Remake This… Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Sometimes, circumstances just seem to conspire beyond the control of mere mortals. This is both the subject of psychological horror Eternal Darkness: Sanity Requiem‘s gameplay, and also, to a degree, its status in the annals of videogame history.

Released in 2002 on the GameCube, Nintendo’s happy, purple budget console with a carrying handle likening it to a child’s toy in some quarters, Silicon Knights’ Lovecraftian adventure jarred ludicrously with its potential audience, being one of the most frightening and genuinely affecting horror experiences ever to emerge as a videogame.

While it plays immediately like a third-person survival horror, Eternal Darkness has a lot more lurking below the surface. Playing as Alex Roivas, the granddaughter of a psychiatrist who has died in mysterious circumstances, the player explores and gradually unlocks the doctor’s Rhode Island mansion, discovering pages of a mysterious book that contains stories of various characters through history who have crossed paths with an insane Roman general and his attempts to open up our world to powerful godlike beings from another universe.

While some have struggled pointlessly against this ensuing doom, others have made subtle differences. Most have met sticky ends, though, and it’s up to the player to play through each of these condemned souls’ stories, enabling Alex to learn not just their circumstances, but also more about the layout of the mansion, the wider world the characters visit and revisit and, crucially, crumbs of information related to trying to fight the malevolent gods. It all fits together exceptionally smartly, and the sense of history is wide-ranging and intelligent, taking in such varied targets as a messenger for 8th Century Frankish King Charlemagne, a World War I field reporter and a 15th Century Venetian architect.

The sense of impending dread as these seemingly random folk all get dragged into the conspiracy is palpable, and that’s even before the game’s famous ‘sanity effects’ come into play; the overwhelming terror each character faces being manifested as an on-screen bar that, when empty, conjures up a variety of bizarre effects, including vague background noises of footsteps or screams, to more visual phenomena like entering a room to find you’re walking on the ceiling, or that your arms and legs suddenly begin to drop off. The most memorable, however (particularly for the first time) is when a system error ‘crashes’ the GameCube and tells you your memory card is being formatted. Eat your heart out, Kojima.

As the plot thickens and Alex gains in power, the elegant narrative tapestry begins to give way to an equally accomplished game of paper/rock/scissors with three different coloured magic types representing the base element of the three warring gods (only one of whom will, game-changingly, become your main target after a choice early in the game).

Eternal Darkness languished on the wrong console at the wrong time for far too long; a quick HD redux be more than sufficient to bring it screaming and wailing back into prominence on XBLA. For 360 owners in particular, it would also be an excellent opportunity to Silicon Knights at its best after the rather unfortunate footnote that was 2008′s Too Human.