I originally played this game a number of years ago, and decided to play it with my girlfriend for Halloween 2022. You play as roughly a dozen different figures throughout history, with the connection between them being an encounter with a Lovecraftian force, ranging from the Roman era to the year 2000. I love games that cover large spans of time, and being able to see the effects that the earlier characters have on the later figures is very fascinating. Some are corrupted and become thralls of the dark God, some begin to oppose it, and others are merely innocent bystanders doomed to die. The combat is interesting, but rather rough. You are able to learn and cast spells in addition to traditional attacks, and the game even allows for the targeting of different body parts. It's a simple system, but can be a bit frustrating in the heat of the moment. The game is most famous for its sanity effects, where the lower the player's sanity is, the more fourth wall breaking effects can happen, such as pretending the game has been muted, or suddenly killing your character on screen, only to flash back. I didn't get too many of these in this playthrough, and while they are very shocking at first, they can become a bit annoying when you get a repeat. Overall, it's a little rough around the edges, but it's a very unique game, and one of the great hidden gems on the GameCube.

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.

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.

A very unique and memorable survival horror game from the minds of the original Blood Omen, that sees you taking control of different characters throughout different periods in history. Where the game really shines is through its brilliant "Sanity Bar" gimmick wherein your character may lose their grip on reality over time as they deal with dangerous situations or encounter horrific enemies, and some crazy shit will happen that can break the fourth wall or psych-out the player in some smart, terrifying, and sometimes even humorous ways.

Nintendo needs to bring this franchise back already.

I had nostalgia for this game as a kid where it scared me too much to get past the beginning. I decided as an adult to give the game another shot since I have always had it. I got to chapter 11 and put the game down. I hate not finishing games, but I decided I had enough and watched the last two chapters online, as well as the hidden ending after beating the game three different ways. For me, the game was just a struggle to keep playing after the beginning. It got so repetitive and boring. I am also not the biggest fan of history, so most of the game taking place in the past and the main character having to read up on it all wore on me.

Below are some other thoughts I had of the game:

1. The sanity effects were cool, but I have the opinion that you should not be able to use magic to heal it, as it removes much of the point of playing the game with removing the sanity effects.
2. Using magic was fun, but you start to feel invincible very quickly and I feel defeats the whole horror aspect of the game. The whole thing of having to set up the same spells for higher tier power you find I think was dumb to be honest.
3. The story to me became less interesting the longer it went on.

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?

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.

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.