""This is just like that other game!""

…or not.

If you’re coming to Eternal Darkness from the Resident Evil series and its endless series of spin-offs and copycats, then you probably think you know everything about the survival horror genre. Well, you probably do. Good thing Eternal Darkness isn’t a survival horror game, right?

No, Eternal Darkness is much more akin to the action-adventure genre of video games, a la Zelda and its brethren. Your heroine is Alexandra Roivas, the heiress of a line destined to stop an all-consuming evil, and (of course) a total babe. Fortunately, she’s a bit more sensibly proportioned than Rynn or Lara, which should please those who prefer characters that don’t double as flotation devices. However, you spend most of the game as any one of the eleven other characters, playing through the various chapters that gradually unravel the games intricate, well-done storyline. Plot holes abound, by the way, as you’ll see if you check any ED message board, but they’re minor, non-essential plot holes, and if you roll up your windows and don’t make eye contact they’ll generally leave you alone.

There are essentially four different levels in the game—the Roivas Mansion, the Forbidden City, the Cathedral, and the Temple of Doom ripoff. However, you go through the levels multiple times with different characters in different time periods, and the levels change enough each time to keep things interesting while still being familiar. Some of the puzzles have common threads, like the organ in the Cathedral, which help to maintain a sense of continuity. The levels are huge and very well designed, and most of them take a while to get through. Between chapters, you’ll play as Alex, using the information you got in the previous chapters to find the Chapter Page which allows you to play the next level.

As for the characters themselves, they’re diverse if nothing else. Some of the characters are good (Karim) and some of them suck ass (Roberto), but they’re all different and they all fit into their time periods well. The animation is good, the character models don’t repeat. They look nice when they move and they look nice when they’re engulfed in flame. The voice acting is superb as video games go, as only a few of the lines sound forced. They vary as far as gameplay goes as well. The characters may be out of shape and tire quickly, or they may be young and strong and can go for a while without slowing. Also, the different characters may fare better or worse in the three categories (health, magic, and sanity), and the variations are determined logically. For instance, the more educated and rational characters like Edward and Paul have high sanity while Peter, a WWI reporter who is locked in a field hospital and has been witnessing the horrors of war for weeks, predictably doesn’t cope as well in that department.

Ah, sanity! Eternal Darkness’s innovation to the “run-around-and-hit-stuff, solve-puzzles” genre is the addition of the sanity meter, a green bar that functions similarly to health. Whenever an enemy sees you, you lose sanity. If you kill the enemy and perform a finishing move on it, you get the sanity back. If your sanity is low, strange hallucinations begin to happen. The in-game hallucinations, like blood running down walls, are fairly easy to spot. The really good insanity effects are the ones that mess with your mind by pretending that something is screwing with your TV, GameCube, or game disc. Your TV may mute spontaneously and you’ll lose all sound, for example, to give away one of the tamer ones. (I won’t spoil any of the really good ones for you). The sanity meter is more than a gimmick, because it changes the way you play the game, but it’s not likely to spawn up hosts of imitators, so it’s not quite the integral part of the game it was made out to be. In fact, it’s quite possible to complete the game with your sanity meter on empty the whole way, though it would probably get repetitive after a while. It certainly does make the game that much creepier, but it would have been nice if Silicon Knights had made it matter more.

Eternal Darkness doesn’t scare you as much as not scare you, but in a dynamic way, like the atomic bomb. All through the game, you get the feeling that you should be scared, but nothing terrifying is really happening (though there are a few things that will scare you absolutely, uh, crap-less). You doubt yourself. You feel absolutely alone, even when there are other humans in the room (I’d tell you why, but I don’t want to ruin it for you). You never feel safe in this game. The music is minimal but the sound effects convey all sorts of emotions. There’s a lot of mood. The overall effect is awesome.

But all of this doesn’t matter, does it? You want to know about the gameplay, right?

Well, mostly you wander around and solve puzzles. Combat is kind of a disappointment, really. There are maybe four different types of enemies that appear with any sort of regularity in this game, and one of those (Trappers) can’t actually hurt you, they just piss you off. All of the enemies are fairly easy to kill without taking a hit once you’ve learned their patterns, and even if you do, the Recover spell comes cheap and you get it early. Too many of the weapons are weak or worthless--projectile weapons are basically useless in this game because they don’t have enough stopping power and they tend to run out of ammo at inopportune times. The only projectiles really worth using are shotguns, which are best at point-blank range anyway. Just use melee weapons. One of the most cheap-assed tactics in this game is to rush into a room, tear into the enemies, and, if you get damaged, just leave the room, heal, and rush back in. You can cast spells with blatant disregard for your magic in this game, because you recover it simply by moving. It somehow still manages to be fun, though. There’s nothing quite like slicing off a zombie’s head and watching it get into fights with other zombies.

The magic system is deep and well done, though. You create spells by combining up to six runes with one of the three elements. Though you learn all the spells naturally over the course of the game, you can experiment and find them yourself early—for example, it’s possible to create Spell 9, Magical Attack, about three or four levels before you actually need it for something. And, happily, most of the spells aren’t just pretty ways of attacking enemies. Some of them are for solving puzzles, others are just useful, but there’s a lot of variety and the magic looks about as real as magic gets.

The puzzles are basically common sense if you pay attention and examine everything (which is really how it should be; if the puzzles weren’t common sense, the game would cease to be fun), and there are a lot—probably too many—that boil down to “Put the Square Peg in the Square Hole and the Round Peg in the Round Hole to open the door.” The most difficult parts of this game tend to be finding the Square Hole, in most cases. There isn’t much in the way of replay value, however. There are three different paths, but the differences between these are marginal at best and only really affect the order you get the elemental runes (and, therefore, the healing spells).

The graphics are beautiful. There are a few traces of the game’s N64 origins, but not many. The clipping is so smooth and clean you’ll wonder why other games have trouble looking this good. The camera meshes well with the play control, which is a slap in the face of Resident Evil. The lighting and transparencies are especially good, and there’s an exquisite attention to detail—Silicon Knights did their homework on that front, at least.

Eternal Darkness is one of those games that doesn’t look that good when you read about it, but when you actually pick it up and play, it’s loads of fun. Everything comes together extremely well. Any way you look at it, it’s a great game. Pick it up.

Story: 10
Graphics: 10
Gameplay: 8
Value: 7
Overall: 9

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/02, Updated 08/22/02