The Haunted Hoard: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (GameCube)
One of the most terrifying things about losing your mind is that you likely won’t even realize it’s happening. Insanity has been represented across fiction in a multitude of ways, but if you realize the breaks from reality are in fact false, that means you still have some presence of mind. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a creative survival horror game that tries to at least temporarily break the borders of fiction to steep you in the same sense of slipping sanity as its heroes, toying with how it presents itself so you, for a moment, believe in things that aren’t true.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem’s main character is technically Alexandra Roivas, but the cosmic struggle she has gotten herself involved in has been ongoing for centuries and you play more often as some character from the past who got caught up in the conflicts of cruel gods from other dimensions. Beginning with a first encounter in Ancient Rome, the plot sees people in different places and time periods each encounter the lingering influence and machinations of those who are compelled to serve the power-hungry deities and aim to bring them to our world to spread their Eternal Darkness. You may find yourself a capable adventurer in India plunging into ruins or a humble Franciscan monk discovering the true nature of a monastery, the plot revisiting some locations across the years with the tools and knowledge available to you shifting in turn. Each chapter having a different lead character in a different point in time leads to an interesting but not linear evolution in how you can deal with the cosmic threats, because whether it is with blade and bowgun or firearms and magic, you’ll find the horrors can be fought against and yet still pose a threat to you beyond your bodily health.
The most famous element of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem are the Sanity Effects, and for good reason. Most characters you find yourself as have an encounter with the Tome of Darkness that opens their eyes to the truth of the world around them, this in turn coming with a horrible toll. As you begin to encounter the monstrosities in service to the dark gods known as The Ancients, the minds of your characters will be put under strain, represented in game with a handy green meter but also in much more impactful ways. As your sanity dwindles, your perspective on the game world will literally shift. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem relies on fixed camera angles for its 3D exploration, but as you lose your mind more and more, the screen tilts that perspective for some easy unease. The weaker your grip on reality though, the more things can become unsettling. You might be plagued by unusual sounds, some horrific like the sounds of screaming and children crying, others meant to trick you like a sudden knock at the nearby door when no one is there. Your character may start attacking on their own, making you wonder if you bumped a button, but then the game starts to attack the player’s senses.
I shall not spoil some of the game’s best or most impressive tricks, but soon you’ll find the game playing with its very nature as a video game. It might make your T.V. seem like it turned off or it might throw you in a room with far too many enemies surrounding you to possibly escape alive. It will claim your controller is disconnected, and while you may think even knowing about the sanity effects in advance might prepare you for their appearance, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem has a subtle hand with its more effective ones. You’ll see areas filled with bugs or floating books as simpler obvious signs of sanity slippage, but even if your sanity meter is low, it will usually wait a while before pulling out its most surprising ones, leading to moments where you will be caught off-guard. In fact, you may even become suspicious of things that are not sanity effects, helping to steep you deeper into the mindset of someone contending with forces they can’t fully comprehend since your own perception is being toyed with rather than just your character’s.
Being that sanity is a meter though, you can find ways to recover sanity, although it’s actually not too harmful to let it at least be partially depleted if you are morbidly curious about the way things can go wrong. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem lets you save most anywhere when you aren’t too close to danger so you can afford living on the edge a bit, but if your sanity does get too low, starting to experience situations meant to lower it will start to pull from your health instead. At first though, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem isn’t exactly a hard survival horror experience. When you encounter the zombies and monsters, you can lock onto different body parts, even a character who isn’t gifted with a sword still sometimes able to carve off an arm or hit the head square on to lessen the threat a foe presents. When a monster is killed, there’s a brief period where you can finish them off to regenerate some sanity too, so even though each new horror impacts your mental health, seeing that you can overcome them helps you avoid painful insanity well before you begin to dabble into the depths of the games Magick system. The adventure does take some time to present true horrors that put up a tough fight, but even though you begin encounter them late in the game when you’ll be at your greatest strength, they end up being the toughest threats because the game does not need to account for your weakness as much anymore.
What fiends you face will change though based on an early choice in the plot, one made effectively without the necessary information on what you’re getting into. This does fit somewhat with the game’s Lovecraftian inspiration, the player presented with three artifacts of unclear importance because you are only just starting to dip your toes into the kinds of things that would drive men mad to know. The artifact you select determines which cosmic being you’ll actually face across the game’s main story, the choice at once not too important but still quite meaningful. Each dark god has unique minions and some of them can do things like drain your magic or sanity better than the servants of the other gods, and while different scenes are made to match the different approaches and behaviors of the Ancient, the general plot and important moments won’t divert too far from each other. This is partly because the main servant of whichever being is the focus is the more present antagonist, the undying priest of these Ancients connecting these stories as you’re always intrigued to see not just his part in things but how a specific character like a bored Persian dancer might end up having cosmic significance in this battle across the ages.
Beyond the regular weapons and how they’re aimed, you will also gradually uncover runes for the crafting of Magick spells. You can, as long as you know the runes, always craft the related spells, although there are tools to instruct you on their proper combination as well. Magick ends up an increasingly important tool in fighting back against the servants of the Ancients, be it protective spells to shield you from damage and recover dwindling health and sanity or more active tools like revealing invisible dangers or directly damaging foes. You can even see your foes casting similar spells, more advanced and powerful ones taking time to cast so you need to both find your moments to unleash your best Magicks or try to interrupt or anticipate the casting of an incoming spell. Magic is even attuned to the different Ancients, these dark gods having no love for each other so their magics can be countered by knowing how they interact with each other. Puzzles and trap-filled hallways also will ask for you to be more thoughtful along the journey, the different chapters usually not taking place across enormous spaces so you can keep important information or items in mind, although the much tougher monsters of the late game do make whether you stand and fight or flee an important consideration as well.
Admittedly, the reuse of locations can sometimes lead to repetitive moments, especially with the two final chapters repeating an already lengthy experience despite their small alterations to its flow. At the same time, individual chapters aren’t usually too long, meaning even characters who rely on firearms don’t necessarily have to watch their ammunition use too much to survive. Magick knowledge is carried across chapters, although since Magick recovers by walking, sometimes you find yourself running in place to get enough juice for a heal or a puzzle-relevant spell. It’s definitely not enough to drag down the experience though, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem too captivating with its construction and the unfolding mysteries to be let down by a few moments where you run circles to ready yourself for the fights ahead.
THE VERDICT: The sanity effects alone in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem would have already put it head and shoulders above common horror, the player likely to chuckle at an obvious one only to sit up in surprise as the game’s patience and occasional subtlety allow for others to catch you off guard. The combat system starts off in your favor as you’re eased in, only for later monsters to truly test how well you’ve come to know the Magick system and when it’s wiser to just run. The story across eras gives frequent shifts to the kind of tale being told, the story sometimes as near as modern Rhode Island or as far as an underground temple to interdimensional beings in the ancient Middle East. A little repetitiveness can’t wear down a game that moves at an excellent pace in providing new scenarios for its evolving gameplay and scares to take root.
And so, I give Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for Nintendo GameCube…
A FANTASTIC rating. It’s easy to be wowed by Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem taking the next step in immersion and making the player question their own understanding of the game they’re playing, and by not overplaying that part of the experience, it manages to preserve the surprise and intended effect of them. You still get effective moments of insanity between the showstoppers, elements like the awful screaming and the tilting screen appropriate for a horror title and keeping you from getting comfortable, but when the game comes for you, it’s hard not to be impressed even if you keep telling yourself to be prepared for it. Between those moments though this is still a wonderfully crafted game. The early fights not being too difficult isn’t too much of a problem thanks to the evolution later, and it’s not like targeting a body part is a guaranteed dismemberment either since different characters have different skill with the weapons they wield. Later fights may even be too intimidating if you try and stand your ground, that being the point where Magick and good sense on when to pick your battles starts to dominate the encounters more. Puzzles, revelations, and encounters with new creatures carry the game well through each chapter no matter the setting, and only a few moments of repetition really need ironing out to keep up the game’s otherwise excellent balance of how much time you spend in a certain place or as a certain character caught up in this cosmic battle against the Ancients. The three alternate plot paths differentiating in the ways they do also prevents a feeling of missing out, the path different to be sure but not necessitating multiple playthroughs even if there is a small extra scene unlocked through doing so.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem can provide a sense of unease through its narrative, its traditional monstrous scares, and its imaginative disruptions to the game’s reality, and yet it’s also not a horror game that obstructs your ability to appreciate it. Accessible and usually only clunky in understandable ways like a monk not exactly being a gifted swordsman, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is an excellent horror game for players who might be scared off by combat limitations in harder titles or more visceral grotesque terrors. While this game does have its share of blood and horrible monsters, it prefers to unsettle and unnerve with the way it disrupts your experience, sometimes with its sanity effects, other times with the more universally understood threat of a tough fight. In an odd way, you are given a good deal of control with the save system and targeting individual body parts, but control is sometimes what is threatened, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem already working well as a Lovecraftian horror narrative but with the extra bonus of a strong relationship with the player pushing it to new unforgettable heights.