Eternal Darkness: Secrets revelead

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is a famous horror game released exclusively on the Gamecube by now defunct company Silicon Knights (so thank GOD it didn't end with sequel bait).It throws the player into the shoes of Elizabeth investigating the bizarre murder of her grandfather in the family estate. She uncovers a terrifying book and starts to uncover a millenia spanning plot to summon for the old gods and slaughter all of existence.

Not this book

The mechanic of reading about past events and warping back to control characters across time is inspired. It allows many different kind of tales to spread out over the course of the game and it all loops together quite well. But the best part is how each new chapter of the book teaches you something or introduces a new mechanic that you THEN use to explore the mansion and find more pages. It really feels like your peeling back the secrets of this old house and its immensely satisfying.

Screw Resident Evil. I LOVE this mansion

The combat is split between a surprisingly good melee system and a dull ranged system. When locked onto enemies, a tilt of the analog stick allows you to target their head, torso or individual arms. With a good sword, you can rip a zombie apart limb by limb or just lop its head off before moving onto its buddies, leaving it groping helplessly at its neck stump. With guns, they stagger until they die from exhaustion or pity. Game does give you plenty of ammo, as long as you don't shoot everything. I mostly saved guns for big bads and little annoying trap monsters.

Much has been made of the sanity mechanic, which I will admit is wonderfully implemented. A dropping sanity meter will cause various effects to occur. From the benign bugs on screen or blood from walls to the sadistic phony deleted save file message. It was clever and appropriately intrusive. But it was mostly rendered moot once I learned the spell that increases sanity. Which brings me to the magic system.

The magic in this game is problematic. Its a mix and build rune system that I will forever praise for allowing you to make new spells by trying out various rune combinations, even if you don't have the spell recipe. And the spells ARE useful and are implemented well for the most part, being well integrated into various puzzles. The problem is that by late game, you just boost your weapon and heal through any damage you take. So long as you kill all the monsters, your regening magic makes you unstoppable. It turned combat late game into a frustrating grind rather than a terrifying prospect to avoid. This was especially true of the 9 part puzzle room the game makes you go through TWICE before endgame.

FUCK this puzzle

But the big problem late game is the story. Eternal Darkness is directly cribbing notes from the works of HP Lovecraft and his cthulhoid mysteries, what with the summoning of old gods and underground murder cults. Up until about mid game, your not sure whats going on, what the rules are and how you can do anything to help save the world against a freaking cosmic destroyer. This mystery is CLASSIC lovecraft and works really well. But then the game overplays its hand it the mystery is shredded. Pious is gonna summon and old god and you need to collect magical artifacts to summon another god to beat into submission (in my case, an early choice meant I was summoning Bulbasaur to defeat Squirtle). While perfectly legit, it makes the game far less scary and intriguing once you have a clear end game to work towards. Not sure how they could have avoided this and had a satifying game arc, but its still worth pointing on that from about 70% on, the game becomes a slog.

Eternal Darkness is a quintessential revist game. You pick it up play for a bit and are like "WOW, I forgot how could this was!" you get about half way through and drop it because you know how it ends. Its horror game through and through with a disappointing ending but fully recommended for at least ONE playthrough. Just don't miss the purple magic sigil like I did.