Actually getting around to playing Eternal Darkness after knowing of its existence for at least a decade is a very strange experience to me in the way that the mystique of both its status as the first Nintendo published M rated game and its sanity mechanics peels back to reveal a fairly standard outing in its respective genre. It's kind of like if Earthbound/Mother was just an ordinary RPG but was still talked about in the same way by Nintendo fans who either A. just straight up didn't play it or B. would not knowledgeable enough on the broader context surrounding its respective genre even if they did play it and would inevitably make an ass out of themselves if they tried talking about what makes this specific game unique. Narratively, Eternal Darkness is a pastiche of Lovecraftian horror without much to set it apart from that type of fiction aside from the cool subversion of a "true ending" if you're willing to do three playthroughs and mechanically, the combination of an extremely forgiving save system and easily replenishable healing magic after a certain point mean the primary resource management dynamics that serve as the main draw to survival horror might as well not exist.
However, the game's saving grace and one of the biggest factors in its demystification is its camp factor. From the script/voice acting to the fun antagonist to the cartoonishly over the top sanity effects, Eternal Darkness ends up being a lot more comedic than its reputation would lead you to believe, especially in a modern context where you're most likely not playing on the intended hardware. I think it says a lot that my computer legitimately crashed once while playing and my reaction was something along the lines of "Oh, you cheeky bastard" under the false assumption that it was a sanity effect because that was the kind of silly trick the game had conditioned me to expect.
Ultimately, playing Eternal Darkness in 2024 yields a representation of the kind of conquering of fears you'd expect from horror, not through the actual contents of the game but through the shattering of its reputation as one of the supposed "scariest games of all time."