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Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (GameCube)

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem review

Game: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Platform: GameCube
Genre: Adventure (Horror)
Developer: Silicon Knights

Featured reader review by Suskie

July 15, 2009

I’m fairly certain that the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in a video game happened in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. In one of the game’s many stops along the timeline of an ancient book detailing the history of a dark, unseen force, I found myself in the shoes of a Persian swordsman named Karim, who was journeying into the desert to claim a legendary treasure for his lover. The Forbidden City that Karim came upon looked startlingly similar to the one I’d explored as Roman soldier Pious Augustus several hundred years prior. Pious’s story didn’t end well, as his trek led him to a cursed artifact that transformed him into a skeletal liche. I soon came to the realization that Karim was after the very same object, which still corrupted the city, infesting it with vicious, gaunt-looking zombies. A number of encounters with them left Karim beaten and bruised, and I began avoiding the creatures rather than engaging them. I walked into another room and found myself surrounded by at least four more zombies. That’s when my controller lost its connection.

Now, Eternal Darkness came before the days of the Wavebird, and as such, battery failure was obviously not the problem. I bolted over to my system to make sure that the cord was plugged securely into the controller port. It was, yet an on-screen message continued to alert me of the issue. I began slamming on the buttons frantically as I watched a motionless Karim get brutally mauled to pieces by the zombie horde. I was reaching for the reset button when came a bright flash on the screen, and suddenly, without explanation, Karim stood in the same spot in perfect health, with no enemies in sight. And I realized, right then, that I’d blindly walked right into developer Silicon Knights’ trap.

The horrific sights revealed to the dozen playable characters of Eternal Darkness are perhaps too much for one person to take in. As such, each individual journey gradually takes its toll on the character’s mind, and soon enough, the player feels the effects, too. Vision becomes distorted. Music plays in the distance, soon to be drowned out by the sounds of footsteps, rattling chains, and people screaming. Walls begin to bleed. And then an increasingly more random (and bizarre) string of events unfolds. In one instance, my character’s body parts began to explode systematically, until only a lifeless pair of legs was all that remained. The example of my controller supposedly shorting out just comes to show that Silicon Knights weren’t afraid to break the fourth wall and put the player directly at risk, either. It’s a brilliant and unique way of bringing freshness to the survival horror genre, which has all too frequently relied on much cheaper tactics to generate fear.

The game’s twelve protagonists comprise a book called the Tome of Eternal Darkness, which tells of a war between several godlike Ancients, and chronicles the adventures of the human pawns who happen to get caught up in the ordeal. The recipient of the book is Alexandra Roivas, who finds it while investigating her grandfather’s mansion following his grisly murder. The stories span a timeline of over two millennia, and very few of them end well. Pious, the first victim of the Tome, becomes the game’s chief villain following the aforementioned event in which he is consumed by the Ancients’ evil and becomes a minion. Many of his predecessors meet equally tragic ends, and uncovering the mysteries of the Ancients’ plot is Eternal Darkness’s big draw. The discovery by a Roivas ancestor that an entire city of monsters lies beneath his mansion is only one of many clues leading to the death of Alex’s grandfather.

The events of the Tome don’t always unfold in chronological order, yet Eternal Darkness’s one true goal – aside from scaring the piss out of you – is to drive its narrative forward, and so much of the game’s fun is in examining its individual chapters and putting the pieces together. The game is set in only four recurring locations, presented during different time periods. A heavily booby trapped temple deep within the Cambodian jungles would have made a fine setting for an Indiana Jones movie during the 12th century; even more so 800 years later, when a British archaeologist happens upon its overgrowth-infested walls. A monk of the Inquisition days has a ghastly premonition of his cathedral being transformed into a field hospital during World War I… but that’s only after he battles the living corpse of a messenger who, hundreds of years prior, fell ill to a curse that was meant for Charlemagne himself.

Amidst all of this, gameplay rings as a surprising non-factor, which comes as a shock considering how polished it is. Our journey through the Tome’s timeline has our protagonists going from swords to blowguns to actual guns, yet the game always leans on a user-friendly targeting system that allows players to pinpoint specific body parts. Silicon Knights ignored the tank-like mechanics that dominated the Resident Evil games for years and opted for fluid, precise movement as well. Handicapping a player with clunky controls and awkward camera angles is a sure-fire method of generating fear, but it also makes the game cumbersome. Eternal Darkness is instead as playable as you could want it to be, and that’s the point: The game is so successful at haunting the player with its imagery that the fact that I was playing it escaped me. I became absorbed in it.

I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the bone thieves yet. These are short, spindly creatures with scythes for arms. They burrow into a person’s flesh and literally replace the skeleton, thereby possessing their human hosts by wearing their carcasses. They do the Ancients’ bidding, using their powers to manipulate other humans who have been caught in the web. When they’re done with their hosts, they violently slice themselves out of their victims, leaving each body a torn, bloody heap on the ground. The first time I saw this happen, I was so shocked that I dismissed it as a sanity effect. Later encounters proved otherwise, and I came to understand that I had once again been playing right into the developers’ hands.

Fear, you see, is uncertainty. If I know something is going to happen, I’m not as frightened by it. The brilliance of Eternal Darkness is that it creates a world in which not all things are real, and what is real is so twisted and disturbing that it could be mistaken for illusion, anyway. You do have some semblance of control over your sanity meter, of course: A monster’s gaze is what ultimately injects fear into a character’s heart, so defeating said enemies will restore confidence, even more so if you manage to execute a devilish finishing move on an enemy’s downed body. But the threat of a declining sanity meter hangs over you for the entire length of the adventure. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter when you are, it’s the one impending force you can never escape from.

And that’s Eternal Darkness’s triumph. It has fluid play control and logical puzzles, and these aspects alone put it head and shoulders above its survival horror brethren. But you’ll get so caught up in its complex narrative and unsettling images – and wind up so rattled as a result – that in the end, nothing else matters. It’s the quintessential survival horror title; seven years later, I’m still haunted by it.

Rating: 10/10

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