Eternal Darkness Sanity's

First Impressionsby Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

In this game you play the young lady Alex Roivas and her ancestor Dr. Maximilian Roivas and her other ancestor Dr. Edward Roivas and a Roman Centurion and some Cambodian Dancing Girl and a Persian Prince and a Firefighter and a WWII soldier and some monks and an architect and... I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game kill off protagonists as fast or as often as this one! The high mortality rate and the constant threat of deepening insanity will have you grasping for an Elder Sign while you play... this is certainly a Lovecraftian Cthulhu game in spirit if not in name.

The plot, which somehow unfolds through a series of brief vignettes with doomed main characters throughout history, involves stopping an ancient evil from manifesting in the material world. You inadvertently choose which of three evils is the primary threat by selecting a glowing relic at the beginning of the game. I chose the green one, which meant I was facing the female-voiced unknowable terror (who I mentally dubbed Cthulhu’s little sister), but in the long run there doesn’t appear to be a big difference between the three. These great demonic otherworlders are locked in a rocks, paper scissors match defined by the color of magic they wield, so as long as you know red beats green beats blue or whatever the order was, you can pretty much deal with each situation as it arises.

Which is why I was confused when purple magic got thrown into the mix. There I was, another unsuspecting historical personage dweeb wandering around going insane, and I stumble upon a fourth school of magic. I never could figure out how purple fit into the scheme of things, but I thought it made for a prettier color so I used it an awful lot. Also, it gave me fond memories of one of my favorite spells in any video game, a little incantation in Zork Grand Inquisitor that could turn purple things invisible. Only purple things, mind you.

Eternal Darkness is famous among gamers for the various effects it uses to portray your characters’ developing insanity. Psychotic episodes begin with what I like to refer to as “Lars Von Trier Camera” which is basically the opposite of steady cam combined with severe intoxication. Soon you are treated to little delusions like having your head randomly roll off or the game suddenly pretend that your save files have been deleted. I never realized insanity was so much fun... in fact I made a conscious effort to remain bonkers at all times so I could enjoy the ongoing loopiness of it all.

Which brings up my primary criticism of an otherwise splendid game... the magic you are granted makes things far too easy. Once you’ve learned the shield and restoration spells it is very difficult to have things go sour. Keeping your health and sanity up are not much harder than keeping slightly one-size-too-large socks on your feet... they just kind of stay there, needing at most an occasional modest tug for support. Even the toughest opponents easily fall to your blade when you’ve magicked it up with the right color (see above.) It takes intentional neglect to experience the fun of babbling madness. Except for that one boss. The game is quite a breeze... except for when you face that one boss.

I hate it when game developers include Him. You know the guy... he takes a lot of different shapes in a lot of different games, but it is always the same idea... he’s the boss you can’t hurt unless you guess the designer’s obscure intentions. In this case you fight a big old hovering demon thing that is only vulnerable to one of your spells (in one specific color) when he is behaving in one specific way. There is very little evidence to suggest the correct course of action, so you end up going through the same unskippable cutscene over and over again as you try every spell permutation your fevered imagination can concoct, and nothing is working because you did the right thing at the wrong time and thus dismissed it as a possibility and you feel like the boss is laughing at you for wasting your precious time and all you want to do is push forward to the next part of the game instead of being punished for your creativity and... okay, I have to stop talking about this before I punch someone. Clearly, some video games can lead to violent behavior after all.

Even though it made things too easy most of the time, the magic system was a lot of fun, and the historical settings and variety of characters helped keep the game fresh and engaging throughout. I wish there had been a little more time for character development... it was rare that you felt any kind of investiture in the fate of any of these hapless mortal pawns. But the idea of passing an ever-expanding book of spells from one hero to the next across centuries has a lot of merit, and I look forward to seeing how it could develop further in a sequel.

Running the game on the Wii was no problem at all, as long as you have invested in a Gamecube controller and memory stick, both of which rumors suggest have grown scarce. But that’s what Ebay is for, and being able to play all the previous generation games for cheap makes any bidding wars you experience well worth the aggravation.

Played For: about 24 hour