Silicon Knights was once a successful second party developer for Nintendo until they became third party, and slowly started melting down their success after the bummer known as Too Human and having financial problems.
Recently a spiritual successor towards Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was announced on Kickstarter, but that too seems to have problems as it was unable to reach their funding goal, for now at least.
It's a shame to see them falling down like this. It's the same with Rare Ltd., but that's even worse and honestly should be reserved for another post. Let's just take a trip back to the era of GameCube, where a decade ago, arguably the best horror of that console was released.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is a third person adventure with a revolutionary sanity system implemented where your character will go insane because of the monsters and the scary environments.
The higher your meter, the worse you will start hallucinating and experience nightmares such as blood dripping from the walls, haunting voices, your character dying or even breaking the fourth wall such as erasing your memory card with all of your save files.
It also has a remarkable varied soundtrack that alongside the different chapters and their settings attempt to capture the atmosphere of all of the locations. From medieval times to ancient Persia and Cambodia, there is certainly enough variety, the same goes for the twelve playable characters.
The story is about an ancient evil rising up, possessing one of the twelve characters, and it's up to you to stop it. What's more interesting is that you are able to choose one essence from 3 ancient gods, giving you either more strength, more intelligence or more sanity.
There are 3 main gods involved; Chattur'gha the Red, Ulyaoth the Blue and Xel'lotath the Green. They have a rock-paper-scissor theme playing, and this also reflects back with the enemy design and how your characters benefit depending on which essence you will choose.
In the shadows however, a fourth being is involved, who is called the Corpse God Mantorok the Purple. And there are even subtle hints that a fifth Yellow god exists too, but we might never know the lore of Eternal Darkness fully.
Gameplay involves puzzles, combat, magic spells and the sanity effects I talked earlier about. By using a specific alignment, you will be able to enhance weapons, change the puzzles, invoke a strength and a weakness plus change the story considerably depending on which god you choose.
Eternal Darkness has a creepy tone in general but it's most of all the alignment and sanity features that shaped this up into a unique horror game classic. What's interesting is that Nintendo producers were involved with this project as well, making it the first serious attempt at the genre from the video game company.
Rating: 9.0
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