Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

"The walls are bleeding, I should get that looked at…"

It all began so innocently.

The buzz about ED was universally positive. Good game mechanics, storyline based on Call of C'thulu, and Silicon Knights, makers of the acclaimed Blood Omen, developed it. Plus, there was nary a poor review on this site (or elsewhere). A friend of mine had hardly been able to put it down and recommended it, so I played it over at his apartment.

Anyway, the first thing that struck me was the way the game played. By merely pressing and holding down R, you could individually target body parts. It was easy... too easy. When you knock the heads off of enemies, you do alot of damage, AND blind them. Decapitating and running will bag many easy victories, even against larger monsters. Most of the bosses of the game aren't much harder, and any veteran gamer will dispatch them easily. Still, having a headless horde of zombies groping around in the dark and swinging at nothing can be amusing.

Attacking is simple... hitting the big green 'Go' Button attacks with whatever you have equipped. Like many survival horror games, the combat system is simple and it works. Let me reiterate simple. Most melee weapons (and the majority of the fighting is melee), have the exact same combo. Slash, slash, stab, kick beastie off of sword. Considering the variety of environments and weapons, (from tulwars and kukris, to sabers and gladiuses, from medieval Europe to the Roman Empire and ancient Persia), this simplicity disappointed me. All the characters seem to wield their weapons with a similar level of skill… also disappointing. The biggest difference between the characters melee abilities is their power and how quickly they tire… woopdi fricking do. It’s worth noting that Kasim’s chapter is the lone exception to this. His dual sword style is neat, and the Ram Dao has the crowd-pleasing ability to floor enemies in a single hit. His chapter, however, is unfortunately short (I’ll return to this point later).

B finishes enemies… along with examining things in the environment. The reason I note this is because it’s not all that uncommon to try to finish an enemy, only to examine that interesting statue in the background. The game pauses when you’re examining, so there’s no physical risk, but it’s extremely disruptive to the flow of combat. On several occasions, trying to reposition myself for the finishing move because of said problem went for naught as the wounded enemy expired without my coupe de grace. This wouldn’t matter… except that killing enemies restores sanity (more on sanity later). They should have mapped a button specifically for the finishing move, given how often you use it. It’s pretty darn easy to sneak using the analog (all of twice that you need to use it) and I didn’t really need a 5th spell hotkey.

The magic system works well, for what this game is. You have to use a certain number and type of runes to cast spells. The more runes you use, the more powerful the spell, but the greater your drain on your mana and the longer it takes to cast. It creates a heightened sense of necessity to get a spell off when the enemy is upon you and you have runes yet to activate. The spells themselves aren’t anything too special, between summoning things, protection spells, attack spells, healing, enchanting weapons and the like. While magic was well implemented into the framework of the game, it simply substitutes for “items” (like healing plants or keys), and the speed that mana regenerates saps what little difficulty the game has.

I’ve covered the (relative) good points of the game, but now…

The Darkness Comes…

The adventure elements are extremely below average. Usually, they consist of finding the right color or symbol, returning the right necklace to the right idol, or simply placing heavy items on pressure sensitive blocks. It’s not even up to the usual standards of the survival horror genre. Most puzzles in Resident Evil or Silent hill may be unintuitive or overly simple, but at least they have some creativity behind them. The majority of the puzzles in ED are either rather obvious, too obtuse, or seem to be filler. You’ll want to get past them and get back to hacking zombies apart. Certain levels, however, emphasize these puzzles and quickly become the most tedious parts of the game.

The graphics were originally designed for the N64 and it shows. The faces lack definition and most of the character models could use a few more polygons. Lighting affects are there… but the spells that often accompany them aren’t going to floor you. Fortunately, you will be able to see your environment fairly well, given the very competent camera. Seeing the action is rarely the problem, yet despite this, I was yearning to control the camera myself with the unused C stick. The graphics themselves are functional. The problem lies in the style of the game.

As I mentioned before, the game takes place in several different locals during a dozen distinct time periods. Despite this, none of the locations manages to stand out, with the possible exception of the mansion in Rhode Island. Yes, Rhode Island. Apparently the center of all evil is housed there. This would be the single most exciting thing to have ever hit Rhode Island (surefire tourist attraction too). The environments look like basic conceptions of whatever era architecture is used, or simply look like they could have been anywhere. It’s a whole lotta stone and generic middle-eastern architecture. Again, places in Resident Evil, Silent Hill and, heck, even Onimusha all managed to stand out, even if they were outlandish. The general design may look ok to most people, but the lack of detail disappoints a historian like me. The environments are very blah, and lack the atmosphere necessary for this type of game (yet another thing I will return to).

Speaking of things being blah, the characters don’t stand out… even Alex Roivas, the game’s main heroine. It seems like the developers put more detail in her hips than her personality. It doesn’t help that she’s about as dense as a brick. Most the other characters have decent reasons for doing what they are doing. Alex stays in the ****ing house, even after crazy **** starts happening. How many times do you have to see your own dead body in a bathtub before you LEAVE? It’s not like she couldn’t have come back later! One delivery boy towards the end of the game has the right idea. He knocks on the door, leaves the package, and ****ing books.

There are a lot of characters in the game, but none stand out. They all suffer from NPC (Non-Player Character) syndrome and their ultimate, usually unpleasant, fates barely achieve any resonance. They would have been better served by halving the amount of characters and doubling the amount of time you spent with them. Just when you’re beginning to warm to a character, the chapter ends, and you begin anew with someone just as generic. Many possibilities for character development were lost, but perhaps the most glaring is the Tome of Eternal Darkness. The Tome of ED is a book that allows you to invoke the powers of the evil Ancients, cast spells and summon monsters. None, I repeat, NONE of the characters in the game have moral issues with this (and some of them really should). None pray for their eternal soul over the ramifications of wielding evil magiks. None ponder the ‘rightness’ of using fire against fire, evil against evil. This is perhaps the greatest waste of potential character building I’ve ever seen.

The beasties seemed like they came from a generic development set for a survival horror game. You have zombies, stronger zombies, large and deformed zombies, zombies with a large flesh hood and a scythe protruding from the top (one of the few enemies with any personality), and small Trappers who send you to another dimension. This other dimension houses panels for restoring any vital statistic, so being sent there is usually a blessing in disguise. These enemies are slow and quite stupid, using painfully telegraphed attacks to swat at you. They didn’t even touch me in a couple chapters. There are a couple bosses, but these encounters are so rare and un-notable they barely add anything to the game.

Pious Augustus: Long lost brother of Skeletor?

The generic-ness of the characters isn’t helped by the bland (and often bad) voice acting. Inspector Legrasse, whom you encounter at the beginning of the game, is a good example of this (he mercifully appears in only one cutscene). His awkwardly attempts to make conversation with Alex and his subsequent ham fisted way of showing her Edward Roivas's mutilated body set the stage for the majority of the voice work. With the exception of Pious and the Ancients, none of the voice acting is very good. Problem is, it’s not bad enough to laugh at (like the original Resident Evil) but it’s hardly good enough to applaud. It doesn’t sound like a normal person either; it sounds like a person reading a script. At one time, this may have been considered “ok”, but with the voice work in games improving in the past few years (Metal Gear Solid, Shinobi, and Kingdom Hearts to name a few) this level of “acting” just isn’t acceptable anymore.

The script and plot are also two things that, perhaps, would have been more acceptable several years ago, when cinematics in gaming were amateurish at best. The Ancients have been around for a long time, much longer than humanity. One of them has found a servant in Pious Augustus, who toils to make his master manifest in this world. A dozen different people from as many time periods work against Pious using an instrument of evil known as the Tome of Eternal Darkness. Sounds neat, eh? I thought so too, until I got a little ways into the game. It seems like a rough draft of a potentially good story that was never revised. The plot doesn’t really progress from this “group of people fighting against evil” cliché and it’s reflected in the characters as well. The characters frame their perspectives as “I am fighting against the total and complete evil. Yar!” or they simply don’t have one, and you are left wondering why they even bother. And the twists of the game all add up to this… things end up sucking personally for everyone who comes into contact with this Tome of Eternal Darkness. The individual story lines are pretty uninteresting and are often about far as removed from their historical time periods as possible. Real historical events are happening concurrently with the story, and are sometimes even directly influenced by the story. Despite this, events aren’t put into historical context and are only mentioned at the beginning or end of a chapter (if at all).

Now, none of the things I’ve mentioned is as important as these last two points (and I’ve saved the best for last here, ladies and gents). First, the game’s catch: the insanity meter. Now, the insanity meter struck me as a decent idea initially. It seemed like an organic way of making the game scarier (aka, it wasn’t a pre-scripted event). How does it work? It doesn’t. Namely, it fails to be scary or creepy at all, and the reasons are twofold. Reason 1) The effects aren’t that gruesome. You enter a room, and you’re unnaturally large… or the zombies are pint sized… or “technical difficulties” start happening with the TV. I’ve dreamt up scarier **** than this. 2) When I see that my sanity meter is low, I know that crazy **** is going to start happening. This kills the surprise that horror is so dependant on. The nonchalant way characters react while “insane” doesn’t help. They never “freak out” on screen, you only hear “This isn’t… happening!” screamed out when the effect ends. No recoiling in horror, no nervous twitching, no nothing. The only incentive for keeping my sanity meter high was to make sure my health didn’t start draining (thus the reason to finish enemies). It’s easy to “disbelieve the illusion” making the “sanity meter” out for what it is… a gimmick.

So if the game’s gimmick doesn’t scare, do the other parts? Not really. I was scared only 1 ½ times. Meaning that I was genuinely surprised once (1), and once I was caught off guard but didn’t really flinch (½). I was never creeped out by the environments, which lack a threatening atmosphere I used to take for granted in the genre, and the easily defeated enemies hardly intimidate, let alone scare. The end of Metal Gear Solid 2 freaked me out more than this game, and it’s not survival horror!

“I’m afraid there’s not much to see…”

The conclusion is a little more satisfying than the rest of the game. Still, there aren’t any huge surprises, and it’s a bit sell out, ending more happily than the game’s theme should have allowed.

Had Eternal Darkness been released around 1996 on the PSX or N64, it would have stood out, perhaps been a high water mark for the nascent genre. As it stands, it’s the weakest survival horror game I have ever played. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, even Onimusha provide more thrills than this. The gameplay is intuitive and the magic system is well integrated… but there are better action games out there. And when everything else falls apart, knocking the head off a zombie only amuses for so long.

Final Score:
4/10

Add 2-3 points if you’re a horror lightweight or new to the genre... or play Resident Evil and Silent Hill and aquatint yourself with the kings of the genre. Everyone else, steer clear.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/26/03, Updated 02/26/03