One of my favorite quotes is from a writer in the 1920's named Howard Philip Lovecraft. He was a strange man who wrote this weird blend of science fiction and horror that never really revealed to you what the protagonist was scared of, mainly because the protagonist more often than not went insane before they even saw what they were scared of. But, I digress. The quote is: "I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth." It's from a story he wrote called The Shadow Out of Time in which a character is slipping backward and forward through time and learning the secret history of the world. In Silicon Knight's Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem the lead character is experiencing something similar through an accursed book called the Tome of Eternal Darkness.
You play Alexandria Roivas, a young woman whose last living relative was murdered in the family mansion. You return, determined to solve the mystery. You discover the Tome of Eternal Darkness and begin to read its pages. Each chapter takes you to a different part of history where you play the role of the main character of that chapter. You'll find yourself playing the role of a Roman Legionnaire, a young Cambodian girl, a medieval monk, a Colonial doctor and an Indiana Jones knock-off just to name few. Each character has different weapons and stats that make them play in different way. The Colonial doctor and Cambodian girl aren't as strong as the Roman Legionnaire so they tire easier and have less health. An increased sanity bar often balances the lack of physical attributes for these characters. Perhaps I should explain just what sanity means in this game.
Sanity is what makes this game so much fun. Your characters go crazy as you play your way through the game. They are seeing evils that defy logic and reason, and their brain just can't cope with it. The walls will start to bleed, you'll hear voices, the camera will change to a more extreme angle, and that's just what happens when you're barely crazy. When your sanity bar slips below half, fun stuff starts happening. You'll cast a healing spell on yourself and your head will explode instead, people that are helping you will turn into zombies and come after you; you completely lose an idea of what is real and what is an hallucination in the game. If your sanity slips any farther than that, the game will start to mess with you in ways that would ruin them to describe here. Let me just say that the game is a lot more fun to play with very little sanity.
Eternal Darkness was originally intended to be a N64 game instead of a Gamecube game, and the graphics show this. Most of the characters are low-polygon and the cinemas are mainly made up of in game visuals with a few pre-rendered sequences for the really important events. The game won't win any awards for being visually stunning, but the graphics work and you never say "Man that looks horrid". They are simple without being bad, and simplicity can be a good thing.
The audio is where this game really shines. The developers went the extra mile and made the game compatible with Dolby Pro Logic II - meaning if you've got the right speaker system those voices in your head will sound like they are really in your head. Every sound in this game is wonderful, from the shuffle of the zombie's decaying feet to the screams of hidden voices in the catacombs…this game sound gorgeous.
But you're not going to be realizing how good this game looks or how amazing the sound is because you're going to be running around quite literally as a crazy person, and the controls are simplistic and responsive enough to make sure you are actually doing what you want to be doing. You have your basic action and aim buttons, as well as a series of "hotkey" buttons you can assign spells to. This come in handy during fights where you don't have time to go back to the spell menu and figure out the combination of runes for a certain spell. You can tell they originally designed the control scheme with the N64 controller in mind, and did an excellent job of adapting and expanding their ideas for the far superior GameCube controller.
The only negative I have about this game is that it becomes almost too easy once you get a certain combination of spells that allow you to heal your health and sanity meters. As long as you can survive a single fight, and have patience you can heal yourself back up to full health. However, before you have these spells, you'll find yourself hoarding health items because of their scarcity. You'll still die once you have the spells, but the game loses some of its stress because you do not have to worry about running out of healing items. It's a minor quip, but one that should be put out there.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is an utterly amazing game. One that will go down as a classic game as time goes on. It was the first game that came close to the psychological horror that HP Lovecraft pioneered. The game may not have all the action to appeal to hardcore FPS fans, but there is enough here to keep them involved. The people who will really get their money's worth out of this game are those that play it late at nights with the lights out and the sound up. If you play it that way, I guarantee that you will be scared witless at this amazing piece of video game horror that Silicon Knights has put together.
And the TV says to me, "I will eat your children." I look back, and say, "Only if I get to play their games after you're done."
