Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Is it real…or only in your head?

NA release: 24th June 2002
JP release: 25th October 2002
EU release: 1st November 2002
Developer: Silicon Knights
Publisher: Nintendo
NGC Magazine Score: 89%
Mods Used: None

In the mid-90s, Nintendo wanted to start trying to appeal to more mature audiences. After seeing Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain at an E3 event, Nintendo were impressed with Silicon Knights and thought that they would be a good match, and hired them to create a horror title for the N64. Silicon Knights accepted and put their other PlayStation title on hold, a game called Too Human. Development on their new horror game, Eternal Darkness, took a long time and eventually spilled over to the GameCube.

On the surface, Eternal Darkness does share similarities with Resident Evil: the camera angles are very specific, and there’s a big focus on using, mixing and checking items to progress. Dig deeper and they’re actually very different games, even withing its similarities, including the camera.

As the backgrounds aren’t pre-rendered, the camera angle doesn’t switch in the middle of the room, instead angling itself and moving slightly to keep the character in focus. This method means that you can have these “spooky” angled without sacrificing movement, as it has full analogue control and I never had an issue with not moving in the direction I wanted.

The story is heavily inspired by the works of HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, with cosmic entities manipulating humans over centuries to achieve your goals. You start off as Alex Roivas (played by Commander Shepard, aka Jennifer Hale) inheriting her grandfather’s mansion after his mysterious death. There, she discovers a book bound in flesh – Tome of Eternal Darkness. As she finds chapters of the book throughout the mansion, you play through the story as many characters across many time periods.

The combat itself is also interesting, you can swing or shoot wildly, but using the lock-on is more important. When locked on, you can target the head, torso or arms and chop them off. It is a little bit clunky and slow, but it’s always fun to mess with zombies by chopping of their arms so they can’t attack.

Enemies don’t just cause damage to your health, but also a character’s sanity. This can be regained by performing a finishing move on a downed enemy, but if it gets low, the game starts to play tricks on both the character and you.

The way Eternal Darkness messes with your head is still a very unique part of the game. As your character gets more insane, the effects get stronger. It start off with subtle stuff like tilting the camera or playing sound effects, and a few things that seem like glitches or bugs before resetting, or error messages and all round manner of other things. Even knowing about them, it can still trip you up and will even mess you up in the menus – the most famous is how the game to pretend to delete all your save data. The feeling of being unnerved escapes the game itself.

I enjoy the system too much that, once I get a healing spell, I tried to keep my sanity quite low while topping up my health between fights.

Eternal Darkness also has a fun magick system. Throughout the game, you’ll find runes that you can combine to create spells. You’ll need an alignment rune (representing one of the four ancients), a doing rune and a target room, as well as a power rune for more powerful version of those spells. This means that you can experiment to discover spells much earlier than when you’ll find the scroll giving you the recipe.

There are only a total of 15 spells, though, and a little bit more experimentation with it would have been very much welcome. Although the fourth alignment rune (which is the only one you can miss) does mix up some of the other spells.

The sanity effects, magick and overall story tie things together, but each individual chapter also works on its own, offering different stories and tones. While most are simple, and often with a grizzly fate, they’re all interesting on their own, and with the game going though different eras of technology, it keeps things interesting throughout the game. It’s even lovely returning to previous areas to see what has changed over time, with them feeling like completely new levels.

To encourage you to play the game again, you have to complete the game three times to see the final epilogue. At the start of the game, you choose an artifact to be the “villain” ancient for the game. A few cutscenes are different, and the majority of enemies you meet are a different alignment. The types of enemies are the same, but they have different looks and abilities, which help make the playthroughs different – plus the epilogue actually fits the game being played multiple times, instead of arbitrary being locked for no story reason.

Eternal Darkness is a wonderful game that not only engages you with its intriguing story and characters, but also interesting gameplay effects and how it breaks the fourth wall to mess with you. With the developer later messing up big time due to stealing code, and Nintendo not wanting to do much with the game, it’s sadly something that was never revisited, with the only time it resurfaced was Alex Roivas appearing as a sticker in Smash Bros Ultimate. A grim fate that the game does not deserve.

Fave

Indeed, one of the finest aspects of the game is that it feels perfectly hones and balanced. Those who get frustrated by having to leave objects in storage crates or conserve ammo in Resident Evil will be pleased to hear that there are no such restrictions here. Each character can carry everything they find and they’ll possess a slashing weapon, so if you do run out of ammo there’s an alternative way to fend off the monsters. Even the sanity meter can be topped up by using a spell, so you never feel frustrated. Tue, there are some imaginative puzzles in the game, but none of them will have you scratching your head for long. Although some might complain that the game is a little too easy, that’s rather missing the point. Eternal Darkness is about clever plotting, building up tension, and delivering a well-constructed yarn. And if you’re into those sorts of things then you’ll definitely get your money’s worth.
Mark Walbak, NGC Magazine #74

Remake or remaster?

A remaster would be wonderful. The textures are still quite good, although some decent bump mapping could make it look great. Other than that, it just needs a checkpoint system in case people forget to save, and perhaps a few new sanity effects. It could potentially use stuff from the Switch’s OS. I’d still love to see Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Redemption some day, but that would never happen.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.