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.

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.

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.

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.

In some parts the writing sucks - everyone is just super trustworthy, especially early in the game or just straight up insane. In other, it's full of very precise item descriptions and occasional really good dialogs. It's weird... and that's not where the weirdness end. How the game plays with trolling the player when the protagonist is low on sanity (or just in scripted segments) is something else and it is FANTASTIC!

Gameplay-wise - it plays like an old horror games. Fixed camera perspectives, where you run picking up items figuring out what to use and where - I don't think it's particularly scary, despite having some scary visuals - but then, according to interviews - it never was meant to be. If it really was suppose to be a B-horror-like - it certainly nails that absurdity and it certainly makes sense why sometimes the characters react in some nonsensical ways. It apparently was also never supposed to end up being another survival horror - and in that sense, I can see that. As - I think - there is a single section in the game, where there is a chance you can end up in a state when it's impossible to progress because of you running out of items - and even then, you can still use "Damage Field" magick to work around it - totally unlike other horror games around that time. If it wasn't for how hard it sometimes gets to figure out what to use and where - this would a very accessible spin on early 2000 horror games... but sadly - the puzzles still will likely make you check internet at times, especially late in the game. And speaking of magic system - it's really good. It never got old to using the magic in the game, despite each spell slowing the progress and forcing me to wait for the spell to finish.

I can clearly see why so many people hold this game in such high regard. It's really solid and it aged for the most part gracefully.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nunca tuve la Gamecube y como amante del survival horror este es uno de los juegos que tenía más ganas de probar, y lo he terminado abandonando tras 4 o 5 horas y 5 capítulos terminados, por que esto no me llevaba a ninguna parte. Es cierto que hay que medirlo como hijo de su tiempo, pero es que este mismo año se publicaba, por ejemplo, REmake para esta misma consola, y el año siguiente Silent Hill en la menos potente PS2. Cierto que el estudio que lo hace tiene menos experiencia, pero cuenta con el apoyo decidido de Nintendo, así que tampoco creo que se pueda excusar como un juego de bajo presupuesto.
Tiene cosas muy buenas. Es un pionero y un avanzado a su tiempo en la gestión de la cordura, y los efectos de perderla son bastante originales a veces. Y el terror cósmico... es complicado. Pero es cierto que es, también por eso, muy poco habitual, y eso le da una cierta originalidad.
Pero es que el gameplay es terrible. El combate cuerpo a cuerpo es anodino, plano y aburrido, y el combate con armas es aún menos satisfactorio. La exploración es muy limitada, la división en "fases" lo hace muy lineal, y el constante cambio de personajes que no controlas durante más de 1 hora, si bien es ambicioso, también fallido, pues nunca alcanzas el nivel de identificación con ellos que alcanzas con otros protagonistas de survival horror.
Es una saga que me hubiera gustado que continuase, por que tiene muchísimo potencial, aunque desaprovechado.

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?