The Dichotomy of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Nintendo has had a tumultuous history with adult-oriented games. The Japanese juggernauts have almost always wanted to preserve their squeaky-clean family-friendly image, so seeing their name next to an M-rating or a Pegi-18 logo is a rarity, even to this day. January 2024 saw the release of Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, which is arguably the first M-rated IP Nintendo has ever developed, and even that is under discussion over whether or not Nintendo should be given the title of developer.

This doesn't mean that Nintendo has no experience in the realm of adult entertainment. Their fourth home console – the Nintendo GameCube – was where Nintendo really started permitting more adult games to grace their libraries. The GameCube was struggling quite a bit during the sixth console generation, and Nintendo attempted to remedy this by casting a wider net over the entire gaming audience. The result was some seriously iconic adult titles. Resident Evil 4 revolutionized what survival horror could be. Killer7 was a brutally underrated and hyper-stylized first-person shooter. Geist existed. It was becoming increasingly normal to see Nintendo's logo next to an adult rating, and one of these lesser-known titles is a cult classic surreal horror game known as
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

Into the darkness

A third-person horror game, Eternal Darkness (we're dropping the rest for brevity's sake) was developed by Silicon Knights and published by Nintendo in June 2002. There are countless horror experiences for genre fans to try but none are quite like this one. The story spans the globe, across two millennia, and includes 13 different playable characters. The main protagonist, a young woman named Alexandra Roivas, inherits the run-down Roivas Family Estate after the untimely death of her grandfather. Within its decrepit walls, she finds the Tomb of Eternal Darkness: a cursed magical book made of human skin that carries the secrets of the Ancients, themselves gods from a time before our world existed. Aided by the ghost of her grandfather, Alexandra must solve the mystery of the mansion, learn about the deeds of those who have encountered the book throughout history, and stop the return of an Ancient being resurrected to enslave humanity.

There are countless horror experiences for genre fans to try but none are quite like this one.

The narrative is something straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft book, whose stories are infamous for trying to capture the descent into madness, attempting to put into words losing one's mind to ancient evils too old and too otherworldly for us to comprehend. In Eternal Darkness, whenever one of the multiple protagonists stares at the horrors brought forth from the cities of the Ancients, they lose a little bit of their sanity. Sanity isn't just a narrative concept in Eternal Darkness. The game's main claim to fame is the inclusion of the sanity bar – a visual representation of how your character is handling this supernatural madness that surrounds them. As your sanity bar decreases, you begin to question reality as impossible things happen around you.

What's so unbelievable about Eternal Darkness is how much they lean into the meta of being a video game to really hammer home the scares. As your sanity level drops, the environment will start to change. The room will become darker, the shadows more foreboding. The camera angle will skew, leaving the floor at an odd, disorienting angle. Then your character's behavior will change. They will curl up, they'll get nervous, they'll start to walk slower, they'll start muttering to themselves that what's happening can't be real, or they will call out for help that will never come. It all works as a visual representation of how far down the rabbit hole you are. The further your sanity meter drains, the more intrusive and intense these visions become.

Insane in the membrane

The team at Silicon Knights came up with some of the most creative and imaginative methods I've ever seen to add unease and tension to the experience of these sanity-based hallucinations. At one point, my character climbed down a ladder, transitioning between areas. When he got to the bottom, instead of stepping onto the floor, he stepped through it, slowly clipping through the environment as I moved through the corridor until eventually he was swallowed whole by the floor. The screen flashed, and I was back under the ladder, as my disgruntled protagonists muttered "This can't be happening!" through gritted teeth.

At another point I used a spell to heal myself, only to have the spell burst my torso apart, leaving behind nothing but flailing legs and a pool of crimson blood. The screen flashed, and I was back to the point right before I had cast the spell as if the most horrific thing ever hadn't just taken place in front of my eyes. Fake blue screen crashes, making it seem like your television is turning down the volume by itself, your character's head popping off and being able to be collected as an item, the controls changing and reversing, save data being deleted, and many fake gruesome deaths. These are just some of the sanity effects I contended with while playing through Eternal Darkness, and I know for a fact that these aren't all of them.

The team at Silicon Knights came up with some of the most creative and imaginative methods I've ever seen to add unease and tension to the experience of these sanity-based hallucinations.

Sometimes these effects are even story-driven, such as when the playable characters of the past catch a glimpse of Alexandra in the future, and it allows the story to link these characters in a tangible and seamless way. Some of the gimmicks – such as the volume changing – don't hit the same as they would have twenty years ago since the technology doesn't match the display, but ultimately it doesn't really matter. It was a creepy treat every time reality started to break, and there were multiple times when I was fooled by what was happening.

The way the game builds tension is incredible. Even now, more than two decades on, some of the game's locales and environments are massive and awe-inspiring. You may find yourself in a huge and foreboding church during a thunderstorm, overwhelming religious iconography looming overhead. You may traverse ancient and hidden temples, sealed away by time, full of traps and treachery. Even the Roivas mansion itself seems to have a mind of its own, with centuries worth of secrets tucked away in every nook and cranny.

You visit the Roman Legionnaires, medieval churches, Middle Eastern temples, worn-torn Europe during the First World War, and the Middle East after the first Gulf War. Each of these places are large and unsettling, building an atmosphere that convinces you they are not only much older than you but were built for dark purposes far beyond your understanding. Even the less impressive set pieces have that wonderful retro gaming charm to them, like when you find a giant underground city and it's very obviously just a JPEG texture stretched across a polygonal backdrop to give off the (very poor) illusion of size. It can sometimes come off as cheesy, but Eternal Darkness plays everything with such a straight face that it's hard not to be enamored with the whole experience.

The mirror has two faces

The dichotomy of Eternal Darkness really starts to rear its ugly Eldritch head when you have to actually have to play the damn thing. Never in my 25 years of gaming have I seen a game quite like this. It has one of the most ambitious and unique plots in the horror genre, with some of the best atmosphere of its generation, yet is such an abhorrent chore to play. Most titles from the early 2000s present some sort of challenge when revisiting them, be it clunky and sluggish controls, gameplay mechanics that have become dulled with time, or schizophrenic pacing. This is expected when playing games from the Wild West of 3D gaming, but it usually becomes more bearable the longer you spend with it.

With Eternal Darkness, it's all three, and they are too egregious to ever really become bearable.

It has one of the most ambitious and unique plots in the horror genre, with some of the best atmosphere of its generation, yet is such an abhorrent chore to play.

While I don't expect a game this old to control like a modern title, the fixed camera angles mixed with the varying and oftentimes staggeringly slow movement speed create an exercise in frustrating exploration. Environments look too similar and clues too ambiguous to prevent extreme amounts of unnecessary backtracking. The map that's provided does little to relieve this pressure either, as it's way too simplistic to actually help in any way.

While the combat may have good intentions, it quickly falls apart. You can target separate body parts on the horrors you face, and you're encouraged to (much like the Dead Space series) aim for the appendages instead of the main body. At best, this is a clunky and unsatisfying experience. At worst, it borders on totally unplayable. Trying to target an enemy, maintain position, select the body part necessary, and actually inflict damage with the wildly inconsistent hitboxes and seemingly random chance to miss completely makes fighting enemies incredibly tedious.

To switch targets, you must gently press the analog shoulder buttons of the GameCube controller, followed by a flick of the stick. This may sound easy in practice, but using one of the first iterations of analog buttons to try to switch targets when half a dozen are on the screen draining your sanity by the second can be practically impossible. This isn't an "I'm so scared, therefore I'm panicking and hitting the wrong button" moment, like the purposefully confusing controls of early Resident Evils. This control scheme just doesn't work very well for combat, and at no point did it feel like the difficulties were deliberate.

It isn't necessarily all bad. Aiming at different body parts causes enemies to react in different ways, as taking the head off a zombie means it flails blindly, or removing the arms of an enemy renders them significantly less dangerous. For 2002, this was incredibly dynamic, delivering consequences for your in-combat actions, and felt quite technologically and mechanically advanced for the time. What accompanies it feels far too clunky, however, so it comes off as nothing more than an extremely flawed attempt at something new. Ambitious as hell, yes, but flawed all the same.

There is one particular set piece of Eternal Darkness that highlights both the mechanical and pacing issues. Eternal Darkness is much more "Mist with elements of Resident Evil" than it is "survival horror game;" as such, set pieces are often repeated throughout the story. It's an ingenious way to organically reuse assets and imbue the feeling of a truly contiguous narrative through line. Your actions have consequences in these places, sometimes not being felt for literal millennia, and it's easy to see what those consequences are as the game progresses since you revisit them multiple times.

For 2002, this was incredibly dynamic, delivering consequences for your in-combat actions, and felt quite technologically and mechanically advanced for the time.

This is all well and good, groundbreaking even, up until the final third of the game. I will not spoil what you're doing or why, but towards the end of the story, you are charged with completing 9 tasks, attempting to solve a powerful puzzle. The game's pacing grinds to a screeching halt as you slowly stomp to and fro across the same environment for far more time than any other set piece throughout the game. This is without mentioning the many obstacles and enemies in your way existing only to prevent you from getting the puzzle sorted out.

It took me longer to complete these 9 tasks than it had any other level in the game, and I was far beyond over it when I finally completed it. Imagine then how I felt when, a few hours later, I was tasked to do all 9 tasks again with a different character. Admittedly, it was a lot easier to blow through it the second time around as I knew what to do and many of the enemies were dead, but I audibly groaned at the idea of trudging my way through this familiar and boring ground once again; It highlighted how unbelievably padded Eternal Darkness can be.

I was deep in the heart of a buried city built by and for the ancient, unknowable, petty gods striving to enslave and destroy humanity, surrounded by colossal otherworldly architecture full of horrors so unspeakable they loosen the human grip on sanity purely by observing them, and somehow I was bored. It didn't feel like I was contributing to the downfall of an evil god, it felt like I was forced to fill out a checklist a second time to artificially increase runtime.

I walked away from my time with Eternal Darkness feeling extremely conflicted. To get the true ending, I was required to play through the game two more times, where I would unlock a secret cut scene that better explained the premise of the game's conclusion. I really wanted to want to play through it again, for the atmosphere, characters, and iconography. The story beats are, without exaggeration, some of the most interesting and creepy I've ever seen from a AAA title, but the way the game constantly snags you along the way makes it really difficult to love as it is presented.

While I tire of the constant remakes and re-releases we've seen throughout the last decade or so, I can't think of a game that would better benefit from it than Eternal Darkness. Only the mechanical issues of the gameplay are holding this game back from being one of the best horror games ever made. As it stands, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is only an incredibly technical and storytelling marvel, equating to simply "extremely good" instead of "one of the best." While this is high praise indeed, it isn't as high as I wanted it to be, and I can't help but feel disappointed at what could have been.