Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem delivers a psychological thriller, one that has been long under the successful development by developer Silicon Knights. The title thrusts players through time, running intensive quests involving more than a dozen characters. It had its original beginnings on N64, had been cancelled, and then fell to the new generation in GameCube by none other than Nintendo. Even so, Nintendo and Silicon Knights worked on the title for two years to bring it into substantially more enrichment and many other features, control tweaking and fixes, along with the blown-out graphics, sound, and other things.
It's not a fuzzy subject. Some players envision getting to unlock this title and suddenly having it raining benefits in play over them. Most probably, disillusionment would set in. Rather, this is something that would take serious gamers over a long, epic pilgrimage filled with surprises, sudden about-turns and twists, fear, and, best of all, that final feeling of satisfaction on both completion and character development fronts.
It is about Alexandra Roivas, a beautiful young lady whose fate is recently entangled in police finding her standing over the torn, bloody corpse of her grandfather in his dark, moody estate, minus its head. She found out the murder had little or no evidence leading to any local cops, and she decided to handle it on her own. That's when the story of Eternal Darkness begins: when she was going to explore her late relative's manor.
First view, and players will be tempted to chuck Eternal Darkness straight into the "Resident Evil clone" bin. And the snap judgment is about as far from the truth as can be. Sure, both franchises have third-person views in common, and Silicon Knights' title tosses in some zombies too, but outside those similarities, the products couldn't be more different.
The battle system is not completely fault-free, either. It's got a bit of gap collision still alive in it, but not as serious as before. What I am saying is that at times, a swing of a sword by a player at a target seems to cut the enemy, but the blade does not cut through it. More worse is that after killing some enemies, they crash down on their knees and keel over; other times, players simply walk right through them. Things like these create some immersion-breaking experiences for a player, if only for a moment. Such collision errors do not comprise much—they do not often happen but do remain a pretty important minus.
Where magic is concerned, it is really learning and applying the different colors for the different beasts in the proper weapons. Some of the weapons may have had to be enchanted to a particular color before such an activity would take place. However, the magic system goes deeper than that. Ultimately, the player will be able to create his own spells. It will be a language. Runes will take the place of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Of course, there are some other characteristics of Eternal Darkness. One of them is puzzles; there are many kinds. Some of them would be easy to solve, others would require magic and some careful item retrieval and placement; thus, some would be quite difficult. But none could be so silly that players would be completely baffled by them. Rather, one considers the puzzle long enough, and the answer makes itself clear logically within the context of that universe.
As gorgeous and atmospheric as it is, Eternal Darkness competes hard as one of the most beautiful games for GameCube.