Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

Yeah, yeah, I like the sanity effects, too. They can aid the music in creating a disturbing atmosphere (such as the screams or the knocking sounds in the mansion), break the fourth wall to actually scare you in real life (the fake blue screen or pretending to delete your saves), or merely be a clever thing to notice (like how you can wander into a version of the cathedral from a different level). The way it distorts the camera angles as you lose sanity is a pretty awesome gameplay feature, which cleverly dodges early ‘00s camera issues by making a bad angle an intentional part of the gameplay experience.

But, like – how many did you encounter in your playthrough? ‘Cause I didn’t see many. See, in one of the early chapters you can the ability to use magic, and one of the first spells you get is a recover spell. With the right alignment, this spell can restore your sanity meter.

Which, you know, is a good and logical gameplay mechanic. But because of the way the magic meter works – it gets restored slightly with every step you take – there’s never a real incentive not to use it. This immediately takes away from the sanity effects, because they never friggin’ happen. The game operates in cycles where you clear a room of baddies, then start loading up on sanity and health and walking around a lot to restore your magic again. Save for a brief section near the end of the game where you’re without magic for a while, you’ll never really see the sanity effects because you’ll never run out. (It might crop up in the middle of battle, but by that point you’re too focused on killing whatever monstrosity they’ve thrown your way to really notice.)

Now, to be fair, I haven’t done a Xel’lotath playthrough, which is where the enemies take away more sanity than usual when they see you. (Near the start of the game, you pick from one of three colours, not knowing what they’ll do – red makes enemies have more health, green makes them take away sanity, blue makes them take away magick.) You might encounter a few more in that playthrough, though it seems silly to play down the main conceit of the game to the one-in-three chance you picked a certain colour of idol in the first level. And there’s always the option of intentionally playing badly. But the former still doesn’t get rid of the problem of the recover spell, and the latter defeats the whole point of the sanity effects by forcing you to break suspension of disbelief.

So instead, for most of the game you get… A decent-ish survival horror game that isn’t that scary. None of the actual gameplay is bad, really – combat actually gets fairly interesting towards the end, and with the magick mechanics in place they have, you actually have to be a little smart in how you fight enemies. Not so much that the game becomes all that difficult, but it’s not boring by any means, which counts for a lot. The level design begins as underwhelming, but you revisit the different levels as different characters in different time periods (which works well from a narrative perspective for reasons I’ll get to later), and they tend to reinvent themselves each time in ways that are surprising. And there’s even noticeable differences between each character, with them having different weapons, run speeds and differently sized health, sanity, and magick meters. Without really changing a lot, the game remains surprisingly effective at making each level seem unique.

As for the story, I, just… *sigh* The gist of the story is that there’s a dude who’s granted eternal life by the powers of darkness, and he ends up on a plot to resurrect a god to destroy the world because… Well, I don’t really know why, and that’s fine. At any rate, you play through various characters who stumble into situations that allow them to work towards retrieving certain artifacts that will help thwart the resurrection of this god. They all end up in a few keys locations over the course of thousands of years, with many of them dying at the end of their journeys, leaving the next unfortunate soul to pick up the pieces. This works really well as a narrative device, because it really hammers home the idea that this isn’t an easy thing to accomplish, that it takes a handful of really brave people that only come along once every few hundred years to actually take down this guy. It’s a really awesome concept for a story.

Except the writing doesn’t match it. Actually, that’s not fair – the writing’s almost not even there. Every character essentially gets one or two lines at the start of their chapter, one or two lines at the end, and a whole lotta nothing in the middle. Sure, they might say “this can’t be happening!” in the off-chance a weird sanity effect pops up. But we never actually get a sense of their fear as characters. They never react to the fact that there’s suddenly fucking zombies everywhere. They’re just kinda blank slates that you move around to do things and hope you get somewhere. What makes it a really big shame is that they’ve practically got the whole goddamn cast of Metal Gear Solid in there, who are by and large good voice actors. Not that you’d know it from their phoned-in performances in this game. It’s just frustrating, because there’s so much potential there that’s just… Wasted.

And really, that’s how I feel about the whole game. It’s a game that has a ton of really awesome ideas in it, none of which ever seem to be fully utilized to their intended effect. It seems ironic that things the game does the best in the end are some of the most basic ones – level design, puzzles, combat. None of them are gonna stick with you in a couple of years the way that the sanity effects would if you could actually see them, or the characters and story could if they were actually developed. But as you’re playing the game, that’s mostly what you’re gonna get, and the fact that it’s good saves this from being a total disappointment. But damn straight they can do better, and you bet your ass I’ll be keeping my eye on whether or not Shadow of the Eternals ever surfaces. They’ve had over a decade to figure it out – shit could be amazing.