Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Insane In the membrane

We’re scared. Someone hold our hand before we have a heart attack

» Gamecube » 2002 » Silicon Knights

i’ve always enjoyed playing through survival horror games, even though many of them terrify me. I quit the original Silent Hill because it all became too much for me and I never completed

Forbidden Siren for the very same reason. Outlast had my heart racing so much that I thought it was going to give up, and playing Resident Evil 7 on PSVR in the office caused me to scream. That’s right… scream. And yet, I still keep returning to them, because ultimately, I think a lot of us really do enjoy a good scare, which brings me in an admittedly roundabout way to Silicon Knights’ ridiculously ambitious Gamecube game.

Everything about Eternal Darkness intrigued me on release. I loved that you played as a female protagonist, I appreciated that it was inspired by the Cthulhu mythos of HP Lovecraft and I really enjoyed the way it introduced new characters, only to brutally kill them off by the chapter’s end. In the end, however, Eternal

Darkness worked for me because of its excellent ‘sanity effects’.

They start off subtly, like annoying you with a fly that crawls lazily across your TV screen, or the volume on your TV being turned down, but as your on-screen avatar begins to lose their mind, everything ramps up. Blood starts dripping from the walls and ceilings, you’ll be told that your controller has been disconnected and you have to watch on, dumbstruck, as your avatar gets brutally dismembered right in front of you by a gang of zombies, and the game even emulates a system error. By far the nastiest, though, is the devious trick where the game appears to delete your hardearned save file. I remember rushing to my Gamecube when it first happened, then swearing (and congratulating) Silicon Knights when I realised what had actually happened. I wonder how many of you reading this experienced the same thing?