Evaluating Eternal Darkness: Nintendo's forgotten gem

i never really did horror games as a kid hell i got scared by really tame things in video games like i'm talking luigi's mansion spooked me something fierce as i got a little older i started watching various horror movies and really enjoyed them but i still couldn't play many scary games without chickening out until my mid-20s or so for whatever reason this caused me to miss a lot of good games that i've been slowly catching up on since and one of them was eternal darkness i had a friend who used to rave about this game telling me about all of the things that happened in it the game only ever released on nintendo gamecube back in 2002 and while it wasn't on the spookiness level of some of the highest regarded horror games it definitely carved out a niche for itself in the genre the game was created by silicon knights and received quite a lot of attention from various review outlets when it released but never really garnered any commercial success causing potential sequels to be canned and banned by nintendo's hand who owns the trademark for the game the weirdest part about this is that they've continued to renew the trademark for eternal darkness for 18 years until this year when they abandoned it for a short amount of time before renewing it again and yet here we are looking at this single entry that could have been a massive series checkered history aside there's something about this game that's different that makes me really want to dig into it and figure out what made it so universally liked to do that i'm going to be breaking down this analysis into parts as running through everything as i normally do isn't going to cut it for this game upon firing up the game the player is greeted with a quote from edgar allan poe followed by an array of visceral and mystifying imagery which includes the like of distant planets shining artifacts zombie-like humanoids writhing insects random blocks of scientific formulae and trails of blood this admittedly over the top yet captivating scene is accompanied by the sound of constant whispering guttural droning sounds and general ominous racket that really can't be described as musical for the most part when you kick off a new game a monologue by someone who proclaims themselves as dead takes place giving you a brief overview of a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily make sense at the moment he mentions his job as a psychologist and hints at humanity struggling against some unknown source for the past 2000 years from here you're dropped into a tutorial where nothing is really explained to you you're just given free reign to try to figure out the controls for yourself as three zombies inch their way towards you eternal darkness is mechanically similar to other older horror titles which were more popular at the time where you have to come to a stop before being able to shoot and are able to shoot certain body parts for maximum effect the limb system here is actually a little more in depth as striking particular limbs with a sharp melee weapon like a sword is liable to lop them off and affect the enemy in various ways for example a headless enemy will likely still live but tends to react to whatever's closest to it this includes other enemies which is pretty neat additionally you have an inventory which is also reminiscent of games like resident evil in which you have to examine or use whatever various tools and devices you find the game has you cycling through several different people's stories who were all affected by this ancient power in some way or another for example the first person story who you play out besides the main character alex is a roman centurion named pius when he gets called away by a voice which creeps into his head he follows its call into an ancient temple which has a very rudimentary puzzle system to help ease the player into the game's mechanics when you get to the end you get the choice of three different flavors of power interestingly enough this isn't a mass effect 3 ending situation in which the color you choose may as well just be your favorite as the whole game is affected by this seemingly simple choice which is void of explanation for my playthrough i chose the fire truck flavor which makes most of the enemies in the game take on a red hue and thus hit harder and are also granted the ability to regenerate lost limbs faster if i were to choose the salad flavor enemies would cause my sanity to drain faster and if i were to choose the detroit lions flavor enemies would do more magic damage which is dealt in both physical and sanity form plus enemies have a tendency to self-destruct now you know why i called it the detroit lions flavor enemy changes aside each color actually affects puzzles and cutscenes as well with each one corresponding to a particular god that pius serves additionally red is weak to blue blue is weak to green and green is weak to red we see this early on when a blue zombie takes on a couple of reds and slaps them around before succumbing to sheer numbers there is a fourth color which trumps them all though purple purple is the color of the most powerful god and the magic which is used under its influence usually destroys all the other colors this definitely gives the game a lot more replayability though many of the basics stay the same throughout the journey i would say this is a pretty cool system to ensure the player definitely gets the most bang for their buck with eternal darkness but a lot of the game is wholly similar no matter which route you take so i have to say that the slight twist and gameplay isn't nearly enough to make me want to repeat it over and over though i will say that by doing so you do get the good ending if you grind it out three times to expand a little more about the various characters that you can play throughout the game without directly jumping into the story every character's adventure intertwines with the main character's abilities discoveries and equipment as you continue to read about these stories alex learns how to utilize various magics interact with certain objects and access particular weapons and items by the end of the last person's story alex has all of the knowledge that she needs to proceed to the end game and take care of the antagonist which is a pretty cool way for a character to learn a vast amount of knowledge and upgrade in a short amount of time i mentioned sanity before when referring to the green monsters basically every enemy in the game causes an instant sanity drain when they see the player if enough sanity is lost strange things begin happening to your game this is easily one of the most uniquely interesting aspects to eternal darkness as your character begins seeing and hearing hallucinations which range from minor things like paintings and walls bleeding to statues turning to look at you two strange ominous bellows coming from random parts of the room to much more off-the-wall stuff like the entire game tilting one direction or seeing a corpse of yourself in the bathtub when your sanity really plummets the game's soundtrack shifts to the wailing of women and laughing children over the din of tortured souls and other strange sounds this is when things get really spicy as anything from your character sinking into the ground slowly to exploding when you heal to being unable to move as zombies eat you in a hallucination to your screen switching to a black video screen as if your video cable got loose there are tons and tons of sanity effects that i didn't even encounter and i would love to go over every single one but it'd probably be pretty redundant the point is that this is done perfectly for its time lots of this stuff could happen in other games around the early 2000s as various graphical bugs are glitching and silicon knights did a fantastic job making your very game feel like it was cursed somehow in addition to all of these other mechanics there's also a pretty in-depth magic system which is learned by the collective mass of characters that you play throughout the game this involves collecting various runes and combining them to form new spells while you can just experiment and eventually brute force spells into existence there are also tablets which help you identify the different runes and recipes which tell you which runes can be combined to form the various spells that you can use while the idea is a pretty complex one on the surface it's actually a relatively streamlined process which i enjoyed after getting the hang of it these spells range from healing your health and sanity to enchanting different puzzle pieces to help you repair them to enchanting your weapons to help you solve puzzles and defeat certain enemies easier to revealing invisible areas and becoming invisible yourself to summoning creatures dispelling protective force fields and casting your own force fields all of these spells and their respective power levels are affected by the disc which you use to cast the spell the three point is the quickest to cast but the lowest in power level whereas the seven point circle takes a long time to cast but has immense power making it difficult to use in a fight enemies in this game are for the most part slow and simple to deal with basic zombies and skeletons are dispatched via lopping off their limbs and executing though retreating when they swing is also a pretty important step to make sure that you stay alive quite a few of the bosses follow this pattern of combat also making them pretty easy to deal with a more interesting enemy is known as the trapper which are these little bug enemies that don't attack your health insanity but instead trap you in an alternate dimension which has you teleporting between different platforms this is both a boon and a curse as getting trapped by one when your full-on health sanity and magic can be awfully annoying but if you're hurting their teleportation is actually a blessing in disguise as these dimensions all have a way of restoring your lost meters if you are full though and you want to avoid them the game's sneaking mechanic comes into play or you can just pop them with a ranged weapon dealer's choice then there's stuff like the bone thieves which are these alien looking creatures that burst out of potentially any defeated enemy and take a gigantic toll on your sanity in the process there are these big mini boss looking horrors which have these three heads and are capable of shooting lightning from afar there are these winged skeletons which are immune when their wings are closed and have to be dispatched by waiting until they're about to strike or getting behind them somehow there's this invisible monster which siphons blood from its victims unless it's stopped then there's the bosses usually bosses are able to cast spells which summon more creatures or put up barriers turning the fight into a spell versus spell type of situation the first one is this spidery looking monster which has a tendency to run away when it starts getting beaten down while summoning zombies to keep me distracted while it sends lightning my way not a huge deal it goes down pretty quickly the second main boss is this big ugly [ __ ] it has three phases in which it shoots projectiles then summons zombies and then tries to hammer me with its claws and i have to say that the whole thing is more annoying after a while than cool there's also the final boss obviously but i think i'll save that one for the end of the story portion of this video i would say that all in all there are some really cool creature designs in this game with the bone thieves being the most creepy and interesting to me personally even if the zombies and skeletons aren't anything super unique the other designs are pretty cool to engage and sneak by the way the enemies interact with each other how they attack other creature colors which correspond to their respective gods and the different attack patterns which they all exhibit keep the game fresh throughout your journey after the initial nightmare sequence concludes the main character wakes up to a phone call informing her that her grandfather died and that the police need her to come down and identify the body what this chunky detective neglects to tell her however is that her grandfather is now a lump of headless flesh and instead shows her his corpse with hardly any actual warning beyond this ain't pretty irritated with the lack of police work our protagonist decides to take it upon herself to search her grandfather's mansion two weeks later for evidence of his murderer this has the player running around this mansion until they stumble upon a secret study with a tome in it the tome initiates the sequence with pius that i mentioned earlier and then yields another page to the book that launches the player into the next character's story this one is probably twice as long and continues to follow pius's lich-like form as he's serving his god to try and vanquish the purple god which threatens every other color this is where we play as our next character elia she's chilling out around this ancient temple going gee whiz i sure do wish i could take place in some kind of ancient prophecy well in a shamalonian twist that can only be outshined by something along the lines of the plot of flubber our cambodian character gets locked in this temple and has to puzzle her way out through various traps and puzzles there's nothing particularly compelling about the level design here but there's nothing that really offends me either as much of it is gathering these different jewelry items and putting them on a statue to proceed at the epicenter of these runes is the big purple boy himself looking like a mashup between yogg-saron and c'thun it doesn't take long for some servant of mantarok to run over and gently mush one of the gods hearts into elia incurring the wrath of pius who comes down and replaces her heart with sith lightning from what we can tell at this stage the purple god mantarok is the being who is keeping the world from falling into eternal darkness making him the good guy here this is only further expanded on by the following cutscene in which pius god reveals that their end goal is to fully nullify mantarok's power along with the other gods to fight for supremacy with manarock out of the picture pius's plan will theoretically launch the red god into the position of dominance if left unchecked this brings us to our third fourth playable character this time we play as a messenger who is supposed to bring an important message to the king of somewhere the king of europe whatever the point is the message was set in motion by pius to ensure that the king can no longer work against his god the message itself is actually a curse which our messenger anthony reads before he delivers it realizing that he's been cursed he goes to warn the king who's meeting with the bishop currently this one has the player running through puzzles which revolve around learning the magic mechanics described earlier in the video as anthony continues to progress further into the depths of this monastery the curse begins to rot his body eventually reducing his movement speed to a crawl at the end anthony has to slay several agents and monsters under pius's command before making it to the king who has already fallen then a bone thief bursts out of one of these dudes despite your faith there is little to save you from the power of [Music] having learned the repair spell from anthony's adventure i can now repair the upstairs key with the main character and explore the mansion a little more i won't go over every little example of these chapters imparting some knowledge onto alex so that she can progress but this is basically the way that it works kareem is our next victim who wanders the desert in search of an artifact so that a woman he wants to be with will marry him she's pretty stuck up and shows it by going yep give me this artifact which i want more than anything else in the world and i guess you can have me whatever the following puzzle chambers go about the same as everything else so far but with the added twist of kareem reaching the same type of chamber which pius did at the start when he goes to pick up the green gods artifact the ghost of the woman he was doing all of this for appears and tells him that he was gone for so long that she died but get this [ __ ] i i gave myself to a nobleman with a jealous mistress she had me dragged from my bed and in cruel revenge cleansed with knives if we are to be together again you must make a sacrifice sacrifice you lied to me betrayed me and you really don't look so good anymore what a [ __ ] legend our next victim is this plump little oompa loompa who happens to be an ancestor of alex this means that the chapter actually takes place in the mansion which alex is running around during the present time and has us blasting horrors and performing autopsies with colonial danny devito this guy's actually pretty badass regardless of his looks his gimmick is being able to perform autopsies on fallen monsters which helps the player glean more information about weak points and potential strengths eventually he makes it down to the hidden basement area where he takes on the boss that i mentioned earlier that can cast spells of its own unfortunately our guy tries his best to inform anyone who will listen after this encounter and winds up in the looney bin because of it this leads us to illinois jax who raids the lost temple from earlier in the game he found this place with another guy who very obviously looks like a villain and as it turns out is pious in disguise after taking out his minion our hero begins his search around the temple his trap-filled escapades are by far the most puzzling so far and expands on elia's adventures with the jewelry pieces on the statues by making illinois here go through it two extra times while our hero isn't led to a boss fight this time he's instead led to several powerful magics and the heart of mantarok which was residing in the body of elia in a sealed room our hero grabs the heart and replaces it with an item of similar weight before hightailing out of the temple and back to the mansion where it's sealed securely behind a comic book i can't make anything up about this game that doesn't sound any more bizarre than it actually is here to continue this trend is our next playable guy luther the bald apparently the place that we were in before was france as i pay attention to this time well here comes pius again pretending to be another dude he lets luther know that there's treachery afoot before shuffling further into the cathedral here so our good monk here does what every monk would do in this situation loot's the place for a crossbow and a mace then he gets the puzzling this is easily the worst chapter so far in terms of level design while the previous chapter was pretty annoying with the way that you kept running around the very samey looking temple this cathedral has you making it all the way to the very end then running all the way back to the very beginning to grab a dagger and then running all the way back again i can at least be happy about gaining the 5 point disc so that i can become invisible but the slog of running back and forth really does wear on me here it's worth mentioning that during pius wild ride he has that giant monster thing that i mentioned earlier guard the blue artifact from the beginning of the game in this cathedral well when old luther makes it over to wear the artifact thing this thing pops out of the ground and it looks like it's going to be an epic boss fight poor guy next up we've got this dude in the middle east who's been commanded to survey a construction site for a monument built in the name of i don't know probably the red god this dude is built like an ihop and accordingly moves like he stopped in for all you can eat pancakes so we pilot this entire meal of a man through the semi-familiar caverns and survey five different parts before finding our boy kareem in ghost form he's been guarding the green god artifact in his afterlife waiting for the chosen one to appear to claim it well surprise rotund roberto is just the man he's been waiting for anyways dude goes back up after surveying the land and gets thrown down a well and what a chosen one he was our next chosen one is brendan fraser he's a reporter around the time of world war one and as such gains access to the most varied arsenal yet in the form of a revolver a rifle and a sword ironically though the biggest weapon that he gains is the ability to cast a magic attack i'm in the cathedral again because that's just where [ __ ] goes down in this game my endeavors have me running through this place at a pretty brisk pace which is nothing like the last time i was in the cathedral to make up for how quickly i head through the now makeshift hospital i come face to face again with this big ass monster from before it looks like it's about to be an epic boss fight no wait yeah we have a real boss fight i pretty much already covered how this boss fight goes but afterwards our guy actually survives for once which is definitely different dude makes it out of world war one and hands the artifact off to the main character's grandfather years and years later good for him this finally brings us to playing as the grandfather himself old eddie roivus was a pretty dapper looking dude in the 50s his mission is to hunt down the aforementioned blood-sucking monster who keeps attacking his servants kick its ass and then plunge down into the depths of i'm actually not really sure how this mansion is laid out but apparently there's a whole city below it which is located conveniently through the stargate this thing is a massive necropolis which houses minions of the red god and is overlooked by a gigantic nine point circle of power the imagery is really cool despite the 2002 gamecube graphics and the rest of ed's adventure has him using his humongous full metal alchemist transmutation circle to just annihilate the residence of what i assume is a fine nation to create a philosopher's stone or just to destroy it either way the ensuing puzzles has me cloaking away from everything and running back to the safety of my mansion before pius finally gets his revenge like 43 years later or something interestingly enough alex's in-between phase is actually worth mentioning again here just because of how much information it gleans so danny devito didn't get put into an insane asylum solely because he went off ranting like a madman about ancient demons he also killed all of his servants presumably because he feared that they may have been bone thieves in disguise whoops well after dispelling the rune up here big al's wacky mansion adventure gets kicked up to 11 as monsters are let loose throughout it so onward to our last alternate character large michael dude's a firefighter with the stamina of a horse and the sanity of tom cruise he's been fighting fires during the aftermath of the gulf war before surprise explosion makes him fall into ancient ruins the best thing about mike here is his stamina followed by the sheer amount of more modern weapons that he gets not that it matters too much considering that i'm going to be invisible for most of the puzzling this is thankfully the last time i'm going to see these runes as i use three effigies which i've collected throughout the game to unlock the best weapon for the final boss and then follow it up by strapping some c4 into the middle of these runes and escaping on a three minute timer i assume that big mike probably dies after all this most likely on the night that he delivers the weapon to gramps though it's never shown and now we move on to the final chapter of the game where we'll obviously be playing as alex after opening the way down to the necropolis and collecting the enchanted sword from mike's chapter we head on down to where alex's grandfather purged the area and basically do the exact same thing he did only different the main difference in gameplay here is that there are hardly any enemies beyond these trappers which are dispatched with the revolver it gets a little tedious especially when i have to cast shield every single time that i enter this room to cross it eventually i complete the nine point circle again but this time i'm summoning the blue god to take on pius and his red god jaturga didn't think i'd say the god's name did you well joke's on you i've heard this one the most besides manta rock anyways the final fight is as follows hit skeletor hit artifact repeat it's actually a really underwhelming fight that's only saved by the cutscenes in between and the music oddly enough i didn't mind it as much as i thought i would for as simple as it was as the gods battle it out in space alex calls upon the spirits of the people which helped her get this far and they all have to take a swing at the artifact without getting hit by pious the battle rages on between the gods with the blue god portaling chaturga's claw in half which was [ __ ] cool this is some godzilla [ __ ] eventually both foes fall only for the blue god to begin trying to take over instead with some hasty help from alex's gramps the two managed to seal away the blue god with the green god's power the rock paper scissors thing is still pretty cool even at the end though the game then tells you that in order to get the true ending you should probably play through it two more times don't get me wrong this game's got a ton of originality to it and a lot of it really impressed me but the fact is that there are four different environments which are recycled from spirit to spirit and that worked just well enough to not get too annoying by the end of the game if i were to start over and do it all again though i'd probably be very bored by the end i'm sure this was again a great way to make the players at home feel rewarded for firing up another run back in 2002 but there really should have at least been an expedited new game plus kind of way to chug through eternal darkness faster than the first time that you played it that said looking up the footage from the other endings is a possibility nowadays so that's probably the route that i would choose to go even if it was faster the second time around as far as the battles go they're pretty much the same stuff but with different monster moves and all that the ending is still the same just with sealing away the new monster with its weakness though with the second ending in particular alex monologues about a hidden ally helping her from the shadows to make the right decisions and remarks that she's quote almost there to push the player to complete the third playthrough when you do finally make it through the third one it's woefully underwhelming at first alex achieves clarity realizing that many people were going through the same thing that she was which i'm guessing is an illusion towards all of the players playing through the game after her narration the game opens up to another cutscene explaining that every timeline happened at once leading to every one of the ancients besides mantarok to be destroyed by each other's hands her claws tentacles whatever now i will say that earlier i referred to manta rock as the good guy in this game but let's be real dude is all eyes and mouths so while he did help to destroy these other ancients it was only because of pius's interference which trapped mantarok and left him nearly powerless the game does a great job here at letting the player know that while the purple god did help out it was still plotting a way to return someday seems like a great setup for a second game wonder when that's coming out eternal darkness is the definition of a game which had boundless heaps of potential i could easily have seen this game being the prequel to something bigger better and more awe-inspiring while much of it is padded with running through these same types of areas and fighting these same types of enemies the ideas here were incredible and extraordinarily well done much of the time many of the puzzles are unique and interesting to figure out and i had a lot more fun than i thought i would with this pretty damn old game it really is too bad that things happen the way that they did with the potential sequels and now the game seems to be locked in nintendo's vault seemingly forever maybe one day they'll dust it off and try to make something truly amazing thanks for watching this one came out pretty quick so i hope that it was in depth enough for you i would recommend that you pick up this game but uh anyways i've got shirts you know this or you don't but i do they generally have a neck hole and two armholes and fit around the torso somewhat this can't be happening i've also got a twitch where games happen i have a twitter where tweets happen i have a discord where discord wait yeah and a patreon and that's it happy halloween

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 177,070

Keywords: Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem, Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem, Nintendo, Silicon Knights, Gamecube, GCN, Mantorok, Pious, Chattur'gha, Xel'lotath, Ulyaoth, ancients, Roivas, Alex, Ellia, Maximillian, Edward, Michael, Augustus, Sanity, Tome, Amiens, Paul Luther, Black guardian, Karim, Bonethief, Horror, Phillipe Augustine, Charlemagne, Roberto Bianchi, Edwin Lindsey, Trapper, Joseph De Molay, Legrasse, Alright I got nothing, Happy halloween, Forbidden City, Ehn'gha, Angkor Thom

Id: 6p6XbUjnakY

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020