A few weeks ago, I was talking about The Nintendo Wii: a console that had a lot of novelty, and little else. But another aspect of The Wii that I didn’t get into last time was the fact that it was backward-compatible with Nintendo’s previous offering, The Gamecube.
The Gamecube, AKA: Nintendo’s purple lunchbox, is considered by many in the modern day to be one of, if not THE most underrated console ever designed. Its only fatal flaw was that it had to compete with The PlayStation2, which doubled as a DVD player; and the Xbox, which… Uh… You could play Halo on, I guess. Also, it was the one console out of the three that didn’t have ANY sort of on-line capability like Xbox had, and PS2 would eventually get with the on-line adaptor. But there were a lot of Gamecube exclusives that were genuinely worth playing. And a few of them weren’t Mario games!
And one such Gamecube exclusive was one of the two horror games that live rent free in my head to this very day. None other
than Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
A lot of people speak very highly of this game, and rightfully so. This game was probably one of the freakiest things I’d ever played, and it remains so to this very day.
The plot of the game is basically a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft: the godfather of what we now call “cosmic horror”. We used to call it Lovecraftian horror in honor of the guy, but then, Gen-Z found out what everybody else had already known about the guy for decades prior, and canceled him posthumously. Yeah, don’t get me started.
The game is centered primarily around this character.
This is Alexandra Roivas. She’s come to town after getting a phone call at exactly 3:33 in the morning about her grandpa’s untimely murder. And holy hell! Whoever did this absolutely murdered the crap out of this guy! I’m no prude, but even I second-guessed posting the screenshot of it. That right there was some Ogrish.com shit, if you know what I mean. The detective himself admits that it’s such a mess that they can’t even get dental records!
Alexandra makes it her mission, from that moment on, to find her grandpa’s killer. After solving the first puzzle in the game, you find her grandpa’s secret study, and the last thing he happened to be reading through right there on the table: The Tome of Eternal Darkness. AKA: the totally not necronomicon in any way shape or form.
From there, you play as several different protagonists all across history as they encounter eldrich horrors, and the main antagonist of the game. I won’t go through every single character (you should do your own fucking homework, I believe), but I’ll at least tell you
about chapter 1.
This is Pious Agustus. He discovers a tomb full of skellymen, and the game tells you how combat works as you hack them to bits. You can hack off limbs, you can decapitate them, Or you can just deliver body blows till they eventually fall down. You can perform finisher moves on the fallen enemies, which the game highly recommends from chapter 2 onward.
Eventually, Agustus enters a room with a ruby, a sapphire, and an emerald idol. This is where Eternal Darkness is unique: you can actually choose who the main villain of the story is. Your choices
are…
Ulyaoth is who Agustus will serve if you pick the blue one. Becoming his prize pupil gives Augustus the ability to see worlds far beyond our own. Ulyaoth’s magic is built around mana, which you need for casting spells… Which in one case is hilarious, because in order to recharge your mana meter, you have to deplete it to cast the spell that’ll refill it. In the early stages, it feels like it’s
defeating the purpose, but later on, it makes more sense.
If you pick the red one, Agustus becomes a servant of Chatur’gha. In the process, Agustus gains superhuman strength. In his own words, he could basically knock over entire buildings with a simple fingerpoke. Chatur’gha’s magic is based on strength, which is a fancy way of saying you use his magic when you need to heal. Sometimes, characters will have enchanted items that have Chatur’gha’s blessing on them, which basically means you don’t have to have the healing spell in your hotkeys right away for some folk.
FUN FACT: Chatur’gha’s voice is so deep that they literally had to make subtitles mandatory for whenever he speaks. Frankly, I didn’t have any trouble understanding him, but I guess I was in the fringe minority. Again.
Chatur’gha is basically the equivalent of playing the game on hard mode, because his minions can actually regenerate limbs, and they seem to be the only ones who AREN’T killed, or even slowed down by decapitation like the others.
If you pick the green one, Agustus becomes a follower of Xellotath. As a result, Agustus’s intellect increases a thousand fold, and he’s capable of understanding cosmic truths that’d cause most mortal minds to explode and paint the nearest wall gray. And where as most would use that intellectual power to solve world hunger, cure disease, or yell at normies on Discord about not being smart enough to REALLY understand the humor of Rick and Morty, he uses it to summon forth this unholy abomination.
Xellotath is the equivalent of easy mode, because all of her minions go down the moment they’re decapitated. Also, you gain access to Xellotath spells the quickest when she’s the antagonist, which comes in handy.
Xellotath’s magic is based on the mind… Which brings us to Eternal Darkness’s most interesting mechanic: the sanity meter.
The red meter is your health, and the blue meter is your mana for casting spells. The green meter, however, is your sanity meter. The lower it gets, the more the world around you begins to distort. You lose sanity by encountering minions of either of the three ancients, and in order to regain a fraction of it, you have to deliver finishing moves. The lower your sanity, the more the game fucks with you. Not the main character, not the character you’re playing, but you. You’ll start seeing things like:
- bugs crawling up your TV screen that aren’t actually there.
- Hitting pause, only to see your once full inventory suddenly went empty.
- Saving your game results in it getting deleted despite clicking save.
- your character pulling their own head off abruptly and for no reason.
- disc read errors that go away as quickly as they show up.
- And those are the ones I remember off hand! Also, again, do your own fucking homework.
If your sanity meter runs out completely, you not only encounter all these insanity effects more frequently, but it starts taking its toll on your health meter. If you don’t keep your sanity meter even SLIGHTLY full, you basically run the risk of dying from insanity.
Luckily Xellotath’s magic restores the mind. Although if you really want to see all the insanity effects, you have to refrain from using it.
The three ancients work in a rock, paper, scissors sort of fashion. IE, Xellotath beats Ulyaoth, Ulyaoth beats Chatur’gha, and Chatur’gha beats Xellotath. And Mantarok, if you somehow find the purple idol in the Cambodian temple, beats all three. Which basically makes Mantarok that asshole who plays rock paper scissors with you, and throws weird shit like asteroid, or dune buggy, or Pac Man, or whatever.
The thing I find rather interesting about the game is that if anybody dies at any point, it’s game over. But when you complete the early chapters, the protagonist ends up dying anyway. If it weren’t for collecting sacred artifacts, or mildly inconveniencing the ancient you choose’s mission somehow, it seems like that’d just defeat the purpose… But the story has to be told right, so… Try not to die too early, I guess.
The game does get a little tedious in later levels, regardless of which ancient you pick as the antagonist. Less in the sense the bad guys get stronger, and sap more and more of your sanity, and more in the sense there’s WAY too much backtracking. The level where you play a younger version of Alexandra’s grandfather is probably the worst of the worst, requiring you to cast a… Ninetagram? Whatever you call a shape with nine sides and nine corners.
But minor tedium not withstanding, Eternal Darkness is a fantastic game. So much so, in fact, it motivated me to look into the work of Lovecraft himself. And… Whew boy, what an adventure that turned out to be.
I admit, early on, I was a fan. However, it didn’t take especially long to start figuring out everything wrong.
Let’s just set aside the obvious “Lovecraft was racist even by 1930s standards” factoid. Everybody knew it back then, they knew it now, and it’ll probably never truly be forgotten anytime soon. However, I’m more interested in the OTHER problems.
In my experience, the more I looked into his work, the more I kind of started to realize that maybe not ALL of Lovecraft’s work was gold. or silver, or bronze, or tin, or construction paper, or… You get the idea. Hell, even his GOOD work, like The Call of Cthulhu, isn’t without its silliness. Seriously, you stopped a god like monstrosity by ramming a boat into him? I have a feeling that’s like the equivalent of a mosquito bite for something like Cthulhu… But I digress.
Lovecraft’s work may have aged like milk, but the concepts of god like beings who treat our existence like a nuisance, or with extreme apathy, or just about everything in between carried on in the hands of VASTLY superior authors and artists. I refer you to such books as The Six Gun Tarot, or Broken Monsters. Or, on the more humorous side of things, references to things like The Church of Unspeakable Horror in Simon R. Green’s Nightside novellas. Seriously, who the hell would worship at a place like that!?
And we sure as shit wouldn’t have games like Eternal Darkness to talk about on spooky season.
Nobody says you have to like Lovecraft’s viewpoints on race and religion and what not. Frankly, the least you can do is appreciate the building blocks at the bottom of the tower for providing a decent base to build on. That, my friends, is what “separating the art from the artist” means to me. None of this shit about how it’s basically white people talk for “fuck you, you don’t matter.” Rather, it’s appreciating what was created, DESPITE the fact the artist was a human septic tank. You can love Call of Cthulhu despite Lovecraft, you can love Sin City despite Frank Miller’s later work and sudden shift into fascist ideologies, you can like The Green Party despite the fact they keep nominating Jill fucking Stein for some fucking reason… Really, the list goes on.
And I’m going to cut it off there, because in the last nine or ten drafts of this article, I went on a psychotic rant that took up way too much space. Mostly because this is a topic that drives me mad with how many people misunderstand the meaning… But I choose not to drive myself mad with naive people right now. Instead, I’d much rather drive myself insane with a classic video game.
I don’t care HOW you play it: Eternal Darkness is a game that needs to be played at least once. Three times if you want the secret ending.
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