Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

The first thing Eternal Darkness presents to the player upon booting up the GameCube system is a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s masterpiece poem “The Raven”. It dictates much of the tone of the narrative about to be unfolded. Taking inspiration from Poe’s supernatural fiction, his violent depictions of bizarre occurrences, Lovecraft’s styled writings along with his creations of cosmic beings so powerful they defy our frail human minds and other creators of the macabre, Eternal Darkness rises, a game that’s certainly one of a kind.

It always baffled me how incompetent developers seem to be when coming up with ideas for newer titles. Does the world need another Japanese-style RPG? Probably not that much. Does it yearn for a whole new first person shooter set in one of the world wars? Not If you ask me. Does it need more first person shooters at all, with their innate soldiers and “sir, yes, sirs” and “roger thats” permeating the entirety of the whole? Highly debatable, but I’d much rather have something unique for once.

Delving into Lovecraftian lore is surely something we haven’t seen that much in movies or video-games. We’ve seen the lost sheep, we’ve seen the occasional titles reverberating here and there, but not in any quantifiable manner. Eternal Darkness came to fill in that blank spot. It not only encompasses much of everything you’d come to expect from horror literature, but it manages to create a game that provides a deep, meaningful set of controls, making you feel like it really was meant to be a game and not some narrative-driven button-presser.

Eternal Darkness shines its dark luminescence from whatever angle you might want to look at it. The story is engrossing and deep, it truly is one-of-a-kind. It all starts when, in Persia, sometime before the common era, Roman soldiers were sent out to find some artifact of immense power. The leader of the group searching for this lost relic, Pious Augustus, would come to have a decisive role in the fate of humanity. Upon hearing voices the captain strays afar from the group and is then sucked within a vortex by a mysterious force.

Pious is then taken to a shrine where three artifacts stand before him. As the player chooses which artifact he wishes to obtain, the rest of the game will be bound to that first choice right away. He can choose between the red artifact, symbolizing power, which is governed by the unholy god Chat’urga; or choose the blue one, which stands for magicka, and is governed by the deity Uyliath; and alternatively the green relic can be the one snagged, then the choice would be made toward the almighty Xel’lotath, who governs the mind, or sanity.

Each of these deities is weak or strong against one another. For instance, Chat’urga, the health deity, is strong against Xel’lotath (sanity) and weak against Uyliath (spirit). Since Pious Augustus will be corrupted by the Darkness to do its bidding to bring forth whatever dark god is chosen, the player is effectively choosing his ultimate antagonist. The rest of the game will actually be a huge quest that features humanity as the primary leading character against an enemy known as The Ancients, dark beings that lead humanity from behind the curtains toward chaos and disorder.

To fight the Darkness an accumulated effort persisting for generations to come unfolds before our very eyes. By corrupting and ultimately defeating Mantorok, the fourth deity represented by the color purple and the one who governs all other three, Pious Augustus, now reduced to a living undead, slave to a cursed god, initiates the taking of the Earth, our reality and, quite possibly, the whole universe. That’s precisely the scale which Lovecraft so feverishly wrote about. These gods are beings so unimaginably grand that our lacking human perception can hardly dream of.

As Pious gets hold of one of the artifacts from the gods the story steers toward how, across several characters, many generations, different places in the world, people have collectively worked toward the salvation of mankind. Nothing had prepared them for this kind of nightmarish endeavor. and it had been clear from the beginning that it would be no mundane task. Many of them didn’t actually have a happy ending after all, but the ultimate task of saving mankind from unworldly chaos is unleashed in coruscating uncertainty.

You control a religious man in the middle of the crusades, a middle eastern dancer girl from before the common era, a firefighter at the end of the golf war, an Arab womanizer searching for treasure and the love of his sweetheart, and many others. All of them chosen to lead mankind’s final struggle against a blasphemous demon god and its will to alter reality as we know. It all happens across over 2 thousand years of history, strife, death and a common cause. It’s interesting to notice how well the writers wrapped everything up perfectly as if all made perfect sense in the end.

Mankind’s quest to secure the remaining 3 artifacts of power eventually wind up in the year 2000, where Alex Roivas lives, last herald of the Roivas family. She’s been informed that her grandfather, Edward Roivas, was brutally murdered. She takes the next flight to Rhode Island where the family mansion is situated, only to find that there’s very little left of what was once a living human being. The only possible way to secure that it really was her grandfather had to be done by inspecting a limb which was inadvertently left behind by whoever, or whatever, murdered him; noticing it wielded the family ring sufficed for Alex, it was him.

Two weeks later, bugged by the police’s lack of any clear evidence regarding the murderer and seeing how ineffective the local force had been up to that point, Alex decides to search the old mansion for clues about the killer. Soon enough she comes across the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a morbid book featuring a cover made of human skin and containing all the story of the struggle the player is about to witness. Again, a clear Lovecraftian reference from his Necronomicon.

As Alex reads about the story of how the Ancients played humans as pawns in a game of chess, she experiences these events with the player, sometimes even getting tips on what to do next inside the mansion. She witnessed firsthand how, against all odds, brave humans across history fought valiantly against the tyranny of the Darkness. As for how the game is set, you always have the chapter of a historical figure and then an interlude with Alex, mostly figuring stuff up regarding the story and finding more missing pages of the Tome of Eternal Darkness.

The story alone would be a great incentive for anyone who enjoys horror stories and history to be at least puzzled on how exactly it all pans out. The historical places are incredible, the attention to detail is absurd. They even got voice actors to do very brief parts of ancient languages before magically translating to English to tell the story more easily. When you’re dealing with a limited budget, you know that’s the kind of stuff that goes way down on your priority list. We all wanted the world to be perfect, but it certainly isn’t, so a lot of developers wouldn’t go the extra mile on that one.

Since you’re visiting the same place at least twice during the course of history, it’s amazing to see how the context changes the location. For example, in a Cathedral in France, the plot to get rid of a political leader is uncovered by an ally. Later on, during the inquisition, a Franciscan monk seeks shelter after a pilgrimage to witness a holy item that turns out to be false. Yet later, the Cathedral was transformed into a hospital for the mass of injured during the first world war, in 1916. The same place that undergoes transformations during this whole time period is used and majestically used.

I have to give special mention to the incredible writing. Silicon Knights really brought up the big guns here. The plot is sharply written, and decidedly works as a perfect example of having people who really know their stuff to come up with such ingenuous lines and pieces of text. The cutscenes alone are all quote worthy, for they showcase a level of research that must be praised. Replete with witty dialog lines, never overdoing, it reserves its place in history as some of the best writings in any video-game.

Still, Eternal Darkness wouldn’t simply stand as a game with only a solid story and nothing else, you got to have something tangible to work on. It’s a pleasure to say that the game itself is masterfully engineered. The combat system works surprisingly well for a game that focuses on story. You are free to move, as the camera moves you adjust your general direction. If it’s not your first day on survival horrors you might have heard about the infamous tank controls from Resident Evil; I can assure there are no tank controls in Eternal Darkness.

A lock-on system takes place when the R button is pressed, the character then stands still and is able to attack/shoot. By pressing or not pressing a direction on the analog stick your attack/shot can go different ways. By not pressing anything you shoot the torso, by pressing left or right the left or right limb is targeted, and by pressing up you aim for the head. It’s pretty straightforward but works well. Dealing with faster or multiple targets shouldn’t be a problem if you got the hang of it. To change an enemy you simply unpress the shoulder button until you hear the click and then click again, you won’t get out of the shooting stance and will change targets; the wonders of a pressure-based shoulder button on the great GameCube controller.

Several fire weapons from different eras of history are available. Some of them are a bit clunky to use so a lot of people will prefer to stick with the good old sword — again, many swords from all over the globe. Since it’s a common practice in survival horror games to provide very little ammunition to keep players at the edge of their seats it won’t be much of a departure from what’s expected. One needs to keep in mind that the items from one chapter rarely — highly depends on the plot, but mostly they do not — get transferred over to the next. Most of the time the periods are so far apart that the rudimentary guns used in one era would barely be useful in another.

To interact with the environment just press the action button and you’ll receive information about stuff you survey, items you might have picked up. To deal with those items the pause menu gives the option to use, equip, and sometimes, depending on the item, to mix or inspect them. Inspecting and mixing might reveal different usages or hidden items that may prove much more fortuitous to you. Still, not everything clearly has a purpose, some are only written letters and diary pages that might have a hint to solve that riddle you’ve been stuck in for a while, who knows.

Another important feature are the spells. I could say it has some of the best use of spells in any video-game, and that’s saying much since they’re not underused in games at all. It’s always a heart-pumping moment when you’re casting a spell and the runes are being uttered by some unknown voice from the beyond while the fluorescent circles start the conjuring. It’s actually a pretty complicated little system if you think about it. First, a deity who governs the spell must be selected — one of the four colored ones previously mentioned. Then, how powerful the spell is; if it’s a 3, 5 or 7 rune incantation. And lastly you choose the runes. You always have to choose 2 runes, and for more powerful spells using 5 or 7 runes, the rest is composed of a special rune called Pargon (power).

You can’t just go around casting spells. First you need to collect a Codex that provides information about the rune so you have the knowledge, then you need to find a scroll that contains the information about which runes are necessary to cast a determined spell, then you need to actually cast it the first time. After that it’s just a matter of bringing up the pause menu and choosing to cast spells you’ve learned already. Everything at its own time; as the story progresses you need to get items to allow more powerful runes as well as the many different spells available in the game. To fasten the process there’s 5 buttons that can be mapped to work as a quick spell shortcut; the Y button and the four directions of the digital pad.

The combination of spell usage and gameplay items offers great opportunities for puzzles and gameplay mechanics. I can’t say they went all-out with some ideas but some clever ones did make it into the game. In the case of spells it might not be a good idea to cast a 7-rune spell if you have very little time to do so, for example. In the end, the experience is both rewarding and challenging, you might get stuck along the way but the solution is generally just around the corner. It still might prove a bit too daunting at times, but since the locations aren’t exactly vast you’ll probably be able to test out multiple methods trying to advance.

One of the selling points and admittedly one of the coolest features I’ve ever seen debut in a video-game are the sanity effects. Most times they’re merely psychological. You have a sanity bar and as it goes down, by not killing your humanoid foes and finishing off monsters, certain effects will start happening on screen. Blood will start dripping from walls, cries will be heard, fake flies will fly on screen, the screen will start tilting to the sides, the screen will simulate the TV turning off, changing the channel or turning the volume down, among others. It might sound strange, but I remember the first time I saw the volume prank, I actually thought I had seated on the remote control. When you’re playing it alone at night this kind of stuff can really get on your nerves.

Another feature worthy of praising is the voice-over and the amazing job performed by the voice-actors. It’s incredible the difference between highly trained professionals, with smart directing, over a cheap job made only for the sake of having it. The voice-over is stellar, and certainly one of the highlights in a game that’s overcrowded with highlights. They add so much depth to characters who, allied with pristine writing, feel almost part of an actual historical event.

The graphics were pretty advanced at the time. Eternal Darkness was released at a transitional period where the first batch of titles had already sunk in and the second wave was about to be dropped. The graphics surely impress for their technological prowess but the star of the show here is the artistic design. Everything is noteworthy, from the architecture of historical locations to the absurdly obtuseness of the city of the Ancients, an absolute underground monstrosity that shall permeate the nightmares of those less fortunate.

The dark tone of the experience is felt all throughout. When exploring the mansion you come across several paintings which upon inspection can be visualized for no other reason but to immerse the player. They often offer a glimpse of light among a brooding mass of obscurity. The exotic nature of several pieces of furniture seen within the mansion and throughout the game only serves to instigate even more curiosity in the player. Masks from the heart of Africa, books on the occult, paintings of unknown Asian origin.

Eternal Darkness sounds as good as it looks. A few tracks are monumental pieces of eerie atmosphere, especially the ones with a middle-eastern edge. The sound effects are impeccable, which is always a pretty important part of a horror game. As the player’s sanity meter starts to go down weird voices are heard, stygian voices, desperate cries. It also features Dolby Pro Logic surround sound if you’re equipped with that kind of hardware.

There you have it, a horror game that manages to craft quite an experience from any angle you might be willing to look at it. The production certainly moved mountains to create the best game they could with whatever amount of money they had to work with. There’s no loose ends here. Experience supernatural cyclopean horror about timeless beings always vigilant, willing to take over our own reality, and the weirdly fresh story about several humans throughout history who persevered to thwart the plans of the Ancients. There’s nothing ordinary about the experience Eternal Darkness can provide, and it’s one of the best experiences anyone can have in a video-game.