Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

I mean, really? What can you say about a videogame that truly transcends its medium?

Eternal Darkness is a masterpiece of storytelling. The best way to describe it is as an interactive novel. I personally don't have the time or the interest to play videogames right through until the end normally, but this one... BOY. I was hooked. I didn't stop playing until I finished the baby.

There were great moments, like there are with any piece of cinema, when the use of music, dialogue and story subversion created moments so exhilarating and original, that it suddenly becomes incredibly sad that it isn't going to reach the wide audience that it so deserves.

Go. And buy it now.

This game doesn't stoop to the level of jumpscares (except for one part but I feel it was well earned), the atmosphere alone strikes fear and unease in a person. If you can get your hands on this game, play it alone, at night, on a CRT. You'll never have another experience like it.

I do love my Mega Man, believe me, but this title is SO, SO, SO MUCH BETTER than any Mega Man game ever released. When someone says "survival-horror," you probably think of the Resident Evil series. Can I tell you something? If I compared survival-horror games to, say, automobiles, ED makes any other survival-horror game look like a Ford Pinto right after the bumper was smashed in.

The story opens with young Alex Roivas receiving a call to identify her grandfather's body-- he recently experienced a mysterious death that left him as nothing more than a pile of bloody flesh. Alex vows to search the old mansion for clues, and in doing so, uncovers a dark family secret: a huge book in her grandfather's study attracts Alex's attention, and it is through this book, the Tome of Eternal Darkness, that the story unfolds.

Your avatar changes as you complete each chapter of the Tome. All the characters come together to tell of the Tome's historical accounts, and the purpose behind the book itself.

Though the concept of basing a game around a book instead of its characters is certainly unique, it's not ED's strongest selling point. That would be your Sanity Meter--a glowing, green vial that tracks how kooky your character's mind becomes after you are attacked. When your sanity begins to fade, the game will do things to mess with your mind: tilt the camera, make you see dripping blood from the walls, and make you appear upside-down in a room--and those are some of the milder effects. The stronger, more brain-tickling pranks will genuinely make you angry, frustrated, frightened, or confused: the TV will appear to suddenly shut off, or your character will spontaneously split apart, for example. ED is survival-horror done right: you're dropped into monster-ridden territory with limited weapons, a magickal book, and only your wits to guide you. It's not anywhere near as difficult as Resident Evil, and the fact that you play through different periods of history with an alternate-universe twist gives ED a lot more credit in my book.

With copious amounts of blood, gore, death, references to the occult, and plenty of creepy- crawlies and scary moments, this is very much a grown-up's game--but MAN, what a great game it is! For all those momentarily fed up with kiddie games on the 'Cube, snatch this treasure up from the video game store's bargain bin and put some hours into it--you won't be disappointed.

Played this game for the first time in June, 2024, and many elements of it hold up very well. It has fantastic sound design and atmosphere, fantastic plotting and the story beats/reveals are very well paced, and it has much better implementation of the sanity meter than I've seen in any modern games, as the game messes with your TV settings as you begin to lose sanity, you end up hallucinating combat situations and ending up in rooms you didn't mean to enter, and the game plays other clever tricks on you that had me tense and sometimes even jump sprinkled throughout the first half of the game.

However, the game is at its absolute best in the first half, and it starts to lose the sense of horror by the second half, as well as the sense that you're fighting for both your survival and your sanity, as the game's patterns become way too obvious, and the hallucinations become both predictable and obvious which just makes them more tedious than anything. The combat is also incredibly easy in the latter half which also makes it more tedious than anything, and by chapter 12 I was actually a bit bored and just ready for the game to finally be done.

There are still many things I appreciate about it though, and many things that it does extraordinarily well that I don't see done very often in modern games of a comprable scale (for the time), I just wish it had either been much shorter or that it had done more to mix up its narrative loop, because it loses so much of the horror as soon as what it's doing becomes obvious.

Positives:

• Atmosphere
• The Sanity system
• Story
• Characters
• Voice acting
• Gameplay

Negatives:

• Not much