LOVECRAFTIAN: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002)

 

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.

Dark Adventure/Devil World (1987)

Konami got in on the Gauntlet craze with its own 3-player take-off (its first 3-player game) called Dark Adventure, but they gave their game a different slant by favoring a pulpy, Indiana Jones theme instead of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Dark Adventure's attract mode informs us that our three heroes, Condor (i.e., Indiana Jones), a pretty blonde reporter named Labryna, and Zorlock, another archeologist who seems inspired by Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark, are holding a press conference to announce the discovery of a strange sarcophagus. Condor slides open the lid, the box explodes with light, and the three characters vanish as a voice declares, "Those who tamper with the sacred ark...are DOOMED!" On starting the game, the heroes appear in a strange land of demons and the only way out is to fight their way through to the demon king and slay him.

Condor of course has a whip, Labryna a sword, and Zorlock a spear, and each can also fling sticks of dynamite around. As with Gauntlet, the characters' health steadily (and quickly) declines and can only be restored by picking up soda cans that occasionally appear. The monsters mostly appear from stone generators and exits must be unlocked by finding keys. Complicating things, however, is that levels often feature multiple exits and taking the wrong one can cause the players to loop back to levels they've already played. More powerful weapons, such as laser guns or bazookas can also be found occasionally, or power-ups that can speed up the characters or extend their melee range.

Dark Adventure makes a strong first impression. The graphics are quite nice, with an appropriately dark color scheme and characters that are taller and more detailed than Gauntlet's. The first level features you battling hordes of minotaurs and then suddenly the music picks up as a giant sword-wielding slime monster starts chasing after you, booming with each footstep. Killing this creature will cause it to collapse back into the muck, but if you linger too long the monster will reappear, so there's a sense of urgency created. Unfortunately, the game isn't consistent in keeping up this atmosphere and it feels like it played its best hand right away. There are some cool monsters and sights still to be seen - e.g., demonic trees that try to ensnare you, bat-winged men similar to those Solomon Kane fought in Wings of the Night, and lava-based levels with their own giants - but not much with the impact of that muck giant chasing you on the very first level. Among other creatures the come against you are rats, giant spiders, bats, and the undead skeletons do finally arrive relatively late in the game. 

Konami also produced an alternate version for two-player cabinets called Devil World.

Devil World deletes the Zorlock character as an option, and includes some significant changes such as ditching the non-linear progression and starting the characters out with ranged weapons that can be upgraded with a Gradius-style system in which you pick up orbs that can be saved up and traded in when you have enough for whichever weapon you want. On the downside, the game is stripped down a bit in its rogues gallery and its audio presentation. 

It never got a home port. Perhaps it just didn't make much money in arcades but it seems like the concept would have been good for an NES adaptation that could have shifted the design more toward something like a more horror-tinged The Legend of Zelda, similar to what Blood Omen did years later.

COVER ART: Shard of Spring (1986)

 Art by Joe Chiodo. Despite the rise of epic fantasy through the 80s, the classic Frazetta-esque swordsman still lingered and was often even in the forefront.

Venture (1981)

 

Venture can probably lay claim to being the very first instance of dungeon-crawling in an arcade game. At a distance, it might appear to be a fantasy-themed variation of Berzerk, with its overhead view of combat and happy-faced character, but it's slightly different.

The player takes control of the crossbow-armed Winky, the aforementioned happy-face character, sort of a heroic version of Berzerk's Evil Otto. You start out in a dungeon, the halls of which are patrolled by fearsome and invincible monsters. Avoiding the monsters, you duck into individual rooms, at which point the game zooms into a more detailed view of the room. Each room includes a certain type of monster - such as our old friends the skeletons, snakes, spiders, etc. - and a treasure to be claimed. Unlike the monsters in the halls, Winky can use his crossbow to vanquish the denizens of the treasure rooms, but he has to be quick because if he takes too long the monsters from outside will invade the room and chase after Winky. If you can claim the treasure and escape the room, the game will fill its outline in the broader view, marking it as complete, and the process repeats until the entire floor has been cleared, all the treasures collected, and then Winky descends to the next, more difficult, level of the dungeon. Not unlike Gauntlet - you're killing monsters, taking their stuff, and exploring deeper and deeper - but without the multiplayer aspect.

The game was designed by Exidy co-founder Howell Ivy, not a household name today but his list of credits is nothing to sneeze at. Among his other games were Death Race, an unofficial Death Race 2000 adaptation that was the first game to ignite a moral panic, Circus, Mouse Trap, and Pepper II. The graphics in Venture are a bit Space Invaders-like in how they balance abstraction, menace, and an odd cuteness, and the game has well-rendered, high-tempo music that wasn't yet a common feature in 1981 games. Winky might be a far cry from Conan and his various clones and offshoots, but he was probably about as good as 1981 gaming could manage.

The game is exceptionally difficult because of the combination of its controls and enemy AI. Instead of being a smoothly maneuvering, agile character, the controls for Winky are unusually sticky in that pushing the joystick in a direction will cause him to first aim his crossbow and then move a moment later, but the enemies aren't bound similarly. They flit about rapidly like water bugs and will deliberately evade shots from the crossbow, and in the event they can be pinned down for a killing shot, their corpses will remain deadly until they decompose and vanish after a couple of valuable seconds. Not only do you have to kill them, you have to make sure they don't die in a spot where they'll block your path and slow you down. Despite its level of challenge, the game is addictive because of its pacing and the dopamine hit that washes over you after you've cleared a room and maybe even an entire floor, and the discovery of new types of treasure.

Diablo (1996)

 

Diablo is something of a video game precursor to the grimdark movement that has been prevalent in modern fantasy. It begins with the player (players if you're playing online with friends, a big deal on its release) choosing a class - warrior, rogue (archer/thief), or sorcerer - and then entering the town of Tristram. You chat up the few inhabitants and are directed to the nearby church to investigate a case of the archbishop leading many of the townspeople to their deaths in the catacombs beneath the church. Soon you're fighting through hordes of creatures, going back to town to rest up and sell valuables, being given more things to investigate, and are gradually lead deeper and deeper under the earth until you're effectively in Hell. It turns out the source of the town's troubles is that a major demon, Diablo, has been confined deep under the surface but is now stirring and drawing evil to it. Success in conquering the Diablo only results in a downbeat ending. Some popular saying about gazing into an abyss might be relevant.

Reading the game's manual reveals an extensive backstory that describes a Manichean and Moorcockian conflict between angels and devils who represent Law and Chaos, with man somehow being the key to swaying the war one way or the other, and then a history of the town and how it got to its present state. It would probably be better to avoid reading the manual's story, though, as the game's atmosphere is much thicker if the player simply explores and discovers things along the way. Despite being a sword-swinging dungeon crawler, the game feels akin to supernatural horror films like Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy, where things follow a sort of nightmare logic and there is no happy ending but just an impulse to push ever deeper in a hope to survive or at least find some answer along the way.

As a game, Diablo was intended by David Brevik to take the old concept of Rogue and its imitators, the randomized dungeon delving, and to simply make it digestible to mainstream audiences. Slick graphics  and audio instead of ASCII characters and PC speaker bloops, and easy, streamlined controls based around the mouse instead of numerous keyboard commands. See something you want to attack or someplace you want to go? Just click on it. (There will be so much clicking that you will take a few years off your mouse's life by playing Diablo.) The emphasis is on being able to jump right in and start beating up skeletons instead of wringing hands over rolling up the best character and fussing over their appearance. It was very successful and represented another major step in Blizzard's march to the top of the game industry. To some it also heralded a decline in classic computer role-playing games, another example of video games becoming simpler, dumber, and more action-oriented while claiming to be more highly evolved because of improved graphics and sounds. One way or the other, after Diablo it was common for "action role-playing games" to mimic Diablo's interface, with a red health orb on the left, a blue magic/mana orb on the right, and a hot bar running along the bottom between them.

Diablo does have a certain strategic element, despite its simplified gameplay, which is its emphasis on optimizing a character through picking which stats to upgrade with leveling up while also outfitting the character with the most effective combination of equipment. Another way in which Diablo was highly influential was its stressing of looting the environment even beyond what most traditional RPGs encouraged. Playing Diablo in some respects feels like shopping in how you slaughter a group of enemies and then quickly riffle through whatever they drop to determine what would be good to sell back in town and what would be good to swap for whatever you're currently wearing. By the end of the game you'll be discarding some absurdly effective items because you've already got epic armor and weapons and can't be bothered to even pick the stuff up to sell.

Diablo had one highly regarded sequel, another sequel that was highly controversial, and another sequel that just released that is also highly controversial. The general trend has been toward less grittiness, more epic storytelling, and the kind of broader, more exaggerated art associated with Blizzard's later, post World of Warcraft games, but the original game still has a foreboding and more personal mood and style.

COVER ART: Nightstone (2001)

 

This cover to a Spanish-made Diablo clone looks familiar...

The English version for a comparison:

Surely many who have viewed Frazetta's paintings thought they could be improved by pasting a couple of CGI women along the edges.

Deathflood: Dungeon of Doom (2022)

 

Deathflood: Dungeon of Doom is a brand new C64 game (freely available from Windigo Productions here) that concerns a lone thief, either the male barbarian or an amazon, who investigates the allegedly abandoned stronghold of a powerful necromancer with the intent on looting its treasures. Locating the stronghold reveals that it's not entirely abandoned because the necromancer's experiments are still shambling about the crumbling halls, and the bulk of it is actually beneath the mountains in which it's situated. Penetrating to the bottom, the thief finds the remains of the necromancer but when attempting to seize the corpse's priceless jeweled crown, the foolish thief sets off a trap: the entire complex is now rapidly filling with water.

The game itself begins with what would be the breakneck finale of most stories, as the player has to escape the dungeon while evading the necromancer's undead minions, grabbing as much treasure as possible, and staying just ahead of the ascending waterline. This is much easier said than done because some of the rooms can get complicated as the player has to climb up and down ladders, searching for keys to unlock doors to reach the room's exit, and the player character doesn't move particularly fast in any direction, leaving very little room for error or wrong turns before the water catches up. Falling beneath the surface isn't an instant death because the player has a limited amount of air to keep them from drowning, but of course you're now slogging through water, and the water rises relentlessly, so you need to go farther up every second to regain your breath. 

Graphically, it resembles the classic Bruce Lee a little bit, with relatively small characters and giving a good overview of the surroundings. The sound is pretty basic, with expected swishes for the sword strikes and the little dings that signify a treasure has been grabbed, but the music provides some frantic melodies. Falling under the water's surface causes all the audio to become muffled in a nice touch.

The controls take a little bit of getting used to in that the character needs a good few paces to pick up speed for long jumps and dismounting from ladders or going up stairs can be weirdly cumbersome. So while it maybe looks like Bruce Lee, it's not as fast or nimble as that game. But that's how the game is made and it doesn't take long to get acclimated. There are multiple endings to the game depending on factors such as how much treasure you snatched on the way out. Pick up enough and you might be able to buy your own kingdom. It's well worth playing and replaying to better your performance.