A few years after releasing Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Silicon Knights and Denis Dyack returned with another horror adventure, this one somewhat surprisingly released exclusively on Nintendo's adorable GameCube. Eternal Darkness isn't based directly on but is heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's work.
The game opens in the modern day when Alexandra Roivas, an attractive college student who at a glance might be confused for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is called by an Inspector LeGrasse to be informed that her grandfather has been brutally murdered at his Rhode Island mansion. With the police stumped, Alexandra vows to find the truth, so she begins searching the mansion and finds an ancient book, the Tome of Eternal Darkness, said to be made from skin and bone like the Necronomicon particular to the Evil Dead movies. As she reads the book, the game flashes back throughout history, allowing the player to control characters in times and places that are crucial to the story.
The first segment follows Pious Augustus, a Roman commander in Persia, 26 BC, who is drawn to a strange underground tomb. Fighting his way through the undead inhabiting the tomb, Pious claims a strange artifact and is transformed by powers beyond into a sorcerous lich. The chapter ends and the game returns to the present, but the book isn't complete, so Alexandra must search the rest of the house, finding more pages to unlock more chapters. These chapters will take the player to Cambodia, France, and the original Persian tomb in times hundreds of years apart, often following doomed protagonists who end up in conflict with Pious. Eventually Alexandra herself will put the pieces together and put an end to things. The game must also be completed three times to unlock its true ending, a multiple timeline concept that Denis Dyack credited to being inspired by Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories. Dyack also wanted to take historical occurrences and put a supernatural horror spin on them, such as atrocities committed by conquerors like Tamerlane. "The Pillar of Flesh in the chapter with Abdul, that's historically accurate. That stuff really did happen."
Probably the most memorable feature of the game was the insanity system it pulled from the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. Fighting monsters causes the character's sanity to deplete, which at first causes odd effects such as bleeding walls or statues that move but in more advanced stages will seem to take over the game system itself, bringing up messages that the player's save card is being erased or changing the volume on the TV, which genuinely caught some players by surprise. The insanity system is an amusing feature, although the general fixation on insanity in Lovecraftian games sometimes feels misplaced since not all characters need be as mentally fragile as Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be. Robert E. Howard wrote Lovecraftian stories without necessarily having his characters swoon at a terrible sight.
The story is pretty good and shows the work Silicon Knights did on Blood Omen wasn't a fluke. The characters are an interesting bunch and the story builds steadily and reasonably while hitting all the main tropes associated with Lovecraftian fiction. It also doesn't really go much outside the boundaries, but video game storytelling is often so inept that it's noteworthy when a game simply manages to tell a story competently. Eternal Darkness tells a better Lovecraft story than many games that are actually based on his work.
In terms of how it plays, the game's primary emphasis on horror gives exploration and combat a weighty feel that also makes it engrossing as a sword-and-sorcery experience. The various characters fight like hell but taking down a handful of undead shambling toward them feels like accomplishment and not some mild diversion on the way to destroying an entire horde. The game might resemble Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil but the characters are nimble and swift, not lumbering tanks, and are easy to get in position for either a melee strike or a shotgun blast. A notable aspect of the combat system is the ability to aim at specific body parts - lopping off a skeleton's head will cause it to lose track of where the player is, for instance. However, the game is a bit on the easy side, both in terms of combat and puzzle-solving, and even the much-lauded insanity system is so manageable that some players might not see the more extreme effects it has to offer unless they go out of their way to not keep the sanity meter topped off.
It still looks and sounds great, though. GameCube games at their best were some of the best-looking of their generation and Eternal Darkness features art direction that hasn't aged badly at all. The human characters are attractively rendered and have personality and the monsters are appropriately disgusting to look upon, and the locations all get across a sense of age and atmosphere with their musty tombs and temples, torch-lit churches, and cyclopean alien cities. The game was released just as 3D graphics technology had matured beyond its awkward early years when everything was still very abstract.
Despite a strong cult following, a sequel has yet to be produced.
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