One night, I borrowed the game from a local movie rental outlet. Remember those? It seems they've long since become a relic of the past, replaced almost entirely by digital distribution and existing now only in the form of automated kiosks at supermarkets. My future children will never believe me when I tell them that entire buildings dedicated to renting out movies on physical media were once commonplace, and that the decent ones even had a section for video games. (On discs! With no DRM or DLC! Amazing!) Could Eternal Darkness really be so old?
Actually, yes. In fact, it came out in North America ten years ago this month. A full decade has passed since the release of what many would consider to be a masterpiece... and still no sequel. (The developer, Silicon Knights, instead spent too many years working on Too Human, a planned trilogy that ended up being a single game with mediocre reception.) There are currently some rumors of a sequel being developed for Wii U (along with some more rumors that the sequel, though never officially announced, has already been cancelled), but sequel-related rumors have been floating around at least since 2006, when Silicon Knights president Dennis Dyack claimed that a sequel to Eternal Darkness was a sure thing. That was six years ago, and none of the "news" since then has been concrete enough to get my hopes up. Nintendo did renew the trademark back in 2010, but U.S. trademarks need to be renewed every ten years anyway, so this might have been routine procedure. Until an official source hands out some official information, any speculation is misinformation and I refuse to participate.
In any case, I'm glad those rental stores were still around at the time, because otherwise I would have missed out on some neat games. I had no idea what to expect from Eternal Darkness, in particular, and I guess that was part of the fun. I only hoped it would be worth my time, and if it wasn't, wasting a few dollars on a bad rental would be worth the money I saved by not buying the damn thing. It was kind of a win-win situation, so I went with it.
As usual, I read through the instruction booklet before playing. I was a bit overwhelmed when I saw profiles for half a dozen characters, all from different historical eras, in the first few pages. (For some reason, only half of the playable characters were actually listed here, as if to let the player know the story is going to span two millennia while still withholding some nice surprises.) When I got to the page about sanity, I was intrigued, and cautiously optimistic; already, the whole concept of a sanity meter, alongside the ubiquitous health meter and the familiar (though oddly spelled) "magick" meter, seemed like a very original gimmick, but still a gimmick. I guess I still feel that way, to a certain extent.
The sanity meter is the game's defining feature, and you can't really describe the game without bringing it up. It hadn't been done before, and it hasn't been done the same way since, probably because Nintendo has a patent on it. The basic idea, as implemented in the game (though the patent makes it sound slightly cooler), was that a character's sanity would decrease when he or she encountered a monster — or, more specifically (and counter-intuitively), when the monster saw the character. (Shouldn't it be the other way around?) The character could then regain sanity by performing a finishing attack on a defeated monster. The most amusing aspect of the sanity system, in my opinion, is that your character would suffer a catastrophic loss of sanity if you went and killed an innocent bystander; in this case, delivering a finishing blow simply wouldn't do you any good.
When a character's sanity was low enough, things got weird. The camera would tilt, the walls would bleed, and you would start to hear crazy voices. Occasionally, full-blown hallucinations occurred, and while most of them involved the protagonists unexpectedly dying in hilarious ways, some of these hallucinations were an attempt to break the fourth wall, or to trick the player into thinking the game had malfunctioned. It was a clever way of making the player feel how the character felt — that he or she was going a bit mad. Throughout my first play-through, even when the game wasn't pretending that my television had just turned itself off, I had to wonder what was "real" and what was simply the result of the protagonist's deteriorating mental health. Few of these effects were likely to actually scare the player, but I'd never seen a more ambitious attempt at player immersion.
But the full-blown hallucinations usually ended with the character screaming, "this can't be happening!" — after which everything went back to normal, often returning the player to the previous room. (The game just isn't cruel enough to have these hallucinations actually affect your ability to win.) Strictly as a gameplay mechanic, the sanity meter was only a minor annoyance. You wouldn't lose for running out of "sanity," per se, but if the character would lose sanity while the sanity meter was empty, health was subtracted instead. Of course, this would rarely happen to a careful player. Impatient players, on the other hand, might tire of finishing off every defeated monster. This was, actually, a rather tedious task, since each finishing move would take a couple of seconds. And if you weren't quick enough, dead monsters would disintegrate on their own before you reached them, and you'd get none of that precious sanity back. At some point in the game, I did get tired of hitting the "Finish Him!" button; I was tempted to ignore it entirely, and instead rely exclusively on a spell which restored sanity in exchange for magick.
The game's magick system was almost as innovative as the sanity feature. At the very least, the potential was there, even though the execution was questionable. Different combinations of magickal runes, collected throughout the game, were combined to create different spells. With five "target" runes, five "effect" runes, four "alignment" runes, and an optional "power" rune to beef up any type of magick, the developers could have provided us with a fairly extensive list of spells. To be precise, assuming each target/effect combination were used, there could have been 25 distinct spell types. Instead, only 10 combinations were used, and while you could technically count 117 different spells if you were to separately consider each alignment rune and each acceptable number of power runes per spell, the complete spell list was still, in retrospect, a bit underwhelming. The player was even encouraged to try new rune combinations to discover spells, rather waiting for the game to reveal the correct recipes, but with only 10 acceptable target/effect combinations — and with many of the spells being revealed to the player as soon as the necessary runes were available — this wasn't quite as exciting as it sounds. The new spell feature was used mostly to create more powerful versions of spells you had already learned. [Spoilers in the video below.]
But perhaps, as a guy who has already beaten this game a dozen times, I'm being too demanding. Most of the spells that did exist in the game were pretty bad-ass, and they offered better ways to handle situations which might otherwise, to the unimaginative player, seem difficult. Playing the ninth chapter, arguably the scariest level in the game, I found myself facing a bunch of bonethieves — freakish, agile monsters that hide inside of human hosts and, if left without a host, try to crawl right down your throat. To defend myself, I had only guns (which are terrible for fighting bonethieves) and a photographer's flash pan (meant to temporarily blind enemies). Instead of fighting them myself, with my limited ammunition, I got rid of them by repeatedly summoning trappers — little crawly dudes that can teleport enemies to another dimension. It was the easy way out, but it was more fun stunning them with the flash pan and running like a coward until I found a proper weapon, which is probably what the developers intended.
The best you could ask for, in a linear game, is the ability to handle a given situation in a few different ways. That's why the plasmids in BioShock were so nice, and why the gravity gun in Half-Life 2 added some extra mileage to what otherwise would have been a straight-forward sci-fi shooter. Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that Eternal Darkness provided more than a couple of opportunities to diverge from its linear chain of puzzles, or that the combat — relatively open-ended though it might have been — was very good. But Eternal Darkness was, first and foremost, a psychological horror-themed puzzle game, not the type of game in which the combat itself was very important. Fortunately, it wasn't a big obstacle, either. In fact, most of the combat was so easy that brute force worked just fine — enchant your sword and start swinging, and you'd rarely go wrong — and if you ever did run into trouble, you just had to come up with another strategy, try different spells, and be more careful. The fighting itself was a bit clunky, and the ability to selectively target the limbs and heads of your enemies wasn't entirely as cool as it sounds, but it worked.
The way I see it, Eternal Darkness could have been a good supernatural horror even without the sanity features, since the magick system alone would have been enough to set it apart from the Resident Evil titles to which Eternal Darkness was so frequently and so unfairly compared. Perhaps it even could have been a decent puzzle-based survival horror without the magick, as well. Playing as a dozen different characters, with a variety of different weapons (from swords to fully automatic firearms), in a 2000-year struggle against the minions of ancient and all-powerful beings that transcend the physical realm and could squash the entire planet without breaking a sweat... well, that's a pretty good foundation for a psychological horror already. Add the spell creation system and sanity effects, and you have something truly special. The fact that the game is innovative in multiple ways makes it worth remembering, and worth replaying.
I ended up buying the game, twice — once because I loved it, and again because my first disc was scratched, which caused some skipping during the cutscenes. But that's what I get for buying a used copy. (Used games! Another soon-to-be relic of days gone by. The industry has almost succeeded in killing the used game market and I expect them to finish the job in the next couple of years. Apparently a used-game-buyer like me is just as bad as pirates or shoplifters in terms of "taking money away" from the developers. I doubt the poor condition of the disc was due to bad karma, though, since my second copy was also pre-owned, but in much better condition.)
Eternal Darkness is a very immersion- and story-driven game, and nothing more rudely breaks this immersion than dialogue that skips and stutters like a broken record, so having a scratched disc just drove me crazy. If you plan on getting your hands on a copy of this game, try to find one that's undamaged. It seems the game is already prone to occasional skipping in good condition, as it tends to drive the console somewhat bonkers, with the little motor in the disc drive pushing the laser back and forth rapidly during cutscenes and loading screens. At least, this is the case with both of my discs, and I've tried them on more than one GameCube as well as a Wii. I've heard similar complaints from other people, all of whom claim that Eternal Darkness is the only game that does this. Perhaps the game itself is possessed by some angry spirits.
None of this will matter to you if you plan on skipping all the cutscenes, but if you're playing a game like Eternal Darkness without paying any attention to the story, you're probably not enjoying it. Gameplay is always the most important aspect of a game, but the plot here is really a crucial part of what makes the game enjoyable. Even some of the vocal performances are pretty well done. [Spoilers in the video below.]
But there are also some rough spots, usually with the characters who don't have many lines. A particular conversation, between primary protagonist Alexandra Roivas and an unimportant supporting character, Inspector Legrasse of the Rhode Island State Police, is so far from believable that it's hard not to laugh, or cringe, or both. It's really a shame that this dialogue occurs right in the opening cinematic.
The fact that I wrote this much probably makes it a bit too obvious that Eternal Darkness is one of my favorite games despite its few shortcomings. I'm even a bit disappointed when people tell me they've never heard of it, but I wouldn't call it underrated. Underappreciated, maybe. But "underrated" is a worthless term, either way, since it conveys nothing but the fact that whoever uses the word is in disagreement with the critics; to say a game can actually be underrated (or overrated) implies that each game has an objective amount of goodness, some sort of inherent rating, that must be compared to the critical reception it receives. In other words, it's a way of saying that everyone else is wrong. And in this case, considering all the positive reviews, I think it's simply untrue that the game was underrated in the slightest. Although it might have deserved a bit more popularity in its own time, it's remembered as one of the best GameCube titles a decade later, and that's something.
