Horror Games Special Feature – Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Posted on 21st October 2015 by

With Halloween just around the corner, we felt it was time to delve into some of the horror classics of gaming!
In the nights leading up to All Hallows Eve, we’re going to do a short feature of some of the more notable horror games that have been released. This isn’t a list of the best or even our favourites.
Just some Horror games which have stood out to us, for one reason or another.

You simply can’t have a list about notable horror games and not include Eternal Darkness.
You just can’t.
If you see a list that doesn’t include it, it means the writer hasn’t played it or they’re actively trying to spark controversy. Possibly both, maybe they’re just insane, who knows?!

…and with that convenient set-up, we can lead into why the game is so noteworthy: Sanity. As mentioned in our article on Amnesia, plenty of games have played with the idea of sanity in games since. You could even make the argument that games have done it long before (there’s more than a little madness in American McGee’s Alice, for example).

Yet Eternal Darkness gets a privileged spot because sanity had never been so integral to gameplay before this. You never had a ‘sanity meter’, where you could actively see how mad you were going and attempt to get a little less crazy if it just became too much.
That might just sound like another fancy term for ‘health meter’ but not so! The sanity meter played an entirely different role.

Much like Amnesia, low sanity could cause you to have hallucinations. And the emphasis is on you here! Not your character.
You might think that’s one and the same thing, but your character can’t see the volume bar at the bottom of the screen slowly decreasing.
Your character can’t see the To Be Continued Screen at a pivotal moment in the game.
Your character can’t see your files being deleted against your will…

Now, admittedly, Eternal Darkness never approaches other gaming greats when it comes to horror. It has a great story and a tense atmosphere, but it isn’t scary scary.
But it does plague on that one very real fear that every gamer, playing any game, has at any given time:
what if the game breaks?
In that sense, fear has existed since video-games were invented and Eternal Darkness was smart enough to capitalize on that fear.

Cleverly, it doesn’t dole out these sanity effects until later in the game. You get some more standard effects, such as giant enemies or false deaths to begin with.
It’s only later, when you feel like you’ve really made progress in the lengthy campaign that the evil error messages start popping up.

Another minor note, and one the game rarely gets recognition for, is that this game was released around the same time as Resident Evil: Code Veronica, when clunky tank controls were very much canon in horror.
Weirdly, Eternal Darkness didn’t make the jump to over the shoulder controls, a lá Resident Evil 4, but it did make major improvements to the typical tank controls model. The result is that it handles far better than any of the older survival horror games, while remaining charmingly retro.

Best Moment:
This will nearly always be a matter of taste and/or which sanity effect you get hit with first. For us, that just happened to be the volume effect (particularly because, as soon as it happened, I pumped the volume up full blast and scared the crap out of myself when it returned to normal.)
Here’s a video that sums all the effects up.*

*Obviously don’t watch if you plan on playing the game and discovering for yourself.

Where is the franchise now?
A spiritual sequel called Shadow of the Eternals was announced way back in 2013. It went onto Kickstarter (twice) but failed to reach its goal on both occasions.
Rumours were circulating that the game had been cancelled, but Denis Dyack (the game’s writer) has insisted that it is still in development. Here’s hoping…
The game was originally planned for release on PCs and Wii U.