Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

The Good
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem features gameplay spanning two thousand years of history, from the year 2 B.C. to 2000 A.D. You start as Alex Roivas, and your objective is to find who or what murdered your grandfather in the family mansion in Rhode Island. Along the way you will discover the dark secrets of the family and save the world. The game is divided into chapters, which are part of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a chronicle of the saviors the world has never known about. During a chapter you will play as the chapter's character. Between chapters you play as Alex, and attempt to find the next chapter page.

The variety of characters and locations is enjoyable, as are the various weapons that each character uses. The magick system is truly unique and suprisingly intricate, while the game also introduces the concept of sanity. Each monster you face subtracts from your sanity, and as you gradually go insane your character begins to hallucinate. Walls begin to drip blood, ammunition appears on the floor, bugs crawl on your screen, and perhaps you even turn into a zombie. The music adds perfectly to the tense atmosphere, which builds to the final confrontation of good versus evil.

The Bad
Unfortunately, while a figure of sixty hours of gameplay has been lobbed about, that is far from the truth. The first time through the game may take you about twenty hours, but the puzzles do not change from game to game, only the cutscenes. Also, the puzzles are the weakest chain in the game. Most consist of countering one magick type with another, and once you've figured out the basic idea all the rest are ridiculously simple. However, the most egregious example of the puzzles takes place late in the game where the player is forced to repeat a puzzle that was completed in a previous chapter. There is no change, simply the same half-hour long repetition. Additionally, some players will find the total lack of extra ammunition for the guns irritating in the extreme. Finally, while it doesn't particularly effect gameplay, by the time you watch your fortieth bone and paper zombie spurt several gallons of blood you'll be thoroughly sick of the whole thing.

The Bottom Line
If you want an H.P. Lovecraft style romp through history, slashing monsters at every turn, this game is for you. If you'd prefer a more straight forward hack and slash, or a Tomb Raider style blaster, you're better off steering clear of this game.

The Good
Wow! For the first time since the original Alone in the Dark and "Legacy: Realm of Terror", a "horror" game that is really creepy instead of just gory. The game story is interesting and well-told, and the game is not so difficult that you won't be able to finish the story. While nowhere near as complex as the two classics I mentioned, let alone a Lovecraftian novel or FtF game, the story is still a little deeper than the usual "survival horror" genre story.

The visuals are up to modern standards - the main protagonist in particular is rendered completely realistically, though some of the ancillary characters like servants and nurses in historical settings are too dark and a bit polygon-ey.

The sound, though, is extremely well-done and extremely well-used to convey the mood, especially of your character's Sanity. At full sanity, you get background music and atmospheric sounds. With a little sanity loss, you start hearing phantom noises. Then the music fades and is replaced by formless, wordless voices and whispers. By the time your sanity hits bottom you are surrounded by hallucinatory voices and screams. The voices of the Ancients are also both well scripted and well rendered - the first time I heard the Ancient of Madness speak it sent shivers up my spine, and I plan to play the game through twice more to see the variations with each of the other options for which Ancient is plotting to return, at least as much to hear their voices as to earn the final special ending.

The other main "sanity" effect, the programmed hallucinations, is also extremely effective. The game is immersive enough that some of the "player-level" hallucinations combine with the haunting sound environment to provide a sense of reality shock, instead of seeming cheap the way they might out of context. The "character level" hallucinations vary in effectiveness, from stock psychological melodrama to eerie reality warps.

The framework of the story, taking control of various historical characters as your main character "reads" their biographies in the Book, is a nice, consistent way to get some of the advantages of a time travel plot without the big problems of fitting such a high-ramification thing consistently into a GameCube mini-CD game. The way the player recognizes the locations of earlier entries as later ones encounter them centuries later - exactly like the character reading the Book would - is particularly clever. There's a great deal of care taken for internal consistency, which is something I've learned not to expect from most console RPGs, let alone "survival horror" games.

The Bad
Of course, so much quality density uses up storage space very quickly. The game is a little short, perhaps 12 hours of playtime. Even if you play through all three times, that's less than 40 hours which is very short by my standards.

And although it's disguised very well and with great consistency, the actual play is rather linear. Locks, magical force fields, magical illusions, the reasons why you are forced to go through each sub-story in a particular order, and to do things in a particular order within a substory, are well-done and don't feel arbitrary, but they are definitely there. Certainly this is the least annoyed I've ever been by linearity, and linearity is after all the norm on console games.

The Bottom Line
When I bought my GameCube, I completely expected a poor selection of games that I'd like. I wanted to play the remake of Skies of Arcadia, and to use the GBA Player, and I wasn't surprised that there was basically nothing else I wanted to play. Then I found this game. I suddenly feel that the GameCube purchase was not a waste. This is the most pleased I've been with a console game in years - I think since the original Skies of Arcadia back on the Dreamcast. Intelligent horror, well done, with a real, effective sense of creepiness instead of cheap gore. Wonderful!

The Good
Eternal Darkness is an excellent game of the horror genre, putting it at the same level as the Silent Hill series. While the production is not nearly as terrifyingly real as the SH series, ED has several unique features that make most Cthulu fans smile.

One of the most interesting is the Sanity meter. It measures how well grounded your character is with the 'real' world, and anytime that you encounter mystical and unnatural beings, your sanity will decrease. The most interesting feature about the lack of sanity is that it has a direct correlation to how the game interacts with you. Whereas in other games, it might simply be considered another attribute, along with health and mana, in ED, it affects gameplay, by creating illusory monsters, fake rooms, and strange video errors.

The storyline, about an ancient evil rising from beyond time and space, is a classic one, and they didn't do it wrong in ED.

The Bad
There are chapters of the game where you are dangerously under-equipped. Without proper guidance, those places can be very difficult and repetitive, as you replay the same scenes over and over again, in order to find a way through it.

The Bottom Line
A great game if you are a fan of Lovecraftian Horror. If not, then it is just a good game in the horror genre.