"By the prickling of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." Wake up GameCube owners, something wicked has arrived.
If the Resident Evil series is the George Romero of videogames, then Eternal Darkness is something more cerebral. Eternal Darkness calls to mind Edgar Allan Poe, Clive Barker or (to match the quote above) the videogame equivalent of Shakespeare's three weird sisters. More importantly, the gameplay of Eternal Darkness is on the same cerebral level as the storyline.
Eternal Darkness contains a textbook perfect learning curve. They set down the basics of the game in the first couple of hours of the adventure. Slowly, without the player consciously realizing it, they build upon it. As these layers of depth are silently added, they show the player how to add spells to weapons which, in turn, adds additional tiers to the combat system. Eternal Darkness then softly introduces opposing runes and spell-based puzzle solving and, before the player knows it, they have mastered an intricate gameplay system. The only drawback to this learning curve introduction is that if you only play the game for a couple of hours, you might dismiss the combat and spell system as simplistic.
While Eternal Darkness quotes Edgar Allan Poe at the opening of the game, the influence of work of H.P. Lovecraft is much more evident. The death of an family elder, a mysterious book formulated by multiple authors, ancient inhuman enemies and plenty of names with apostrophes are some of the common links between Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and Silicon Knight's Eternal Darkness. The details of the story found in Eternal Darkness are complex in nature and both confuse and intrigue in equal measure.
Instead of the traditional "one main character" approach used in most games, players take control of a wide variety of individuals. Each one composes a chapter in the game itself and in the massive in-game novel/spellbook, the Tome of Eternal Darkness. This Tome and the combat system are common threads in each chapter. The combat can be considered simplistic when compared it to a fighting game, but in the context of an adventure game, it is pretty advanced. Whether you are wielding a sword or toting a pistol, you can target specific body parts of the various enemies. Removing a zombie's head from his body blinds him while detaching an arm cuts his attack abilities in half. A smart gamer can quickly develop an ordered strategy of removing an enemy's vision, attacks and life and use it for most of the game. One of the only drawbacks to the combat can be traced back to the lack of buttons on the GameCube controller. The B button is used for both your finishing move and for viewing objects, this sometimes leads to an unwanted viewing of a cryptic piece of art when what you really want to be doing is finishing off a wounded enemy. It is never a good sign when you are watching to upper right hand side of the screen hoping to see the "Finish Him" message flash when you should be concentrating on staying alive.
Eternal Darkness doesn't lower its horror quality by resorting to cheap surprise tactics. Instead, it blazes new ground with a new feature called Insanity Effects. When the in-game character's sanity level becomes too low, the person playing the game begins to feel the repercussions. This game literally "got over" on me dozens of times with the Insanity Effects. I don't want to ruin the surprise for players when they come upon these effect, but I will tell you about one effect that is a true classic: The main character enters a room and is decapitated. Instead of the game ending, he is then prompted to retrieve his head by pressing the B button. Upon picking up the head it begins reciting a famous Shakespearean speech. Our hats (heads?) are off to the development team: Alas, poor Silicon Knights, we knew them, Horatio. A group of fellows of infinite jest.
To quote Edgar Allan Poe: Sleep-- those little slices of death. O, how I loathe them. After playing Eternal Darkness, this isn't an issue for me, I didn't want to sleep until I finished it and now that I have, I don't think I'll ever be able to sleep again.
Create an Account
Member Login
