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spanning many millennia, with the main story gimmick being a college student Alex Rovias, reading through all of these historical documents - and I especially liked just how much attention is drawn towards all these different moods and atmospheres of these different eras, and also just how much the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.

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.