ETERNAL DARKNESS | WRITTEN REVIEW

written review

Aug 2

Written by Alma

A Horror Game On the Gamecube That Messes With Your Mind:

Eternal Darkness is one of the most creative horror games I have ever played in my life. It nails down a lot of things that make a good horror game and expands upon it in one huge way that has not been seen in a game up until then, and even since then in many ways. I first god wind of this game in high school when browsing online for game stuff.

I came across this on a list that, I believe, was a list for the top horror games that the creator had played. This game was number one if I recall and after seeing trailers for the game and catching a bit of gameplay, I was absolutely set to give this game a go.

I managed to find this game online cheap at the time but sadly now a days, at least at the time of me writing this, the game can go for a bit of a pretty penny but thats nothing a little emulation cant fix if you really want to play it, though it ruins the experience if you play it on emulation due to a few surprises this game has. What are these surprises that make this game THAT much more fun to play, you may be asking? We will get there, trust me, we will get there, and it is going to really want to make you grab this game EVEN more then before! On Top of that this will also end on a very angering topic when we actually get into it. Something I feel is a very stupid move on a certain companies part.

A Haunted Mansion, A Classic Setting for a Classic Horror Game:

Theres quite a bit of story in this game! You start the game as Alexandra Roivas as she finds herself returning to her familys estate in Rhode Island after her grandfather, Edward Roivas, is found brutally murdered in his mansion. She decides that shes going to go around his mansion looking for clues to get to the bottom of what happened.

In her snooping around she comes across a secret room with a book called the Tome of Eternal Damnation. She starts to read the book and learn about the tragedies of the people in the books and how it ties in with the tome that she is reading. I dare not give any more away then that because the game has a pretty damn solid stories with a lot of twists and turns to it. This game comes with one huge flaw that I will not talk much about because its pretty self explanatory, it has unskippable cutscenes.

This is a blemish on what is a classic game, in my opinion, because sometimes there is a pretty long cutscene before a big event. Not a spoiler but the final cutscene before the last challenge of the game is very long, and if you screw up the last part you get to watch it over again, fun right? No, absolutely not.

This was a very stupid move on there part that only solves itself by letting you skip cutscenes AFTER you beat the game, what the hell. Lets talk about the players now, to get off that bad blemish on an incredible game. You wont just be controlling Alexandra for the whole game though, you are also going to be controlling the people that the tome mentions

about as well. Each person you play as controls amazingly and even lets you target individual body parts to let you choose how you attack the enemy that you are facing.

This allows for stuff like cutting off certain limbs to get an advantage over who your fighting. The only way to finish off someone though is to finish them while there down. Everyone, more or less, plays the same but tougher then another person, more agile, more in tune with magic, or even more sain. More sain you say? What does that mean?

Well my dear reader, this is where the true magic of Eternal Darkness comes in. If you dont know this already then prepare to learn about this games hook, the sanity meter.

The Sanity Meter, Also Known As the Amazing Gimic To This Game:

Eternal Darkness: Sanitys Requiem includes one of the best gameplay mechanics I have ever seen in a horror game, the sanity meter. This is a green meter that your character has that goes down slowly as your character encounters monsters or other disturbing things in the game. As it goes down the camera starts to tilt a little, the atmosphere more surreal, and everything all around just seeing very very off. It may seem like nothing at first but as you soon learn, when this meter starts to drop some very VERY strange things start to happen. I do NOT want to spoil everything this system has to offer because this is absolutely something you must witness yourself to get the full effect but I will give you an example of something that happened to me while this meter was down. I entered a room as I normally did, but something was off, very very off, the whole room was upside down.

I didnt know what was going on. I tried to get out but the geometry was out of whack and I could not get anywhere. I thought I had broken the game and I thought I would have to start again from my last save point, a point that was VERY far away, but after a bit of trying to get out suddenly there was a light, and my character was in the room I was in before I came out and started to scream to herself THIS CANT BE HAPPENING. It freaked me the hell out, and everything seemed fine after that, but thats just a small small taste of the fun this system has with you because if theres one thing this game loves to do, its mess with your mind. If you want to play on the edge you can let the enemies die on the floor so you never recover your sanity but if you want to play without the risk of the effects dont forget to finish off the enemies on the ground after they go down!

The Magic System, The Starting Choice, and A Sad Truth:

Before I end this lets go over a few things I didnt cover much in the other paragraphs. There is a magic system in this game that is very cool to use. You combine runes that you find in the game to do stuff like power up your weapon, resort HP or sanity, shoot deadly magic at an enemy, and ect. Its a very well made system to a game that already has a solid combat and sanity system, among other things too of course. I also wanted to mention that at the start of the game you are given a choice between 3 very shiney runes in a room. A red runes, a blue runes, and a green runes. If you want to make this game as interesting as you can (and also the easiest in my opinion), pick the green runes. Why you may ask? I will never tell!...and dont like, google it or anything because thats cheating! So what is the sad truth I was talking about in the title and the angering topic I was talking about from the starting paragraph?

Nintendo owns the rights to this sanity system. Ya, thats right, this is why you dont see horror games like this anymore, nintendo owns the damn rights to this system and to be honest its absolutely disgusting and stupid in my opinion that they hold onto this and dont do anything with it. Imagine the games we could have gotten with a system like this games sanity system but jacked up to an even higher level, it would have been amazing, but Nintendo seems to just want to hold this patent for whatever damn reason and never let it go. It seems to be expiring on November 11, 2021. I hope they do NOT continue to use a patent like this because I cant stress enough, they are doing absolutely nothing with this and continue to do nothing with it. They havnt even re-released the damn game too as of the writing of this. Nintendo, very stupid move on your part.