to invert practically all the traditions people expect from a Mario Bros title.

In almost every room of this haunted house, you’ll come across some variation on a reflective surface, flipping the environment back to front, as the game itself turns your preconceptions on their heads. To put it more clearly, try all you want to but you won’t be able to jump in Luigi’s Mansion.

In fact, that first stab at the A button will give you nothing more than the sound of Luigi shouting his brother’s name – calling out to a familiar hero in a world in which nothing works quite the way it used to any more.

Luigi’s Mansion may seem like a mirror-world twin to the subsequent instalment, Super Mario Sunshine, both sharing backpack gimmicks, a preoccupation with cleaning and an uncharacteristic focus on a more realistic setting (and it says a lot about the Mushroom Kingdom that you can call ghost houses and ice-cream-covered islands realistic).

In reality, however, things quickly become more complicated. The story may be typically light (the brothers win a mansion in a competition they didn’t enter, and Mario subsequently disappears) but the main gameplay sees your usual exploration severely curtailed, as Luigi is tasked with uncovering his brother’s whereabouts by clearing a single building of ghosts, one room at a time, with only a Poltergust 3000 for help.

Despite this limited agenda, Luigi’s Mansion remains a surprising game, its most fundamental mystery – why Luigi? – revealing the workings of the Mario machine in an entirely unexpected light. While it could hardly be clearer that the game wants you to restore order to a chaotic world – it does, after all, present you with a vacuum cleaner at the outset – its deeper message might be that even the greatest template has limitations, and even the tidiest rule set needs to be thrown in the air every now and then.

Initially, the focus on Luigi doesn’t seem terribly promising. Mario may have been designed by necessity and limitations – his moustache added to turn a fuzzy clump of pixels into a recognisable face, his hat to avoid animating hair – but Luigi blinked into existence entirely accidentally. Mario’s brother was originally nothing more than a re-skinned sprite to provide an avatar for Player Two, and in the years that followed very little else was added. Luigi was the thinner one, and had a slightly different jump at times, but he remained a cipher, someone you most often ended up with when you didn’t pick Mario in time. The idea of basing an entire game around him was a little like writing a novel about the red Koopa Troopa.

And the choice of hero wasn’t to be the only shock in store. Luigi’s Mansion also does away with years of accrued tradition, ditching platforming, the hub structure of Mario 64, and the bright, sunny environments the audience was used to. The result is a Mario Bros game unlike any before or since: Luigi’s adventure is quick to head into some very unexpected territory.