Eternal Mediocrity: Sanity’s Bronze Medal Winner

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

It feels really strange to be playing a survival horror game on a Nintendo console, because I grew up in an era when consoles were marketed to kids. Nintendo built their reputation on being family-friendly, Sega built theirs on appearing to be a bit older and edgier than that to kids whilst actually being no more objectionable than Nintendo were; he might have worn trainers and had a nebulously-defined “attitude”, but ultimately there was nothing to Sonic which was any less kid-safe than Mario. Once Nintendo and Sega had managed to split the market neatly between them for a while things started to feel a little stagnant; I drifted away to PC gaming, whilst on the console scene Sony realised that there was a market for a console which wasn’t afraid to show a little blood and utter a few four-letter words. Sega asphyxiated under a large pile of bad decisions, whilst Nintendo had the indignity of seeing the Gamecube bumped into third place in the console wars after the PS2 and the original XBox.

Of course, a while later Nintendo made its family-friendly image pay off again in the form of the Wii, a console you wouldn’t be ashamed to play on with your kids or your mum. But Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem came out in 2002; Nintendo’s machines were seen as kid’s toys in an era in which people in their later teens and early twenties were seen as being the primary market for console games. Games like Eternal Darkness were meant to change that – to prove that the Gamecube wasn’t just good for the latest Mario and Zelda games – and whilst it wasn’t a huge commercial success it’s received nigh-universal critical praise.

It doesn’t quite deserve that praise.

Well, maybe I’m being harsh. Eternal Darkness is an enjoyable enough survival horror experience, but I can’t in good conscience call it a great game – merely a good one. It doesn’t really add anything especially exciting or new to the genre – it’s no Alone In the Dark or Silent Hill or Resident Evil or Fatal Frame, and it doesn’t excel at imitating any of the greats of the genre either. In terms of authors, if Silent Hill 2 or Fatal Frame were H.P. Lovecraft, Eternal Darkness would be August Derleth. Lovecraft, as an author, presented a unique vision which has inspired many. Derleth – and I’m talking strictly of Derleth in his capacity as an author, not as an editor or a promoter of Lovecraft’s work – tried to imitate Lovecraft, but failed due to a frequent compulsion to toss in pulpy action and violence, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what Lovecraft was aiming for in the first place.

Likewise, Eternal Darkness grants the player just slightly too much combat effectiveness to establish an impression of constant threat once a player has got the knack of it, but is lumbered with a combat system cumbersome enough that hacking up zombies isn’t really pleasurable. It seems to be aware on some level that effective survival horror depends on the player being immersed in the experiences of the player character, but at the same time directly sabotages that immersion frequently enough to wreck all the effort it goes to in order to establish it in the first place. Even the plot itself is reminiscent of Derleth’s Lovecraft pastiches; it’s ever-so-slightly too heavy with the Lovecraftian tropes, and there’s even a segment which takes its plot directly from the standard plotline Derleth used for almost all of the stories which he wrote in the wake of Lovecraft’s death and passed off as Lovecraft’s work (man inherits creepy old house, investigates family’s dubious past, discovers Lovecraftian horrors and goes insane – think a third-generation photocopy of The Rats In the Walls).

The game gets off to a strong start; the protagonist, Alexandra Roivas, is awoken from a bad dream in the middle of the night by the police, who inform her that her grandfather, Edward Roivas, has been brutally murdered. After months have passed with no progress on the case, Alex decides to look into the matter herself, and ventures into the family mansion in order to find answers – this being the point where the player properly takes control. Fairly soon after the investigation begins, Alex encounters a horrifying ancient tome of unspeakable evil, which of course she immediately sits down to read – at which point, the game makes life really difficult for itself.

You see, each time Alex sits down to read an extract from the Tome of Eternal Darkness, there’s a flashback sequence in which you get to play through the experiences of someone from the book’s dark and sinister history, and as the flashbacks progress you can piece together the overarching plot. In fact, you easily spend more time controlling other people through chapters of the book than you do controlling Alex. Viewpoint characters range from Roman centurions to modern-day firefighters to Cambodian slave girls to Persian adventurers to intrepid archaeologists. You would think that constantly changing the time period, setting, and viewpoint character would be immensely damaging to the sense of immersion that survival horror depends on, but I found that I actually identified with the various characters remarkably quickly. It helps that although there are a wide variety of characters to play, at the same time there are only really four locations that the events of the game unfold in – the Roivas mansion, a buried underground complex in the Persian desert, a temple-city in Cambodia and a cathedral in France. There’s much fun to be had seeing how the locations have changed over the years – especially effective is the development of the cathedral, when you realise that the “Old Tower” referred to in the 15th Century foray into the place was the entire building back in Charlemagne’s time – and the difficulties each character find themselves embroiled in are engaging enough to maintain your interest. What’s more, although most of the time the protagonists come to a bad end, there are a couple of instances where they escape safe and sound, so there’s sufficient ambiguity as to their fate to keep things uncertain and interesting.

Where Eternal Darkness stumbles just short of greatness is in the gameplay – and in particular, how the gameplay disrupts the atmosphere the game otherwise strives to achieve.

Much is made of the sanity system in Eternal Darkness, and for most of the time it’s an asset. When monsters notice you, you lose sanity; you regain it by hacking monsters to pieces (or through the use of magic spells, once you work out how to do that). The excitement comes when you don’t quite manage to recoup your losses and your sanity starts seriously dropping; the camera angles start getting strange, you start hearing odd noises, and the main character starts mumbling to themselves. When things go seriously wrong, you start hallucinating.

There are two types of hallucination: those that help the game, and those that hurt it. Auditory hallucinations, the sound of someone rapping on the front door of the mansion when there’s nobody there, bugs crawling around on the inside of your screen, all that’s perfectly fine, because they don’t disrupt the flow of the gameplay at all. But there are a few hallucinations which, whilst amusing, simply disrupt the flow of gameplay – essentially, you’re walking along, then the hallucination happens, and then there’s a flash and you end up back in the previous room with your character yelling “this isn’t really happening!” A very, very few of these are tied into particular character’s stories, and are therefore at least interesting – for example, there’s one character who briefly has a hallucination that he’s stuck in a padded cell – but others are simply goofy as hell and just end up being irritations, especially since there’s no “slap yourself and wake up” button. If you walk into a room and then your head falls off, and then each of your arms drop off, and then your torso bursts, it’s pretty obvious as soon as your head goes that you are having a hallucination, but you have to sit through the entire sequence before you can start playing again. Realising “this isn’t actually happening, but I have to wait while it happens anyway” is intensely disruptive to the atmosphere of the game. Even more disruptive are those hallucinations – like the Blue Screen of Death appearing, or the game announcing that it’s over and you need to buy a (fake) sequel in order to continue playing – which pretty much announce to you “Hey! You’re playing a game!”, because whilst it might cause a brief moment of out-of-character shock and irritation, it doesn’t actually immerse you in the atmosphere the game is trying to establish.

Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame are my two benchmarks of excellence in the survival horror genre, and part of the reason for that is that they simply do not let up. As play continues there’s a sense that you’re being drawn deeper and deeper into the game world and the mystery therein, and it is not a friendly game world, and the answer to the mystery might not be something you want to know. Eternal Darkness, when it comes to the crunch, wusses out; rather than being willing to be absolutely uncompromising, it goes to the opposite extreme. It is constantly, constantly giving little winks to the camera to reassure the reader “it’s OK, it’s only a game, none of this is really happening” through these hallucinations – at least, for your first playthrough, when your sanity is likely to be quite low for much of the time.

Once you’ve played through the game once you’ll doubtless have mastered it enough to be quite good at keeping your sanity high, at which point there simply isn’t very much threat. The magic system presented, whilst interesting enough, is fairly simple to master, and once you’ve cracked it you can blast your way through the game perfectly happily. And the combat system is clunky too – a common feature of survival horror games, where the protagonist isn’t meant to be good at fighting, but it’s clunky and slightly too easy. You can viably kill absolutely every single individual monster and zombie you encounter, which is a significant difference from the bullet-counting and combat avoidance that characterised Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The culmulative effect is that once you get good at the game, you have far too much control over your environment to really be scared any more.

Survival horror games are often quite short to play through, and Eternal Darkness is no exception – you can go from opening to end credits in about 10 hours – though the designers do find a nice way to extend the play time a bit. In the first extract from the Tome of Eternal Darkness you play through, a certain critical choice defines which of three hideous elder gods will be your adversary over the course of the game, which affects the characteristics of the monsters you encounter, and if you defeat each in three subsequent playthroughs you get a little special ending. This isn’t quite enough, however – the tactics for fighting, say, magic-aligned monsters are much the same as those for fighting sanity-aligned ones or combat-aligned ones, and you play through the exact same scenarios. What would make this worthwhile is if the game experience utterly changed for each elder god – perhaps the game could even have entirely different scenarios and viewpoint characters depending on which god you’re fighting – although that would probably take a hell of a lot of work.

I’m complaining a lot about the game, but it’s still at the end of the day a fun enough adventure which by and large manages to not completely embarrass itself next to contemporary competitors on the PS2, despite the technical limitations of the Gamecube. (Although there are a few ropey bits – there’s a bit where you get to go out on a balcony and see a view of an ancient cyclopean city buried deep underneath the Earth, only it looks like a painted backdrop, and there’s a bit in the World War II segments where the windows get blown out and it looks like the scenery beyond the windows are just cardboard cutouts on a stage.) It’s just that it’s merely good, not great, and sometimes it slips back into being merely ok and occasionally gets tiresome. (There’s some intensely repetitive stages towards the end that were just a chore to get through.) Pick it up second hand, play it on your Gamecube or Wii (hooray for the age of backward compatability), and then sell it on; it’s worth trying out, but it’s not a keeper. I am convinced that the sunburst of radiant critical praise surrounding the game is simply down to reviewers being happy to play a grown-up game on a Nintendo system, but by now the novelty of that simply doesn’t cut it.