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Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (GameCube) review"The idea of survival horror is a fascinating one. While films are usually identified by aesthetic and emotive theme - fantasy, or action, or science-fiction - games tend to be categorised by activity. Do you shoot in this game? Then it's a shooting game. Do you strategise in it? Then it's a strategy. Videogame genre naming conventions leave very little room for thematics. Maybe that's to be expected. Games are, after all, primarily about doing stuff. " |
The idea of survival horror is a fascinating one. While films are usually identified by aesthetic and emotive theme - fantasy, or action, or science-fiction - games tend to be categorised by activity. Do you shoot in this game? Then it's a shooting game. Do you strategise in it? Then it's a strategy. Videogame genre naming conventions leave very little room for thematics. Maybe that's to be expected. Games are, after all, primarily about doing stuff.
But it means that, when something like the survival horror genre comes along, those two little words say a lot. You survive, and it's horrible, presumably. This spectacular little combination of words is interesting, as it brings both game and theme to the table. There's immediately a very strong sense of flimic borrowing. This isn't just a puzzle game, or an action game, or whatever. It's a horror game. Its aesthetic and emotive purpose is to make you scared.
So. How do you do survival horror?
Make a film and shoehorn in some game, if plenty of titles are to be believed. Resident Evil has always rubbed me up the wrong way because it does both survival and horror so awfully. The horror's melodramatic and uninspired, and the only thing that makes it remotely frightening is that the survival is so utterly and pathetically contrived. It's a cheat's way, for example, to ramp up the tension by making basic activities like walking around a bloody room so implausibly difficult. That so many genre examples play up to this nasty notion - even the wonderful Silent Hill series controls like a retarded bus - is something I find really saddening. Indeed, when pressed, I can usually only name three survival horror games that fully realise the genre's potential, and they're not even what we'd typically think of as survival horror. System Shock 2, STALKER and Pathologic are all totally about staying alive in a horrible environment, rather than wrestling with a gamepad and cursing the most atrocious of camera angles.
Except there's one more. It's a fabulous gem of a Gamecube title, one that fully realises everything the genre has to offer, and it's called Eternal Darkness. It does things a little differently to the rest.
In Eternal Darkness, you primarily play as Alexandra Roivas, who looks an awful lot like a digitised Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You also play as a whole heap of historical figures as you shuffle your way through the pages of a magical tome, discovered at the place of your father's tragic demise: a good old spooky mansion in the middle of a dark nowhere.
Ostensibly, it makes exactly the same mistakes as all those other horrible slices of gaming. Though less tank-like than Resi, its controls are still a tad on the fiddly side, the camera still not quite where you'd like it to be. Its initial setting is similarly unimaginative. And the various nasties are rarely enough to get you fidgeting, let alone to make you jump out of your seat and go to bed with several thousand floodlights surrounding you for comfort. The story is complex, but ultimately functional at best. The puzzles are solid but unremarkable.
Yet Eternal Darkness works. And it works because it plays around with the form, emerging with something that succeeds in scaring the living twilights out of you in a way that could only ever work in a computer game. Sure, the camera's very "directed", if you see what I mean, but Silicon Knights never tried to make a film. They tried to make a game. A survival horror game, in the truest sense of the term.
So. Buckle up and watch your sanity meter. You'll need to, given the hideous depths of pretentiousness that this essay is heading for. For example, I just called it an essay...
Brief tangent. I went to the Develop Conference in Brighton last summer. Mr. Silicon Knights, Sir Denis of Dyack, delivered a talk entitled "Videogames as the Eighth Art". In it, he detailed the various ways in which they had crafted Too Human into a work of art rather than just a game, and how understanding and borrowing from the medium of film helped them to achieve this.
And... it's just bollocks, isn't it? Aside from the fact that Too Human was a rather impressive failure, two things jumped out at me. Thing the first: we need to stop trying to be films. Surely. I loudly applauded, much to everyone's bemusement, when Flower developer Jenova Chen challenged the very core of his argument from the back of the crowded room. I totally get what Dyack was trying to say: that new art forms evolve from older ones. But when you actually play Too Human, you get the impression it's not so much trying to understand and borrow from film, but actually just sodding be one, with arbitrary button mashing thrown in. It's also nowhere near as creative or clever as it thinks it is, I'd say. But that's another rant for another day. And to be fair, I've only played a tad of it.
Thing the second: why didn't he talk about Eternal Darkness? As far as videogame artistry goes, I suspect it would have made for a much stronger case. In its boundary pushing and its deep understanding of what makes games - and players' minds - tick, it's a hell of a lot more affecting and stimulating than any piece of interactive cinema I've ever twiddled my thumbs through.
The sanity meter is a little bar in the top left corner of the screen, above the health gauge. When you get injured, your health drops. But when you start delving into the darkness and witnessing all sorts of nightmarish sights, your sanity drops. Eternal Darkness is a game about going insane.
That takes some guts to approach. Plenty of games have dealt with psychology to an extent, but none have made descending into madness in a very real way the absolute crux of the experience. And while plenty of other games have enjoyed breaking down that good old fourth wall, none have done it in a way that so uniquely works in the context of its respective gaming narrative.
When your sanity meter reaches zero, everything goes completely messed up. Sometimes, it's subtle - a quick flash of an image, perhaps - while other times it's something so improbably barmy it's astonishing. Importantly, most have an effect on how you play the game, even if it's only temporary. Picking up shotgun shells is likely to make you less conservative with your shotgun. Realise a few minutes later that you never actually picked those shells up is an unsettling revelation that has a tangible impact on your play style. It means something not just to your character, but to you, sitting in your chair in front of the screen. And that's the core of how Eternal Darkness goes about its horrible tactics.
We're getting a bit analytical here, aren't we? Watch your sanity meter. I'm guessing it'll have dropped.
Compare with other games that have borrowed from Eternal Darkness' trickery, and it's quickly evident why nothing has ever matched them. The recent Batman: Arkham Asylum Scarecrow sections were unthinkably brilliant, but they never quite had the same impact. Why? Because there was never the option to avoid them. You accepted these mind-games because they were part of a linear story, and you knew you'd always have to battle through them in order to access the next bit of the game. Quantic Dreams' flawed classic Fahrenheit, known as Indigo Prophecy Stateside, got it right in having you try to avoid going a bit mental, but stumbled over itself by ending the game if you did. All it boiled down to was "don't get insane if you want to carry on playing". All the mechanic did was run you into the brick wall of the loading screen.
Eternal Darkness' system remains the most clever because it encourages you to avoid this psychological torment while never backing you into a game-ending corner if you fail to keep your character of stable mind. So it becomes a battle to stop the game from fucking with you quite so much, because it leads to things happening that totally break all the game design rules. But because these sequences are just vignettes that occur as part of the wider scope of the game, you never feel like you're being cheated. And the fact that the sequences are often so utterly cool leaves you oddly eager to see them anyway. And all this conflicting information that's zooming from designer to developer to disc to console to screen to eyes to brain creates a whole new form of psychological anguish in itself. It's really, really compelling.
Sanity meter. Definitely dropped a load. Watch out, it's running low.
Eternal Darkness is not perfect. That's because it's not the following game.
A while ago, I had a dream. I was playing Eternal Darkness, only it wasn't quite Eternal Darkness. It was Eternal Darkness as it would be if it were a virtual reality simulator, played in four-player co-op. Your task was to collect the various pages of the game's tome, which were strewn around the house, as well as avoiding the astonishingly powerful enemies that turned up just every half-hour or so. It was really, really slow, to the point of often being painfully boring. As a result, the most brilliant of choices opened up: do you stick together and be largely bored, but safe, or do you split up and get things done more quickly, nagged by the knowledge that if a foe turned up at any moment, it would wipe you off the face of the game faster than Barack Obama could swat a fly?
That's tension, right there. My dream version of the game didn't even include any sanity effects. Imagine that game, with the real Eternal Darkness' logical polish and the sanity meter, and I reckon you'd have something approaching perfection.
Wait, shit... shit, the sanity meter! You mean you weren't watching it? Even though you were reading a game review in which the writer started talking about a fucking dream he had? Oh, no, this isn't good. Not good at all. Look... it's empty...
You're in a room.
The camera's slanted slightly downwards to the right, and you're walking towards it, controls reversed. You're walking into the darkness, the long shadows cast by the low lights converging into a muddy pool of black at the near-end of the area. There's a noise coming from... somewhere. Off-screen, and unidentifiable, but not something pleasant.
Then, suddenly, Red Faction doesn’t really do atmosphere. It tries to, sure, but somewhere between the incompetent AI, bland visuals and uninventive storyline, it resolutely fails. It’s also a game of unfulfilled promises, a textbook old-school shooter that seemed to forget it aspired to be the genre’s reinvention. Who else remembers their crippling disappointment regarding the much-touted GeoMod technology, which purported to allow players to blast their own ways through levels by destroying the environment? Seemingly, Volition expected players to forgive its inconsistent application early on, and forget it even existed by the time the entirely static later levels rolled around. Red Faction set its sights high, then slipped achingly back to mediocrity. Mediocre games don’t do this to me. What’s going on?
Red Faction starts abominably. Cast into your day job as an oppressed miner on a future Mars, your shift ends in a splatter of spilt blood, as - for seemingly no reason whatsoever - the entire security force starts shooting at you after your buddy gets into a minor altercation with one of the guards. It’s a nonsense opening, glossing over any logic in a dismal attempt to thrust players straight into the action. This is a game that cited the slow-burning unease of Half-Life as a major influence on its heady ambiance. Goodness knows what they were thinking here.
Thus begins a treacherous yet dull sci-fi dungeon crawl, through monotonous underground networks, plagued by badly-planned blueprints and texture issues. The first couple of hours of Red Faction are woeful, but something compelled me, spurred me on, something other than the gradually improving level design. It’s worth noting that Red Faction is one of only two games I’ve ever played through in a single day. What was it that I found so captivating about this ugly and broken shooter?
Maybe it’s escapism. It’s what the modern videogame form does so very well, after all: taking us to places we could never visit, positioning us in roles usually confined to dreams. Red Faction’s ludicrous implausibility lends itself surprisingly well to this, and the chance to rise from everyman to every man’s hero is what drives experiences such as this one. As you plough through the Ultor facility in search of your freedom, your reputation rises. People begin to recognise you: “You’re that miner from Sector M4! I can’t believe you’ve made it this far!” And it feels good.
And then you're back in the room, and you're left wondering whether your head really did fall off, or if it was all in your mind.
Right. Enough of that.
Point is, Eternal Darkness understands the core of survival horror as well as any of the less traditional but more successful attempts at the genre. It has a complete working grasp of what's at its core, but subverts both strands into something really intelligent. Survival doesn't just mean physical survival, but emotional survival as well. The horror doesn't really stem from what's actually going on in this terrible world, but what's going on inside the head of your character and, through its clever integration of sanity effects into the game itself, your own head as well. That it still devotes itself to being as filmic as it can get away with is almost a shame, but it's also proof that you don't have to deviate so far away from genre conventions to do something wildly imaginative and wholly conceptually successful.
Is this making more sense now? Is your sanity meter back up yet? All the way?
Good. Now would you mind having a read of this for me?
Oh, no, it's falling, it's falling... shit, shit, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit...
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Community review by Lewis (January 03, 2010)
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