For a long time now, there's been a formula for survival horror games, although each new game added some of its own touches, the premise has always been the same. Some weird undead creature, whether it be zombies, vampires, or something infected with a virus, and they're taking over the city, and you gotta survive. The gameplay is usually a combination of puzzles + find the key to open the door. Don't get me wrong, I love all the resident evils and silent hills, and dino crisis, and parasite eve, and I could go on. But Eternal Darkness is the biggest step forward in the survival horror genre since the original resident evil. Usually to be a good survival horror game, you try to scare people with weird sounds and noises, a couple times where something makes you jump out of your seat, and hopefully a good story. Eternal Darknes has all that, but it adds so much more.
The gameplay is different from horror games that are out there, in that you can attack different parts of the enemy, and you can use magic, and add magic to your weapons. But although this works out well, this isn't the games strong point. For the most part, the enemies get fairly boring, since most of them are pretty easy to defeat, especially once you get the hang of magik(That's not a typo).
The great part about the game is the psychological aspect of it. You have a sanity meter, and when it goes down, different things start to happen. I'm not going to ruin it for you, and if you really want to know, I can almost guarantee another user review probably goes through a good portion of them, but I personally wouldn't have wanted someone to ruin it for me, so I'm not gonna spoil it for you. But just trust me when I say, even though you know its a game, you get so into it that you almost forget about the sanity meter, and you honestly think messed up things are happening.
The way the story is told is very well done too, you play as a great variety of different characters, all in different time periods, which I believe are spread across roughly two thousand years. You start out as a girl who finds out her grandfather died, and you go to his mansion and find a book that tells a bunch of stories of different people. And as you read through them, you play as those people. It works out very well, and the story is very good, although its tough to keep up with at first, by the end you will understand it.
I'm not going to go into too much detail with the graphics, since they really aren't that good. There's nothing horribly wrong with them that takes you out of the game, but there just doesn't seem to be too much attention to detail. Everything looks fine, but everything looks so dull, except for a few very nice looking parts that are the exception to the rule. Although I will say some of the FMV's are very well done, especially some of the later ones.
The music on the other hand is simply amazing. Not only do the sanity effects do a great job of scaring you, but the music really gets in your head too, especially late at night with the lights off. When your sanity meter gets lower, you start to hear these constant horrific screams. Although this isn't anything new to the genre, with all the other amazing features it really fits in well.
So overall this is a great game, the action is a little off some times, and the puzzles are basic at best. But the things that Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem brings to the survival horror puts this with not only some of the best survival horror games of all time, but one of the best games, period, of all time.
Create an Account
Member Login
