Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002, Silicon Knights)
I was 12 years old when Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was released in 2002 and was compelled to ask my parents to buy it for me, not only for the sheer novelty of a Nintendo-published M-rated title that was serious in tone, i.e. not Conker's Bad Fur Day, but also for the much-hyped fourth wall-breaking sanity effects which sounded so wild and new to me at the time. I received it, and then never finished it. I don't think I ever even put more than two hours into any given attempt to play it; it unnerved me that much. I would come back to it again and again, a few weeks or months apart, to start anew thinking, "it's just a game. It can't like... 'get' me." But I would sit in front of the CRT television, the same that sits on a repurposed endtable next to me as I write this essay, slowly going through the opening prologue and maybe the first and second chapter, eventually unable to move my character a centimeter lest the game throw something at me that I simply couldn't emotionally handle. I would then turn it off and play Super Mario Sunshine or something instead.
I've come to realize that the capacity for a horror-themed videogame to frighten its player is greater than that of a horror film to scare its audience. When I saw The Ring, released in the same year as Eternal Darkness, I couldn't sleep comfortably in front of a television for a couple of weeks. But I saw it in theaters, and watched every bit of it, and then I got it on DVD and watched it numerous times more. I could enjoy The Ring in a way I was incapable of with Eternal Darkness, not least because The Ring is a 2-hour experience vs. Eternal Darkness's length comparable to a full season of a television show, but moreover because film is passive; you don't have any control over the events of the story, and the characters are going to do what they do, even if you sometimes really wish they wouldn't, even if you loudly vocalize this wish while watching. You watch, with trepidatious interest, the consequences of these autonomous characters, and then you may later watch again with numbed sensitivity to their actions that once generated suspense, perhaps still being creeped out enough by the imagery that the film remains compelling. It's interactivity, though, that separates the videogame from the motion picture, and when the onus is on you to tell the character (here for real) to open that door in the spooky mansion, or descend that ladder into the chasm, or to read that cursed book, or to, again now in the character's shoes, actually react to the potentially approaching jumpscare, you may elect not to take the chance. I know my adolescent self certainly did.
I'm here to say that in 2022, Eternal Darkness affects me in a similar way only subdued by 20 more years of maturity, and my now keener aesthetic acuity tells me that its exquisitely spooky atmosphere owes a lot to its sound design. It screws with your head hard as your character wanders past torches whose flames will randomly loudly pop from time to time, or as you're going about your adventure game puzzle solving duties you'll hear aggressive banging on the door from someone who isn't there, which still makes me jump a little. As your sanity meter lowers your characters will start whimpering gibberish helplessly to themselves, and the music will turn pitch black with some scenarios offering disturbing ambiance with sounds mixed in of a woman and child alternating between giggling and wailing in terror, or pain. Unsettling stuff. Eternal Darkness would not be half the game that it is with a lesser attention to detail in its handling of sound effects and music. The game's environments look the part as well, with some quite impressive texture work in the sand, stone, grody mansion walls, and so on. The character models are well animated but overall don't look nearly as good as in the Resident Evil remake, released the same year, though this is understandable given that the latter uses prerendered backgrounds at fixed camera angles and so can dedicate all of the GameCube's power to rendering the characters. With Eternal Darkness's dynamic camera movement between fixed angles, full 3D environments and 60 frames per second the visuals more than suffice to set the right mood. Occasionally the game will attempt to convey a view to an inaccessible outdoor area with a big ol' flat texture which looks very obviously fake and a bit jarring, but these occasions are thankfully rare as the almost exclusively indoors setting of the plot scarcely writes checks the visuals can't cash.
The "action" in Eternal Darkness's action adventure presents itself in the form of, as usual, combat. The game features a targeting system in which you can select one of an enemy's individual body parts, most commonly their limbs, head or torso, to attack when using a melee or projectile weapon. For swords and clubs it works pretty well most of the time once you wrap your head around the targeting perspective being that of your character rather than the camera, which in a game with fixed camera angles can initially seem awkward, though when the room gets crowded it can be a little frustrating switching the targeting between enemies. Using guns or crossbows is about as clunky as it gets and is rarely worth the hassle when every character gets early access to a melee weapon, so I really only used projectiles when picking off the small scorpion-like Trappers from a distance. I can't say that the gunplay is any worse than an RE game's, but Eternal Darkness is designed around more often engaging with the enemy directly with a large arsenal of weaponry in your limitless inventory rather than running away due to scarceness of resources and space to keep them in, not to mention the former's enemies can get pretty tanky while the projectile weaponry doesn't provide much advantage in terms of stopping power, so the many different types of guns and ammo scattered throughout the game often went to waste after I picked them up out of obligation. The Magick system, in which you concoct spells out of the several runes you gradually collect, is much more tightly designed and a lot of fun to use. Every spell can have one of three power levels and an alignment with one of the three-ish gods the game's plot is centered around, which determines what the spell does or how it affects already present Magick of other alignments in rock-paper-scissors fashion. There's a bit of a tactical edge to it as well, as you'll generally want to stick to weaker but quicker-to-cast spells related to attack or recovery mapped to a hotkey during combat, whereas you can take your time with stronger, slower ones that buff yourself or your weapons before heading into a fight or other dangerous area.
The titular Tome of Eternal Darkness, a cursed book made from human flesh and bone passed down magically over millennia, provides a nifty narrative framing device. The protagonist is Alex Roivas, who after her grandfather Edward is mysteriously killed, sets out to investigate his mansion for answers and comes across this very book. We start out as Alex, and through her we read the book and experience the stories of all who have come into possession of it, in between each chapter regaining control of our protagonist to go find the next chapter hidden somewhere in the house, usually using some skill we learned in the last one. Not only is this a nice tidy way to convey a story that both has a central main character and takes place across the scale of millennia, it's also a very convincing way to maintain character development across multiple characters; the spells and runes are ostensibly stored in the pages of the book itself and so are passed along from character to character over the centuries. Through this and other aspects Eternal Darkness has a remarkable commitment to diegesis in its mechanics, as aside from the health, Magick and sanity meters and some of the sillier sanity effects, everything has a reason to exist in its world. The big bad guy even casts spells in cutscenes with the same animation that a character would in-game. New mechanics are introduced logically and naturally through each successive character, furthering the sense of progression across stories; if I really wanted to reach, I could say that the book itself is the real main character. You'll see the same handful of environments across chapters but at drastically different points in time, so you'll notice perhaps an additional room here and there, or an area that once looked new but is now in an advanced state of decay. The episodic structure of the game goes hand-in-hand with the nature of the adventure component of its genre, as each story has its own main character and its own setting with its own set of puzzles and items to go along with it, so the environments can never get too labyrinthine and confusing nor the puzzles too layered or farfetched. See I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream for another great example of this kind of structure in a more pure adventure game setting. Sadly the game does run a bit long. Despite the attention paid to the clean framing of the plot, a few stories feel extraneous and repetitive, and one seems bafflingly out of place. Worse, its last few chapters feature some downright infuriatingly tedious puzzles in which you're constantly doing the bad form of backtracking: slowly combing over the same set of small (but also too big) uninteresting areas over and over again to do a large scale but really dumb task.
A tedious puzzle and an overly obscure puzzle: the difference here is that an obscure puzzle you only have to figure out once, and maybe you beat your head against it for hours and after finally brute forcing it you throw up your hands and exclaim, "how the hell was I supposed to know that!" But once you know it, you know it. The obscurity of the puzzle probably will make it even more memorable than the simpler ones, and should you play the game again you'll remember what you did and those hours of breaking your mind over it aren't there to experience anymore. A tedious puzzle, on the other hand, is always tedious. Eternal Darkness does encourage multiple playthroughs as a decision made very early on determines what kinds of enemies you'll face and some between-chapter story beats, as well as the ending. Do all of the endings to get the true ending. During my eventually aborted second playthrough, a remark made by Tim Rogers somewhere in one of his massive and highly entertaining video essays, in a reinforcement of a Kotaku article about how videogames are better the second time around, that a second playthrough is one that you've "rehearsed" for, entered my mind. As a metaphor, at the time, it struck me as not quite right. In a linear action adventure game that relies heavily on solving puzzles, wherein on the first playthrough the protagonist stumbles through their world, absorbs it, gathers clues and context, and slowly comes to understand what it is that needs to be done before doing it, its wrongness seemed clear. On a second playthrough of such a game, one immediately knows what to do. One knows as soon as the scenario starts there's a note on a podium and the character needs to go pick it up and show it to that soldier guarding that door they need to enter; the knowledge of the player gives the character not a heightened sense of how to move about in the game's world, but a narratively unnatural premonition. In the former case, the character is acting exactly as they should act, whereas in the latter their actions are, while correct, nonsensical within the internal consistency of the story.
An actor rehearses from a script to do what they're supposed to do on the stage, or in front of the camera. What a player is supposed to do is struggle against the conflict they're presented with, and through this feel just as lost or as grounded as the character might. Do I, on the second time around, continue to wander and absorb, pretending not to know exactly what to do and how the story is going to turn out? Is that "role-playing?" Is this what I "rehearsed" for? What is the value in continuing on artificially doing what I did the first time? What is the value in instead knocking out the objectives as I remember them? At the time I preferred doing the latter, but is that because I had just done all of them and didn't leave any significant span of time in between games? The aforementioned metaphor holds up better in the face of a more action-focused game, in which the challenge lies in mastering a technique, and in which the character over successive playthroughs might seem more like a badass who knows what's up and knows what these predictable goons are going to do; narrative plays a role here. See the purest action genres of the arcade whose entire appeal is replayability. And it's not only spatial accuracy and reflexes that can support this, as in a sufficiently complex strategy game that requires neither, you basically need to play several games before you have even a clue of what you're doing. And it's not only skill, either, as a game that has many branching paths like King of Chicago or Tokimeki Memorial can provide a replay experience that doesn't artificialize the narrative, because you might have no idea what's coming up next despite having played before. Though in the last case, it's hard to say that what you've done in previous playthroughs was "rehearsal," it's more like you're just playing a somewhat new game in the same system of mechanics. What am I even driving at here? My first full experience with Eternal Darkness was quite enjoyable as I found my way about the world, same as the characters would in their individual situations. Is it that the game is bad because it encourages replays despite not being very sincerely replayable? Not really even that! I found genuine entertainment in completely demolishing the majority of the game on my second time through, though as a kind of novelty that doesn't really come from the game world itself, but from seeing how fast I was blazing through it compared to the first time. At least until the last few hours, when it came time to do the tedious puzzles again, at which point I stopped playing, and I'm skeptical as to whether leaving that span of time between games would make it any easier to stomach again.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is richly, darkly atmospheric and aesthetically intoxicating, but with a somewhat clunky combat system and a tail-end filled with a level of drudgery that almost defies credulity. I found it hard to assess exactly how I should rate this game, as the majority of my first time through I loved (i.e., would consider "Great"), and loved genuinely from what the game world itself presented to me rather than from the silly pseudo-speedrun challenge egged on by its encouragement of achieving multiple endings within a battery of already solved puzzles in the second go 'round. I find myself in a kind of trap I once read about wherein a critic conjures up a perfected ideal and then critiques from that position all the negatives, but I hold to the idea that if Eternal Darkness had stuck the landing I would have finished that second playthrough and likely even a third if I didn't have to churn through the last few hours of the story, and I would have declared it unquestionably great, half-baked aspects of combat and artificiality of further playthroughs brushed completely aside without the slightest consternation. Well, maybe a little consternation. Am I treating this whole criticism thing too much like some kind of mathematical certainty? It's not that I'm scoring every aspect of the game and taking an average, the last few hours of the game absolutely stick in my mind as exasperating... but not as much as what came before it was thrilling. It is significant that I didn't want to do what the game wanted me to do and finish the game the requisite number of times to see the true ending, but not as significant as how much the game still made me feel very uncomfortable, still startled me, and still surprised me with how much care was put into the atmosphere of nearly every individual room. I can, at least, recommend it on that basis.
Final rating: 4/5 (Good)