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?

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.

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.

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.

Despite it's tiring level reuse, clunky menu and lack of tension later in the game, Eternal Darkness is pretty great. It's extremely flavourful and unique construction sets it apart from so many other horror games, even to this day. It's cosmic horror influences are captured wonderfully, both thematically and mechanically. Taking control of so many characters throughout the history of humanity, and the story managing to balance and tie them so well together was a real treat. The gameplay has also aged surprisingly well, with fluid controls and a limb dismemberment system that predates Dead Space's popularization of it. Such a shame that Eternal Darkness wasn't more successful and Silicon Knights later imploded in on itself, the game deserved so much better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the best horror games of all time. Although a GameCube classic it's kind of forgotten today which is a real crime.
Where do I start?
A fantastic story inspired by Cthulhu Mythos (basically a Cthulhu game in everything but the name)? Different time periods? Superb voice dialogue? Great graphics? Interesting combat where you can target individual body parts? And of course the sanity system that made you feel insane? From walking on the ceiling to deleting your save files!
This game has everything. Simply fantastic.

This game is pretty famous for its funny sanity effects, and coming into this i was expecting just to be exploring a creepy luigis mansion with those happening. What I was not expecting was to be meandering around the mansion for about 12 minutes before being thrown back in time into a damn Pontius Pilate wanna be and unlocking the ancient powers of a lovecraftian god. The game then takes you on a whirlwind of human history with over a dozen characters throughout time fighting to stop this god, knowingly or not. The sanity effects are such a cool mechanic layered over an already very cool game, and i am surprised there's never been a game since that's tried to emulate it. Lots of them caught me super off guard like the random exploding head, walking into a room that's upside down, and the flash cut to "Find out what happens in the sequel" screen. Even past the main gimmick of the sanity effects it is just very well done survival horror game, and having enemies drain sanity until you kill them to get it back is a great system of forcing the player to interact with the video game, but also let you easily get your sanity down if you want to see more of the funny jumpscares.

I honestly believe this game doesn’t receive all the attention it deserves. Probably, it’s because it was launched on GmaeCube and not on more popular PlayStation/Xbox. The game, however, is one of the best titles of its generation. The way the story is served is unique. I like how it embraces many epochs and shows how evil plans can be prepared over the centuries. The fighting mechanics are pretty funny at first. Chopping the enemies' heads and hands entertains you for a few first hours but then you either run towards the enemies to get to the interest point faster or smash them into heads like it’s Morrowind. Focusing on enemies is kinda of laggy imo, and it’s another reason to not partake in fights. Also, it destroys the shooting mechanics. Shooting is not so “juicy” in this game, so I prefer melee combat. The camera angles are pretty disturbing as well. There’s a semi-fixed camera in this game and sometimes you just can’t see your enemies. Wrapping up, I’d recommend this game to everybody interested in 2000’s videogames. It’s 4/5 from me.