I've somehow managed to make it twenty whole years not really knowing what Eternal Darkness is beyond the basics: a survival horror game with "sanity effects" that kick in the more spooked your character is, though even then I had no concept of what those could be outside of tilting the screen at a dutch angle (which is a fancy way of saying "sideways.") As a result of being kept in the dark (har) for so long about the specific ways the sanity effects prey on the player, I actually got spooked a couple times, though in ways that were perhaps made more unique to the time and setting I experienced them in.

The first was when the game simulated a CRT shutting off. This tricked me only for a moment, but in that flash I thought "oh no, it took me forever to find this CRT, I can't go hunting for another one." A half second later I realized the set was still humming and all was well, but the thought of my TV breaking and having to scour the Facebook marketplace for a replacement put the fear of God in me.

A short while later I wrapped up the game's second chapter when it transitioned to a screen thanking me for playing the demo of Eternal Darkness and to look forward to the full game. Anxiety crept over me as I was tricked into thinking I just wasted two hours playing an extended demo and would have to repeat all of that. After all, I'm playing this on a modded Wii and it's not like I've never accidentally downloaded an ISO of a demo version of a game before (in fact I did that with Rogue Squadron III while gathering games to put on the system.) Had I experienced this back in 2002 I wouldn't have doubted myself for a second, I'd have a genuine disc and box assuring me that I did in fact have the full game, but in 2022 Eternal Darkness' little demo and CRT fake outs take on new life.

I also found the game's structure to be really interesting. Rather than controlling one character in a confined location, you're treated to 11 survival horror vignettes, with protagonist Alex Roivas' investigation into her grandfather's death serving as a framing device. Each chapter features a different character, and each character shares the same dungeon with at least two others. It's fun to see how these locations slowly open up over time, becoming more involved and deadly the closer you get to the modern day. Spells introduce another unique twist on the standard survival horror formula, requiring you to enchant items with the right elements both to solve puzzles and get an edge on enemies, all while preserving your sanity.

A consequence of this segmented design is that progression feels pretty linear. Each chapter has a well telegraphed route through it with not much room for experimentation, and puzzles aren't always given enough room to unfold. Later chapters also start to drag as there's a whole lot of running back and forth to ferry items over great distances. While this is a staple of survival horror games, Eternal Darkness' linear design means running down straight hallways with little deviation, and after a while it starts to feel like it's just wasting your time. This is especially bad during a late game segment where you're tasked with activating a teleportation device. You have to jump through a portal and activate a rune, then survive a short combat encounter before dragging your ass back to the teleporter. You repeat this nine times, and a couple chapters later you get to do the whole process over again. It sucks.

Combat is also a bit wonky, requiring you to hold the right trigger and move the analog stick to select body parts to target. Removing specific body parts will disable enemies in unique ways, with different enemies having different body parts you need to prioritize. This is a really interesting system on paper, but in practice it just feels off. You could excuse this by saying it's similar to tank controls, it's not meant to feel good because that's what builds tension. I've made this argument for poor design choices in survival horror games before, but even I know that after a while the excuse stretches thin and is just used to mask things that are shitty without being purposefully so. In this case, I think it's just another example of the Gamecube's clown controller making things feel like crap, and jankiness that's more generally characteristic of this era of games.

My gripes aside, I think Eternal Darkness holds up. I was surprised by the way the game was able to get to me, and I think its structure is pretty unique. Reminds me a little of Clock Tower 3, and I think more survival horror games should be like Clock Tower 3. Just a shame what happened to Silicon Knights, virtually blowing their own legs off at the kneecaps trying to go after Epic Games like that. But, hey, at least you can get Too Human for free now! You can't beat free...

WIKTOBER LOG #0022 - ETERNAL DARKNESS: SANITY'S REQIUEM

This pretends to be a horror game, but it's actually Epic Mickey. I love the concept of the historic protagonists and the Eternal Champion, but the lineup feels at times more like the cast of Night at the Museum than a historical Epic (as in, the genre, not the Epic Games company that would later murder this developer in self defense).

This game is basically some people attempting to make a Resident Evil clone after playing the Psycho Mantis fight in MGS. That's cool. Problem: If you have ever played a videogame before, and don't deliberately try to keep low sanity, you will not see Psycho Mantis appear, and Psycho Mantis is worth about half the stars in any rating of this game.

It's quite a slog after a while because the combat and puzzles are insanely simple and you can basically just sprint past every enemy (you will do this once you've seen all 3 of the enemy types in the game - otherwise you are stupid and dumb). The only time I was scared in this game was when it tricked me into thinking I'd have to replay 20 minutes of it.

Despite this I still liked it. It's... cool... it's got... pizzazz... it might be... dare I say.. soul? Luckily for the NINTENDO SHITCU- the screen flashes white, a ringing fills your ears-ckily for the Gamecube, an interesting 7/10 is better than a bog-standard 9/10.

"AHHH IS THAT A .... F-F-F-F-FLOATING EYE ..!? THAT'S SO SCARY I'M GONNA GO INSANE"
What?

The concept behind Eternal Darkness is one I've found intriguing since first mention, and I can see glimpses of the fully realized vision in what was released, but the execution is quite unfortunately marred by what I consider poor pacing and balance issues. Still, I think many of its ideas should be remembered and retried and I would love to see some successor some day perfect the framework Silicon Knights established back in 2002.

This game gets a lot right on the fundamentals: the sound is moody and the use of stereo effects is laudable; the art is effective, cohesive, and distinct; the composition is creative and theme appropriate; and even more than all those the game actually feels nice to play while still clearly being an Adventure game first.

The narrative is probably one of the weaker parts but that seems to depend on how you feel about horror. Personally, I find Lovecraftian horror loses almost all of its distinct allure once you can stab your way back to sanity—so it was a bit of a wash for me. I'd say, "But at least it didn't get in the way of gameplay too much," but that's actually part of my biggest criticism of the game.

The game has too much (uninteresting) gameplay.

While the gameplay mechanics are polished and smooth, what they are not is balanced or deep. By 3-4 chapters into the 12 chapter affair you've seen all of the puzzles, spells, and enemy types you're going to be tackling with slight alterations of for 95% of the runtime.

There are a few suprises and new things later on, but by the time they show I had already become a well oiled machine on the combat and spell casting side, and the challenge faced by most of the puzzles was not in working out a solution but in even realizing the game had a puzzle for you in the first place. Often it would drop vague "hints" after 3-4 unrelated challenges since you briefly glimpsed whatever environment the hint pertained to, and so all that information would just get lost entirely.

The amount of unique content in the game isn't really the problem here, though, the problem I see is how it's doled out. Through the 11-12 hours you spend playing, hardly 5 minutes goes by without encountering yet-another-group-of-zombies. After chapter 3, resource management becomes entirely trivialized by the magic system. You almost always have access to an effective melee weapon for dealing with standard enemies, meaning all the special weapons are easily saved for the few powerful baddies. You see the same baddies so many times that there's no way you won't get efficient at killing them.

What is horrifying is often correlated to what is unknown, and Eternal Darkness will not let things stay unknown. You will pass through the trapped room until you're memorized the layout. You will fight the big boi until you've got a perfect kill routine. You will solve Red/Green/Blue puzzles like you're studying for a programming interview.

I haven't really meant to rag on the game this much. I'm fairly convinced my experience is largely a matter of my perspective on the genre, but I think I'm just really upset at how pointless the "Sanity" mechanic ended up being.

It seems so promising early on, but then they do two horrible, horrible things to it: directly tie it to health so you're pressured into keeping it topped off since it drains so quickly; and make it trivial to top off with a cheap spell (even mid fight if you're quick). I can count on one hand the number of times I remember seeing the "Insanity Events" this game is lauded for. Three of them were before chapter 3.

If there was a difficulty option, I swear I picked Hard but now I feel unsure.

I wish I had more to say about the game, but sadly I feel like I experienced it as one would a play from backstage. I can see the actors putting in a lot of effort that could make a fun show, but I definitely did not experience the vision as intended.

Honestly, this is one of my favourite games ever and I think a lot of people chalk this one up as being "Resident Evil but with a sanity meter or limb targeting etc." - but really there's very much something distinctive here with what's being down, which is about a Lovecraftian horror and spinning a meager survival horror game into some sort of epic tome of sorts and I really dug it.

There's a strange, fascinating appeal I got with this game by playing it on a shitty 90s CRT screen - and I really liked just how much attention was drawn towards the atmosphere in this one. Of course, there's the famous sanity effects (which include things up to turning your TV screen off or pretending that your memory card is corrupt) but it's surprising just how much they add to this creepy vibe where basically anything can go wrong - and I remember in particular people terrified of the whining screams that occur when your sanity becomes really low, and some of the genuinely terrifying screamer events.

But then it's also spooky and atmospheric in its own right, especially with how so much of it takes places of sanctuary and flips them on their head into something terrifying - places like the church and the mansion will get burnt into your brain when you play this game long enough, only that it gets twisted every so often. Even something as silly as the 'memory card failing', I think, is meant as a sneaky way of forcing you to question what you are seeing rather than it being presented as this incredibly horrifying thing.

That, and I think the story here is genuinely intriguing - where it's all about this massive cosmic battle spanning many millennia, with the main story gimmick being a college student Alex Rovias, reading through all of these historical documents - and I especially liked just how much attention is drawn towards all these different moods and atmospheres of these different eras, and also just how much the main villain, at heart, is presented as this giant egotistic bastard who is just after power at whatever costs after something corrupted him. Very much one of the things this game goes for is criticising the theme of power, notably with how noble knights, bishops and priests become corrupted or evil in ways other people do not take account of - or with more mundane examples of police detectives who don't exactly follow through on their jobs, which jumpstarts the main plot of the game.

And also the voice acting in this game is superb, from the likes of people like Richard Doyle, Jennifer Hale, Earl Boen and narrated by Neil Dickson (who has a distinct James Mason type voice and makes the most mundane things imaginable sound fascinating), and it's one of those things where you get the sense of the characters being living, breathing people and also the extra effort to flesh out the characters so they don't just seem like stock archetypes.

It's very much a horror game, but then I also think the humour here is very much part of the point - where there's a central absurdity behind this game, but then it's also genuinely terrifying as much as it is intriguing with just how it plays with horror conventions where there's much more to it than you'd expect. I really dug this game, and it's honestly something that I'd consider to be perfect.

What a fantastic game, that truly is an underrated little gem, and something that has never been attempted again.

There's so many cool little things about this game, I could type about it for hours. It's not without its issues which I'll get too, but the positives totally outweigh the negatives here.

First of all the atmosphere is great, the story is interesting, and the fact that you play as 11 different characters is super unique and cool. Each characters section plays a little bit different, and you're always left with something fresh in this 10+ hour game. This unfortunately leads me to one of my biggest complaints, as cool as the story is, the voice acting is god awful. Which shouldn't be a surprise for 2002, but it's super campy and 100% takes me out of the game which is unfortunate for such a great game otherwise.

The sanity meter is the star of the show here, and although it becomes really easy to raise it back up late game, you almost don't want too to see what twisted stuff they throw at you, and I never had stuff repeat on my playthrough either. Such an original awesome idea for a horror game, that's truly wild no one else has tried.

The map in this game sucks, another one of my big complaints, its practically useless, but otherwise the gameplay holds up pretty darn well. It's got a little jank to it but all things considered, I think it plays pretty darn good.

This is just such an awesome game, and one of the better horror games I've played in sometime. If you want something truly unique, you could do much much worse than Eternal Darkness. What a BANGER.

Eternal Darkness is a psychological and survival horror game that
was, surprisingly at the time, published by Nintendo to check the box of providing an exclusive adult game for its otherwise family-friendly console.
It started its development for the N64 but thankfully made its way to the GameCube, allowing the game to have better graphics and presentation.

The story is very good, spanning centuries during different key periods of making including the Roman Empire period, the Middle Ages, Gulf War, all the way to the present and deals with stories found within the Tome of Darkness.

Graphics and sound were very good for the time but the standout element from this game is the gameplay which combines classic survival horror combat with puzzle solving as well as fourth-wall-breaking sections triggered by the sanity meter. Some of these effects were great and actually caught me off guard at the time when I played the game.

In order to get the true ending, the game had to be finished three times and while the game largely remained the same, some of the magick summons were different.

Eternal Darkness is definitely a true hidden gem for the GameCube and I'm glad I was able to experience this game when it first came out to fully enjoy and grasp the psychological effects within the game. For horror fans, this is a must play due to the unique gameplay and presentation style.

How is this game simultaneously too hard and too easy? On the one hand there were fights/parts, that made me curse this game on the other hand I barely got to see the effects of the sanity systems, as my sanity was rarely low enough. When I actually had low sanity for a while the stuff that happend was really nice, at least most of the time. Makes the whole thing a little gimmicky sadly...
The atmosphere was really cool, most of the time that is, when the little story vignettes weren't too bland (which only like 3(?) were). Most of them were pretty cool.

All in all I think this is quite the ambitious title and now that the patent is finally expiring maybe some developer will pick the idea up again? I would really enjoy that

I hate that this game is stuck on an old console with no rerelease, remaster, or anything to keep it available today.

The story spans millenia, and is full of cosmic horror. If I had to criticize anything about it, I'd have to say the combat isn't all that great.

The game did an amazing job just messing with the player in ways that I hadn't seen at the time, except for maybe select portions of Metal Gear Solid.

L2AGO #12

If you had asked me 5 years ago to play Eternal Darkness, I would have immediately shot back with "hell no." Back then, I was convinced I would never get into this genre. After all, I thought the original Ghostbusters was a terrifying movie as a kid, I had trouble falling asleep after reading the Wikipedia description of Clock Tower, and my friends had to actually make a "horror comedy" theme night during the Halloween movie event catering to me in particular so I wouldn't feel left out. That said, I finally talked myself into trying the game out after running through several Silent Hill games + Resident Evil 2 not too long ago. And I was hooked.

I can't overemphasize how impressed I am by Eternal Darkness in how well it appeals to its target audience; it thrives off of this pulpy, B-movie, comic book & over the top cheap thrills horror, and every bit of its presentation seems out of place yet so fine tuned to achieve this feeling. Cartoon beat em up sound effects whenever you slash someone with a sword? Check. Shitty low-budget movie caption font for subtitles and exposition combined with overly earnest and serious narration? Check. Purple gothic prose descriptions for every scene you can examine and the classic "non-choice" choose your own adventure book prompt asking if you want to progress the game or not? Check. (Hell, there's a dramatic reading of an Edgar Allen Poe quote every time you boot up the game.) Crash course obstacles of spinning axes and spike tiles? Check. The "FINISH HIM" prompt that plays when you've sapped an enemy out of all their health and can run through an exaggerated killing animation like hacking them to death with a giant sword or dropping a kukri like a parlor trick to send them back into the abyss? Check. The extents to which Eternal Darkness goes out to capture this low budget movie horror feel really impresses me, and kept me thoroughly engrossed in every detail of this game.

Now while I was very much soaking in all the little things here and there adding to the presentation, let us not forget this is a horror game despite its very cheesy aesthetics. That is not to say that the game isn't scary though; in fact it ends up being scary by keeping you just a little tense while pulling out its shock factor whenever it feels like it. See, the game works off of a Sanity meter, distorting your perception of reality within this B-movie horror world even further; as you get spotted by exaggerated carcasses and Mega Man bosses, your Sanity meter will take a hit and weird shit will start happening on screen, from discordant Gregorian chanting in the background to sudden door knock noises to bleeding walls. I won't spoil some of the more absurd sanity effects, but needless to say, many got quite a genuine shock from me while exploring the desolate and often run down environments. There's this genuine sense of powerlessness at times due to these effects and how the game loves to throw you in these situations where you're left bare without your excessive powers and weapons (a little more on that later) and have to run past scores of powerful enemies before you can fight back. It is true that you have to be playing a little suboptimal to experience some of the more harrowing effects, but this is easy enough to circumvent at least because the main protagonist, Alex, doesn't encounter any enemies in the mansion for a good while, and the Shield spell can at least mitigate damage taken while you have low sanity should you choose to go that path to get some more kicks.

So let's also talk a bit about the combat and gameplay. I've heard Eternal Darkness be compared a lot to Resident Evil due to its fixed camera angle presentation and 3rd person overworld combat + puzzles, though I think it more than distinguishes itself from Resident Evil in its exaggeration. This is because it has some wrinkles in its combat due to the targeting system; you can aim for specific body parts of enemies to systematically work through them. For example, aiming for the head does the most damage and will often leave the enemy blind and standing still, just attacking in place every now and then, while aiming for arms will make their attack animations a bit worse since they'll need a hand or two to deal damage. There's also a fantastic magic system; collect and combine runes to cast these fantastical spells like summoning monsters of your own or setting up a damage barrier, and sooner or later you'll feel that rush of power just plowing through the horrors with these flashy attacks. As a result, the game doesn't feel very difficult because there's this sense of overwhelming power just abusing spells and quickly taking down enemies with the generally precise targeting system, and that's perfectly okay; I think that just adds to how cheesy and over the top the game tries to present itself and it's a lot of fun treating it as this magical horror sandbox wizard simulator. And as I mentioned earlier, this sense of feeling overpowered just adds more contrast when your toys are taken away and you have to try and fend them off or evade the monsters without them.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story due to spoilers, but needless to say, despite how dumb and pulpy the narrative feels at times, I was genuinely engrossed in learning more about this winding tale that captured so many different moments in history caught up in the same supernatural disaster. There's four different locations across the game, and you visit them multiple times over different eras with different protagonists captured in the Tome of Eternal Darkness... think of it like a deconstructed Decameron, with Alex Roivas as the frame story reading from 2000 AD, only the stories all take place at different times and some of the people met horrible and exaggerated fates. While the main areas of the game are revisited chronologically (despite the Tome itself jumping back and forth through time), the game does a good enough job changing the different areas of the game to reflect its era to vary up the puzzles and atmosphere so you generally won't feel like you're going through the same motions. All the protagonists involved in the story have their own pieces to say, and it's a ton of fun speculating on how they fell into the narrative and everything that's going on around them. After all, it's Eternal Darkness and most of it is magical mumbo jumbo at the end of the day, but that's part of the fun; you don't need in-universe explanations for every single bit of lore and the writers recognize that and just go with the flow. Sometimes, the nonsense just works.

Now despite all my praise, there are some flaws here and there, mainly due to jank of this era or lack of polish in some sections. There was one section where I was trying to finish off a skeleton to regain sanity but because I was fighting next to a doorway, I ended up going through the doorway instead because the B button is used for both finishing off enemies and going through doors. One of the bosses near the mid to end "broke" because I decided to walk behind it and it decided to not become vulnerable for attack, and I did have to restart that fight. There are two sections at the end of the game that are pretty close to one another and more or less mirror the same gameplay strategy of dungeon crawling through many rooms, and that can get a bit excessive at times. There's also a room in the final dungeon that has a bit of a vague solution; I kept getting trapped in the room when it turns out you needed to sneak by the floor markings, and I honestly couldn't see any hints/clues alluding to this. I found one type of the enemies to be a bit of a bother, since they love wasting your time by teleporting you into a pocket dimension where you have to run to the end and can't cast spells; I think they more or less exist to give you a better excuse to use ranged weapons, since they can't be targeted by melee weapons. Oh, and there's a convenient "quick spell" binding option so you don't have to go back and menu spam every time you want to cast, but you will have to recreate spells in the menu every time you gain a power upgrade if you want to quick cast it. Fortunately, I found most of these moments to be fairly minor in the scope of the overall experience.

So this is a pretty easy recommendation from me; Eternal Darkness can definitely be an unsettling and at times, genuinely shocking game, but I think anyone who loves dumb, over the top, cheap horror thrills will absolutely get a kick out of this and it's a very fun game to play and stream with friends. I'm glad it seems to have picked up more steam in recent years and is getting the recognition it deserves; a shame that the proposed Kickstarters for a sequel never got off the ground running, but until then, we've at least got more cheap thrills at the source.

IT'S ALMOST WIKTOBER, EVERYBODY

This game is actually insane.

I didn't really enjoy it that much, but I can't help but feel like it innovated so hard, that no game fully compares to it to this day. I feel like the most apt comparison to this game is Siren on the PS2, but infinitely less clunky and difficult. The game started out on the N64, using a special 64MB cartridge. Nintendo literally did not comprehend how their hardware was being used so effectively. John Nintendo liked what he saw, and wanted this on the cube, BAD!

Immediately, the games baits you into thinking it is a RE1 clone. The game makes fun of you for thinking this, and immediately turns you into a Roman soldier. Controlling different characters at different points in time with different weapons and stat lines. This is absolutely huge.
The Cambodian foot princess? She's weak. The melvin? He's scared. That fat guy? He has no stamina. Have fun! I won't, but it's pretty cool, not gonna lie....

Additionally, this game features sanity effects. I found myself intentionally throwing in order to have jacked sanity, but it was incredibly worth it, permanent Dutch angle included. One effect genuinely got me, as I was menuing and my save file started deleting. I genuinely believed I did something wrong. There was also a cool moment in the monastery, where all of a sudden bombs were going off and there were medical tents everywhere. Later in the game, it turns out this effect was basically showing me the same level but at a future point in time. I would reckon the game is 20% worse if you never experience the majority of them. This is the most talked about concept for this game, and for good reason. This system needs to be stolen and utilized more (no - not amnesia).

The magic is a bit...suspicious.. I don't like the rune gathering system, nor the spell creating system which needs done 3 times per run per spell, nor the use of spells for certain puzzles. At some point very early on, you have near infinite access to health, sanity, and magic - along with every melee weapon being powerful and more ammo than I could ever use. This eliminates many aspects that I enjoy about survival horror, making this game more an exercise of puzzle solving and story telling than surviving. This also effectively leads me to say that I don't really enjoy this game as a horror game, despite how horrific the beats in the story can be.

Also, fuck you for making me do the tower thing twice. I did not like these.

I don't think it lived up to any hype I had for it, and yet I still feel like this is a huge feat for the time and possibly to this day.

One of the few veins of horror that has yet to be strip-mined to feed the YouTube indie horror machine, due almost entirely to its narrative structure and ambition: a millennia-spanning story told in a dozen segments, each featuring its own protagonist. To this base, add Resident Evil-ish third-person action and light puzzles, melee and ranged combat, a magic system, enough B-movie violence to get an M rating, and the headliner: a “sanity system” where your character’s mental faculties were reflected by in-game, fourth-wall-breaking hallucinations.

At first glance, this sounds like something a JRPG developer with a coke habit would describe as “a little too much.” That the combined forces of Silicon Knights and Nintendo would make a solid game out of all of this is bonkers. (Much like Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles, Nintendo-dispatched designers were responsible for significant improvements on the initial efforts.)

So what keeps this shambling beast together for 12 hours? Most of the game’s biggest strengths flow from the sheer bravado and execution of the narrative concept. The chapters take place across four different locations, and seeing all of the ways these places change over the centuries keeps things very grounded – you’ll traverse a certain room in a Gothic cathedral in one segment and will immediately recognize it when you return to the same room in a segment set in the same cathedral several centuries later. There’s an alchemy here that other epoch-spanning stories can’t quite pull off; an oddly quotidian take on time travel. And a steady drip of horror-movie schlock, purposely overwrought Lovecraftian prose, and small doses of wry humor prevent the whole thing from getting too heavy.

Another strength is the multiple protagonists. Most of them only take the stage for a single segment, so by necessity, characterization sprawls outside of writing choices. Each controllable character has different stats based on their background – a psychologist has a firm grip on sanity compared to a journalist covering the first World War scant miles from the horrors of the trenches. Even animations contain plenty of personality: an Indiana Jones-esque archaeologist finishes off zombies with a stylish toss of his blade, while an out-of-his-depth Franciscan monk needs three clumsy blows to crush an undead spine. Each character feels different enough that there’s a basic sense of propulsion from this alone.

That said, other aspects of the game tend toward mediocrity. The combat system is serviceable but never really pushed in any interesting directions, and for all the Resident Evil inspiration, one or two more instances where players are asked to operate with limited resources would have gone a long way toward spicing things up. The pacing, while generally solid, isn’t flawless: while the final chapters wisely tend towards big guns and hordes of undead to ventilate, some mid- and late-game setpieces focused around investigation and exploration bring the proceedings to a screeching halt.

This is my personal Platonic ideal of a game to replay every year or two. It’s not too long, it does a few things extremely well, and the rest is mid enough to carry its own weight. It’s a shame that we won’t see another horror game like this for a long time, if ever: Nintendo has long abandoned their M-rated game strategy, Dennis Dyack badly mishandled multiple Kickstarters for a spiritual successor, and the horror genre itself has moved far away from big budgets, Lovecraft, and Resident Evil. These aren't necessarily bad things - I'm not trying to go Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud about this game. But someone else is going to figure out how to make a narrative this wild work in a video game again, and I'm excited as hell to see what that looks like. Until then, all I can do is hope that somewhere, the old gods yet stir in restless sleep, dreaming of a long-forgotten past when their names were still to be feared.

I loved this game as a kid. Visually it does not hold up today but the mechanics sure do.

My friend and I played this when we were much younger at a sleepover in his creepy basement which we swear was haunted. We got so scared that asked each other to turn off the GameCube and we huddle under the blankets. Eventually he was the hero and turned it off.

The insanity system, creepy voices, the different eras you got to play through, the environments at the time and the story were all so darn good. Great Halloween game to play! Wish this would get brought back to life one day.

The fact that a port, sequel, remaster, or remake does not exist is a terrible tragedy.

I love the narrative structure of the story. Centering around Alexandra Roivas in her grandfather's puzzle-filled, Metroidvania-style mansion, you gradually unlock new parts of the building and new chapters to play.

There's only 4-5 settings, but multiple revisits with different protagonists. They cleverly wrap around eachother throughout time, even encountering previous characters. The puzzle-solving works in tandem with your spellcraft a lot of the time, doubling up as tutorial. Discovering new spells is almost always useful and sequence-breaking to find more early is immensely satisfying.

Of course what everyone remembers is the sanity meter. It's such a brilliant idea that I wish had freer copyright limitations so I could see it implemented in new titles. The hallucinations, feints, and red herrings you and your hero encounter are always entertaining and baffling. My favorite is when a fly starts crawling across your HUD.

There are some shortcomings. The hacking combat and simplistic shooting wears a little thin. I also hate that they added a mechanic where your character runs out of breath after jogging for a while. The fatter characters run out nearly immediately and it really taxes the patience.

Fantastic voice-acting, sound design, and writing. It's not afraid to take bold twists and seep crawling, ancient, arcane fear into your psyche. It's not perfect, but I do love it.