Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
"Deep into that Darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering... fearing... doubting." — Edgar Allan Poe
Protagonist(s): Alexandra Roivas Genre(s): Action-adventure Psychological horror Rating(s): M Platform(s): GameCube Release Date: NA: June 24, 2002 JP: October 25, 2002 EU: November 1, 2002 AU: November 7, 2002 Developer(s): Silicon Knights Publisher(s): Nintendo Country: Canada

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is a psychological horror game released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002. It was developed by Silicon Knights and published by Nintendo.

Why It Escapes the Darkness

1. It is the first and one of the very few Mature-rated games Nintendo has published.
2. Though Alexandra is the main heroine, reading the Tome of Eternal Darkness lets you play as eleven other characters. The first person you play as is Pious Augustus before he becomes a lich.
   • Not to mention, Pious's ending determines which of the three gods he serves.
3. The three gods, Ulyaoth, Xel'lotath, and Chattur'gha share a rock-paper-scissors relationship. Their magic can be harnessed by the characters and be used to help defeat enemies. A fourth but more benevolent god, Mantorok, maintains equilibrium over the other three. Mantorok is however bound by Augustus to keep him from interfering.
4. There's a rock-paper-scissors system between each god that affects the spells you use and even decides which god you have to awaken to defeat the one Augustus summoned.
5. Gameplay shares some concepts with early Silent Hill games.
6. The game is heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The Tome of Eternal Darkness is a reference to the Necronomicon.
7. Each character can lose sanity. When sanity is lost, a number of things can happen that keep playing tricks on the player to make you think you're the one going insane. Some examples include:
   • The illusion that your television is broken.
   • Your controller suddenly not responding.
   • Your saves getting deleted.
   • The game abruptly ends after completing a chapter and surprisingly, teasing a sequel.
   • Items disappearing for a moment.
   • Or your character just dying.
8. Each character is equipped with weapons of the era they are in.
9. Each weapon description is somewhat educational allowing you to learn more about the weapon in real life.
10. Four major locations.
11. During Alexandra's final battle with Augustus, the spirits of the other warriors offer their support.
    • Speaking of which, beating the game three times with Augustus serving a different god allows for the true ending.

Bad Qualities

1. Somewhat chunky character models that haven't aged particularly well, despite the great graphics and framerate that runs 60 FPS.
   • This was due to the game originally being made for the Nintendo 64 that had it graphics upscaled to fit onto the Nintendo GameCube.
2. The sanity effects, one of the main selling points of the game, requires you to keep one of your core stats low and potentially take damage.
3. Some of the sanity effects are ineffective when played on a HDTV, but it's no real fault of the game itself as the said sanity effects were a play on the most common TVs at the time and HDTVs were far in the future back in 2002.