This video has been sponsored by Surfshark (ominous music) There are things much,
much worse than fear. The sensation of “being
afraid,” in most cases, is an emotion that can
come as quickly as it goes, especially when we’re
talking about video games. A loud sound, a brief flash
of something startling, and BANG! -you’ve got a powerful moment
that is quickly over and done with, but can nevertheless stick in
the player’s head for a long while. But is this kind of horror
in games actually SCARY? It is surprising,
absolutely. Startling... memorable, without a doubt. (creepy droning) There’s a whole sub-genre of
internet reaction videos for this because of how much fun it is to watch
someone startle themselves silly. - AM I DEAD?! - But as anyone who has endured one jumpscare
too many, over their time, will tell you, the overuse of this “loud-and-in-your-face
approach can become quite exhausting, very quickly After a few too many abrupt,
no-context jumpscares, you’ll suddenly find that
you’re no longer scared. You’re... annoyed. (shrill screaming) Or even worse, the cardinal
sin in gaming, you’re BORED. And that’s because “fear” is really
just a temporary, fleeting emotion. It’s a situational reaction to
something happening TO you, a response to
environmental stimulus: Here one moment,
and then gone the next. Fear, then, is an
ultimately ephemeral thing: Easy to summon, but
hard to capture in a bottle. And yet there is something even
greater and more potent than fear, something that so many games
have tried and failed to invoke. TERROR: That overwhelming feeling of an
ominous and existential threat, lingering just on the
periphery of your awareness. It’s the ever-creeping
certainty that you are not safe, that hope is an impossibility, and that it’s merely a matter
of time until you tire, slip up, and fall prey to the all-consuming
dread that haunts your fever-dreams. This is no mere
flash-in-the-pan jumpscare. This is true COSMIC TERROR. If you were to set things up like one of those
dopey and indecipherable “political alignment charts, “Cosmic Terror” would reside at
the extreme opposite of Humanism. To the Cosmic Terror devotee,
humanity isn’t just insignificant; we are beneath contempt. We are totally and completely at
the mercy of vast eldritch entities. Monstrous mega-deities for
whom the span of a human life is but a brief flash in the boundless and
unknowable procession of the cosmos. In other words, we’re
all damned and doomed, and attempting to struggle
against this grim fate will only bring us to an even more
horrific and unfortunate end. And no writer or creative mind has
done more to define the contours of this mythology than America’s
probably most famous Rhode Islander, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The works of HP Lovecraft
have become extremely popular in recent fiction across
all forms of media. Every other movie, game,
or TV show over the last half decade seems in some way or another
to be inspired by the Lovecraft mythos. (shrieking) But in this moment of
near-total Lovecraftian ubiquity, it’s easy to forget that
not even 20 years ago, Lovecraft’s most famous works, like The Shadow Over Innsmouth
or At the Mountains of Madness, were considered
cult-obscure relics. Lovecraft himself made barely any money
from his writing while he was alive, and died broke and near-penniless. And more than two decades ago, one legendary game studio took
inspiration from the works of HP Lovecraft and worked to
translate his tales of eldritch horror to the modern living room
TVs of gamers everywhere. That studio was the
inimitable Silicon Knights, creators of the classic
action-RPG Blood Omen, which I’ve covered
on this channel before. Now, up until this point in
the late-90s-early-2000s, there really only had been a handful of high-profile
games that had dabbled in Lovecraftian fiction. Quake is the title that many will point to first
as a Lovecraft-adjacent title from this era, but there were other games where the
inspiration was even more direct and apparrent, like the survival horror
progenitor Alone in the Dark, or the classic point-and-click
adventure Shadow of the Comet. Which I've also
covered on this channel. But while developing their as-yet-untitled
project for the Nintendo 64 in the late 90s, the team at Silicon Knights fixed their
gaze upon even greater ambitions. By harnessing the power of next-
generation console hardware, they could expand on the work
laid down by these classics, and create a cinematic horror
game with the mythological scope of HP Lovecraft and the
poetic flair of Edgar Allen Poe. And so the labor of these
Silicon- Knights-of-the-Round gave us the game that
many consider to be THE crowning achievement by this
massively underrated studio, and one of the finest survival
horror tiles ever conceived: Eternal Darkness:
Sanity's Requiem, which was released in 2002
on the Nintendo Gamecube. This game would have the dubious honor
of being the first-ever M-rated title published by the notoriously
“family-friendly” Nintendo. And this little bit of trivia is also perhaps the
LEAST interesting thing about this game, and that’s saying something! - [Narrator] Nintendo - Eternal Darkness was a game
with tremendous ambitions: Literary, cinematic, AND ludic. This was a title that set a new
high mark for home consoles, and truly pushed the boundaries
of cinematic presentation in games. It was also an early contender in the
“Games Are Art, Actually” debate, nearly a decade before Roger Ebert muddied
the waters with his terriblest of takes. But even more impressive is
how confidently and competently Eternal Darkness DELIVERED
on all of these ambitions. The result is, beyond a shadow
of a doubt over Innsmouth, one of the greatest and most celebrated survival
horror game experiences ever released. Eternal Darkness is
an incredible game. An incredible game that, sadly, next to nobody actually played. (Monsters of the Week title song playing) Alright, before we go on, a thank you to Surfshark VPN who
sponsored the making of this video! I assume you do know
what a VPN is, right? Basically it’s when you route your internet activity
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slam event like Wimbledon, it gets virtually impossible for me
to live stream it from where I’m at due to annoying legal crap. But...pop on Surfshark via
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again, and now, I hope you enjoy
the rest of the video! (foreboding music) Fresh off of the success of Blood Omen,
the crew at Silicon Knights had big plans. They wanted to take what they’d
learned from Blood Omen and bring their fantastical visions to life
with truly cinematic presentation, via the latest and greatest advances
in polygonal 3D rendering. Eternal Darkness began
development as an N64 title, but it soon became clear that only the
forthcoming generation of systems- -meaning the PS2 / Xbox
/ Gamecube generation- -had the raw horsepower the studio
needed to truly realize their vision. Sure, nowadays you can emulate the N64
and the Gamecube on a wide range of PCs, or heck, even your phone. But it’s very easy to forget
that, at the time, these consoles represented the absolute bleeding
edge of processing and graphics power, the kind that wasn’t even
available for most consumer PCs. And so Silicon Knights signed a
“second-party” exclusivity deal with Nintendo to produce two games for the
mysterious forthcoming Gamecube, which, at the time, was
known only by its codename: PROJECT DOLPHIN. For their first
Nintendo-exclusive project, the team decided to take a stab at the big
Cthulhu title they had been planning for years. It proved to be a wise choice. The Gamecube was,
hardware-wise, the most technically powerful
system of its generation, outstripping both
the PS2 and Xbox. Games like Eternal Darkness,
and later Resident Evil 4, were a testament to the technical
wizardry and eye-candy that skilled developers could summon
from this humble little cuboid. - [Leon] Sir... - And central to Eternal Darkness
would be the game’s dark, moody, and deeply literary
exploration of the Lovecraft mythos. Cosmic Terror had finally
arrived on your home console. For one, the use of Lovecraft helped to give
this game its own unique style and identity since the Cthulhu mythos was
still very niche at the time. But there was also another
added benefit to this approach: The writings of HP Lovecraft were, and
remain to this day, in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. Yeah, Lovecraft’s works are not and have
never been under copyright lock-and-key. You can go to your e-book depository
of choice right this moment and download the entire
Lovecraft canon, free of charge. And what’s more, this means
that the Lovecraft mythos is, for lack of a better phrase,
entirely OPEN-SOURCE. Any aspiring writer, artist, content
creator, or what-have-you can pull from the Lovecraft canon and mix-
and-match its constituent elements at will Cosmic Terror is a
monstrous void, yes, but it’s also an amazing
creative sandbox. And it’s one that the team at Silicon Knights
great use of in developing Eternal Darkness. To distinguish their new game from
what they saw as the more campy, "b-movie horror” of other
survival horror contemporaries, Silicon Knights decided on some key
narrative elements early in the design process. Eternal Darkness would be a
time-traveling mystery story that was as much adventure-
game as survival horror, (thump, squish) featuring just as many
cerebral psychological thrills as straightforward
“haunted house jumpscares.” (thunder) And this is one realm
where Silicon Knights absolutely distinguished themselves
with their work on Eternal Darkness, - Venture no further or be
struck down where you stand! - just as they did with
Blood Omen before it. The plot of Eternal Darkness isn’t
some after-the-fact afterthought whose only purpose is to provide “story
beats” that structure the gameplay. From the outset of
the design process through to the last moments before
the gold master disc was pressed, narrative is ALWAYS been front-and-
center for Silicon Knights titles. - [Michael] Just as much as I know,
you know. - These were lofty creative ambitions indeed
for a videogame in the early 2000s. And yet the core concept that
gave rise to the development of Eternal Darkness was actually both
simple and incredibly topical. As Silicon Knights studio head
and Eternal Darkness director, Denis Dyack, told
the Escapist in 2006: “Videogames were under fire for
messing with people’s heads, and being accused of
being murder simulators. So, we thought, wouldn’t it be a
good idea to make something that really does mess
with people’s heads?” Of course, a horror story with
ambitions this epic required a suitably sprawling
setting to support it- -a saga of blood, betrayal, and eldritch lore
that stretches across more than two millennia. But this is no fable of righteous heroes wielding
sword-and-sorcery to vanquish their foes. This ensemble tale is
Lovecraftian to its roots, a “multiple viewpoint story” that
follows 12 ordinary men and women who become caught up in a titanic battle
against the cyclopean cosmic terrors that seek to drive us all to
madness and consume our world. The game begins with a
straightforward framing device: Young Alexandra Roivas, voiced here in her early pre-Femshep
years by the wonderful Jennifer Hale, - [Alex] Hello? - [LeGrasse] Miss Alexandra Roivas? - Um, yeah... who's this? - This is Inspector LeGrasse
of the Rhode Island Police. I'm sorry to disturb you but... - [Ragnar] learns her grandfather
has been murdered- -decapitated while sitting in
his study in the dead of night. She travels to the ancestral
Roivas mansion in Rhode Island, and she’s barely set foot inside before she discovers
a gruesome Necronomicon hidden in the house: The Tome of Eternal Darkness. Upon leafing through the dessicated,
human-skin pages of the Tome, Alex is thrust into a saga spanning across
thousands of years of human history, both oriental and occidental. Each of the game’s dozen playable
characters follows a single thread of this tale, with the tangled web becoming
more and more decipherable with each chapter in the
Tome you complete. These 12 souls are engaged
in a desperate struggle with cosmic terror far beyond
the ken of mere humans. They are not mighty
wizards and warriors, but rather doctors, engineers,
journalists, and architects. Each protagonist is a
near-powerless mortal, barely capable of defending themselves
against the enemy’s arcane emissaries, and certainly ill-equipped to square off with
monstrous and all-consuming eldritch deity. And in the best
tradition of Lovecraft, those who try to take a stand against the
cosmic terror always come to an unhappy end. (energy bolts sparking, screaming) They're eaten alive, consumed by
deadly magicks, or annihilated entirely. Others who attempt to flee the looming
darkness may escape physically unharmed, but are mentally scarred for life
by the horrors they’ve witnessed. - [Maximillian] (whimpering)
Death... Darkness! - The story of each era of
human history is revealed to be intertwined with
the legacy of cosmic terror. The tribune of mad gods that are
vying for control in the universe are also the masterminds
behind The Inquisition, the First World War, the Puritan's
Witch HHunts, and the Persian Gulf War- -all in service to their dark designs. And yet, there is a greater purpose to each
seemingly-hopeless act of defiance, even if the unlucky martyr cannot
recognize it themselves in that moment. Each life chronicled in the Tome of Eternal
Darkness builds upon the one that came before it, handing hope and the
promise of salvation down through the generations like
history’s most desperate baton-relay. The human impulse to
keep hope alive perseveres, even in our darkest moments, and even when we ourselves cannot appreciate
our contribution to the larger struggle. It’s a sly and ironic invocation
of the humanist principle, embedded in a Lovecraftian mythos that
is so often famous for the exact opposite. Through the pages of the
Tome of Eternal Darkness, Alex becomes enmeshed
in a globe-spanning, time-traveling mystery to uncover
her grandfather’s killer. The player will shift between
a veritable constellation of different playable protagonists,
locations, and historical eras: Modern Rhode Island, Roman-occupied Persia, Cambodia at the height
of the Khmer Empire, And Dark Ages France. The voice acting in particular
deserves a special nod here for how much it underpins
the epic presentation. Silicon Knights was justifiably impressed
quality of Metal Gear Solid’s voice acting because they hired nearly the whole dang
squad to voice the cast of Eternal Darknes All our faves are here! Colonel Campbell, - [Paul Luther] I... I found him lying here. Dead! I called the guards! Liquid Snake, (screaming) - [Anthony] What sorcery is this?? A spell? I am bewitched! - Mei Ling, - [Ellia] I only wish something that fantastical
with a higher purpose would happen to me.. - Even big-man-on-campus David
Hayter himself makes an appearance! - [Legionnaire] Do you believe that it really exists,
Centurion? - [Pious] I do no doubt our
emperor's beliefs... or his orders. - Just like Metal Gear, these actors put
on some truly BRAVURA performances. And is that- -oh ma gawd- -OLD BIG BOSS?! - [Pious Augustus] I am the SCOURGE of GOD Appointed to chastize you. Since no one knows the remedy
for your iniquity... except me! You are wicked,
but I am more wicked than you… So BE SILENT! (screaming) - Mechanically, Eternal Darkness bears
more than a passing resemblance to other survival horror
classics of the time, like Code Veronica and Fatal Frame. And there are definitely some
similarities to the presentation: You’ll navigate maze-like environs
in a third-person perspective, clash with dangerous foes who
can overwhelm unprepared players, solve light inventory
puzzles, and carefully ration your health and
resources to win through each encounter. But Eternal Darkness is also quite
remarkable for how much it did to innovate on the established
survival horror design formula. In a genre famous for purposefully
clunky and cumbersome controls, Eternal Darkness is actually
quite straightforward to play. For one, this is a fixed-camera game,
but not a fixed-PERSPECTIVE game- -and the Dagoth
is in the details. Early Resident Evil was both fixed-
camera and fixed-perspective, where the camera remains in place
within each scene and does not shift until the player has moved to the
next screen, loading in a new scene. And this camera scheme is
how we got “tank” controls, where movement is always relative to the
*character* rather than the *camera*. Eternal Darkness, on the other hand, uses
fixed-camera, but not a fixed perspective. The player does not control the camera as
they move through the game’s environments. Instead, the camera will follow along
behind you, more often than not, panning and zooming as though you’re
watching a super-extended dolly shot play out. Besides taking inspiration from
Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, you can also tell that the team at Silicon Knights
were huge fans of the early Silent Hill games. This, combined with the game’s extremely
well-realized and well-thought-out implementation of camera-
relative non-tank controls results in some absolutely breathtaking
and cinematic playable sequences. And thanks to the inventive
controls and camera, you actually get to PLAY
these scenes yourself, rather than just watching
them play out in a cutscene. There’s also a surprising amount
of depth to the combat, the kind of mechanical
complexity that had never really been seen before in a
survival horror title like this. A limited targeting system allows the player
to aim directly at specific enemy weak-points; either doing extra damage
for the finishing blow, or stunning them just long enough
for you to beat a hasty retreat. There are no cheap deaths or surprise
insta-kill moves to contend with here. If you mess up and die, you will always
understand what went wrong, and quickly come up with something to
do next time, to avoid it happening again. Of course, it’s not all combat
and inventory management. Another way that Eternal Darkness distinguishes
itself is through its complex magic system, which is the key to solving some
of the game’s best puzzles. The player builds
spells via combinations from a glossary of runes hidden deep
within the Tome of Eternal Darkness. Some spells can
heal and protect you, others will help
you repel your foes, and some magicks will help you progress
past obstacles and apparent dead-ends. The game does offer scrolls that
reveal how to craft certain spells when you need them
for a specific puzzle, but the player is also given plenty of
space for arcane experimentation. As soon as you have the
right combination of runes, you can cast any spell you’d like well before
you acquire the corresponding scroll, which allows for some fun minor “sequence
breaking” by inventive and skilled players. (magical swooshing) Many of the later
bosses and puzzles will test your understanding
of this magic system, and will reward you for thinking
laterally or nonlinearly in this way. Each of your trips through
history is bookended by short sections in the mansion
where you return to playing as Alex. These segments are much quieter
and slower than the main game, playing more like a point-and-click
adventure than survival horror. But that doesn’t mean there’s
no horror to be found here- -far from it. As Alex explores, the
mansion will begin to change around her in ways
both subtle and startling. Tranquil paintings will shift to
scenes of demonic hellscapes; the statuary will come to
life and appear to “follow” you as you trek through the
mansion’s cavernous hallways; wails of anguish and
torture will ring out from seemingly abandoned and
walled-off parts of the manse. Everywhere you turn, your mind
seems to be playing tricks on you. Whenever you are noticed by an enemy or
perform certain environmental interactions player’s “sanity meter”
will begin to deplete. And as your sanity drains away, the world around you
will begin to change. At first, the
shifts are subtle: The camera begins to
tilt at an odd dutch angle, occasionally “twitching” as though
it’s attempting to right itself from under the
weight of a great force. You’ll hear whispers and moans
in an otherwise-empty room, or you’ll catch a glimpse of rivulets
of blood trickling through the walls. Then suddenly
the phone will ring, and no one except a disembodied voice will
be on the other end when you pick up. (dial tone) You’ll move from one
room to another, and you’ll suddenly sink through
the floor like quicksand, arriving somewhere
else entirely. As your sanity
further depletes, the game “breaks” itself
in even stranger ways. Footsteps will echo around you
when your character is standing still. You’ll stumble upon a treasure-
trove of weapon ammunition, only for the game to suddenly reverse
itself and take away your loot. (Paul screaming) Soon, your character will begin muttering
and whimpering to themselves, wildly swinging their weapon at unseen
foes with no input from the player. (gunshot, glass cracking) And as you continue to lose sanity,
resulting in ever-stranger hallucinations, it will quickly become
clear to the player: You are not playing the game. THE GAME is playing YOU. You’ll see bugs crawling across
the inside of your screen. The game will raise and
lower the volume by itself, or turn the
screen off entirely, leaving you alone in the dark with only the
snarling of unseen abominations to keep you company. You’ll be in the middle
of a pitched battle, only to suddenly see a fake “blue
screen of death” appear on your TV. And perhaps most diabolically of all, the game will even pretend to delete
your data while you’re trying to save, which is practically guaranteed
to cause your heart to jump up into your throat
the first time it happens. If Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid is the series that first popularized
this kind of meta fourth-wall-breakery, it is Eternal Darkness that
elevated it to an artform. And to bring the cross-pollination
between these games full circle, more than fittingly, Denis Dyack and his team
at Silicon Knights eventually ended up developing Metal
Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, the GameCube remake
of the first Metal Gear Solid which originally inspired the iconic
game design of Eternal Darkness. These “sanity effects”- –they are the secret sauce,
the je ne sais quoi that makes this game so
unique and timeless to play. There was simply nothing
like it when it came out, and there has never been
anything quite like it since. No, really: I mean there has quite literally
never been anything like it because Nintendo put a fucking
patent on the game’s sanity system, only to never employ it again. So much for open-source. [error code 2305: buffer overflow CRP2\{}] (swoosh) Eternal Darkness is definitely
not an *underrated* game. It’s rightly considered to be one of the
finest survival horror games ever made, a genre pillar that is still supremely
playable and enjoyable to this day. But while the game was highly *critically*
and won a shedload of industry awards, audiences were...mostly
indifferent at the time. Eternal Darkness had the bad
luck of competing head-to-head with the release of the shiny
new Gamecube remake of Resident Evil, which the vast majority
of players apparently preferred. And hey, for good reason, because it
just so happens to be another contender for the crown of the “greatest classic
survival horror game of all time.” (gunshot, shrieking) But that meant Eternal Darkness was a
near-total commercial-financial disaster, selling fewer than half-a-million
copies worldwide and falling short of the sales needed
to recoup its development costs. Silicon Knights began
work on a direct sequel to Eternal Darkness shortly
after the first game’s release, but the project was quietly
canceled by Nintendo, who still hold the game’s IP under
copyright lock-and-key to this day. The series has been
permanently put on ice, and it is unlikely that it’ll ever
see the light of day again. Although, hey, apparently
we’re getting a port for the Wii U Fatal Frame game
for the Switch soon. Never say never. Silicon Knights would continue on
and release two more great games in the coming years with The
Twin Snakes and Too Human, followed by an X-men tie-in game
that is better left unmentioned. (loud stuff and silly screams) But in retrospect,
it’s easy to see that Eternal Darkness was the
beginning of the end for the studio. Following the disbanding
of Silicon Knights, more than a decade after the
release of Eternal Darkness, Denis Dyack and the
original team tried to get the band back together for the Kickstarter
project Shadow of the Eternals, a spiritual successor to Eternal
Darkness by the original developers. It was a miserable failure, earning less
than 10% of their requested pledges. Eternal Darkness has never
been ported to another console, and is even rarer due to
the fact that there were no additional copies of the game
released after the first pressing, making this one of the rarest retro
survival horror games of its generation. Right now you can expect to pay easily
US$100 for a used copy of the game, and it should be stressed here
that no one from Silicon Knights OR Nintendo, for that matter,
will see a single cent from games you purchase
on the secondhand market. That money goes straight
into the reseller’s pocket. And so, it’s that
time again everyone: - Arrre 'ya ready kids?? - AYE AYE CAPTAIN! - I can't heeeaar yououuu - AYYYE AYYYE CAPATAAIIIN - ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Right now, the only way to play Eternal
Darkness on modern hardware and preserve this classic
piece of gaming history… Is through emulation. If you'd like to play it yourself, as
always, I've added a Google Doc, which is linked in the
description of this video, that shows you how to set up the Dolphin Emulator
to play Eternal Darkness on your computer. And it plays and looks
beautifully, as you can see. Just like the Tome of Eternal
Darkness for which it is named, the game itself languishes forgotten in some dusty
and shrouded corner of the Nintendo Vaults waiting for a reader to
chance upon its pages. But actually, the parallels here are even deeper
and more profound than I initially thought. So, indulge me for a moment
as I take off my critic’s hat and don my Game
Theorist’s dunce-cap. (fart) In a book tucked away in the recesses
of the mansion’s library in the game, we learn that the Roivas family
were Mediterranean immigrants who fled Europe only to be persecuted
in the New England witch hunts. And even though I first played
this game almost 20 years ago, it is ONLY NOW that
I realized “ROIVAS” is “SAVIOR” spelled backwards. A ROIVAS-SAVIOR of
Mediterranean origins… Locked in perpetual battle with
the forces of chaos and darkness... Hated and persecuted by the
corrupt authorities of their era… Who held aloft the light of
hope for the future... Carrying the torch for humanism
down through the ages... So, here goes: ETERNAL DARKNESS IS THE GREATEST AND MOST
SUBVERSIVE CHRISTIAN-ETHICS GAME EVER MADE But hey, "tHatTs JuSt A tHeOrY..." (swoosh) - [Alex] THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING! - Just as Eternal Darkness compels
us to keep hope alive through the ages, so too can we retronauts
keep this game alive through the dark ages of
planned obsolescence and anti-social mega-corporations... - [Edwin] Yees, this is it. It HAS to be! (Zizek-sniff) Eternal Darkness is
something of a relic: An artefact from a time when top gaming
critics would cheerfully contend that “story in video games is
just like the story in a porno”- -usually silly, always superfluous, and
only there to move the action along. But the team at Silicon
Knights believed differently. They believed that
STORY MATTERS, and this narrative first-approach to their
game design still shines through today. Despite the
fantastical premise, Eternal Darkness tells a story
that is not only believable, but also entirely internally
consistent and coherent. Everything just makes sense within
the rules established by its universe. And it’s the highest compliment
you can give the game: Despite all of the narrative’s
far-flung hijinx around time-travel, magicks, and
multiple timelines intersecting, the story always
feels easy to grasp. And that’s why,
despite all the years, Eternal Darkness still
is just as playable today as it was when it
was first released. It’s no exaggeration to say
that this game has held up far BETTER than so many
other more “polished” or “technically advanced” horror
games that came out after it. Because while...fear may be fleeting… Darkness is Eternal. (orchestral crescendo) (Andrew Hulshult's Prodeus soundtrack playing) Hey everyone, thank
you for watching! For... anyone who
discovered me with this video, hey, I'm Ragnar and on this
channel I cover old games, horror games, indie games
or combinations thereof and try to bring attention to
games that have fallen into obscurity as well as outstanding indie
titles that I want people to not miss out Like in this credit segment, you see me play through
a level of Prodeus, a currently in early access
retro first person shooter by Mike Voeller and Jason Mojica
who’ve worked on titles like Doom 2016, Payday 2, Bioshock
Infinite and Singularity before this. Prodeus is unashamedly inspired
by the original Dooms and translates their soul
successfully to modern engines without transforming
the actual core gameplay, mashing up the best elements of
id-tech and Build engine FPS games while looking both incredibly
nostalgic and technically impressive with its blend of pixel-sprite
based enemies and entities, unfiltered textures, dynamic
lighting and PBR textures and excessively satisfying
amount of particle effects. It has, to me, I’m not
exaggerating here, the most satisfying gunplay I’ve come
across in any shooter so far, really- -enabled by the unbelievably
juicy sound-design, supported by incredibly smart
and playful level design and endlessly amplified by the amazingly kicka
soundtrack by the legendary Andrew Hulshul It also has amazing community content
support built in from the get-go with a highly accessible and
functional map-editor and directly implemented
community map-browser, which is a deep embrace to the community s
that kept old DOOM games alive for decades Now, despite
being early access, this one already had me playing non-stop
for many hours, and I keep coming back. High recommendation. If this looks
satisfying to you then playing it will probably be that
multiplied with at least a 2-digit number. It’s incredible. If you wanna check it out, you can follow the link in the card
that just popped up in the top right which you can also find in
the description of this video that leads you to the GOG version of the game, that comes without any DRM. And, disclaimer: if you
buy through that link, I’ll actually get a tiny
affiliate commission- –from GOG; It's not cut from the
developer’s earnings or anything; so that could be a neat way to
help me out a little in the process. But speaking of funding
the work on this channel: Making these videos and the
financial support of everyone who partakes in making them
is primarily crowdfunded. So, if you’d like to help us shed light on
forgotten and overlooked gems in the future then it’d be a great help if you considered
dropping a buck or two over on my Patreon. It gets you access to high quality version
of my videos, one to several days early, as well as the chance to leave your
mark in the credits of my videos. The support makes a
tremendous difference. It realy does-it is the de-facto
financial backbone of this channel. So, thank you for
considering and a big THANKS to everyone
who supports me there already! And a special thanks
this time goes out to: www.patreon.com/RagnarRoxShow Until next time... ta ta! (ludicrously juicy minigun massacre)
