L2AGO #12
If you had asked me 5 years ago to play Eternal Darkness, I would have immediately shot back with "hell no." Back then, I was convinced I would never get into this genre. After all, I thought the original Ghostbusters was a terrifying movie as a kid, I had trouble falling asleep after reading the Wikipedia description of Clock Tower, and my friends had to actually make a "horror comedy" theme night during the Halloween movie event catering to me in particular so I wouldn't feel left out. That said, I finally talked myself into trying the game out after running through several Silent Hill games + Resident Evil 2 not too long ago. And I was hooked.
I can't overemphasize how impressed I am by Eternal Darkness in how well it appeals to its target audience; it thrives off of this pulpy, B-movie, comic book & over the top cheap thrills horror, and every bit of its presentation seems out of place yet so fine tuned to achieve this feeling. Cartoon beat em up sound effects whenever you slash someone with a sword? Check. Shitty low-budget movie caption font for subtitles and exposition combined with overly earnest and serious narration? Check. Purple gothic prose descriptions for every scene you can examine and the classic "non-choice" choose your own adventure book prompt asking if you want to progress the game or not? Check. (Hell, there's a dramatic reading of an Edgar Allen Poe quote every time you boot up the game.) Crash course obstacles of spinning axes and spike tiles? Check. The "FINISH HIM" prompt that plays when you've sapped an enemy out of all their health and can run through an exaggerated killing animation like hacking them to death with a giant sword or dropping a kukri like a parlor trick to send them back into the abyss? Check. The extents to which Eternal Darkness goes out to capture this low budget movie horror feel really impresses me, and kept me thoroughly engrossed in every detail of this game.
Now while I was very much soaking in all the little things here and there adding to the presentation, let us not forget this is a horror game despite its very cheesy aesthetics. That is not to say that the game isn't scary though; in fact it ends up being scary by keeping you just a little tense while pulling out its shock factor whenever it feels like it. See, the game works off of a Sanity meter, distorting your perception of reality within this B-movie horror world even further; as you get spotted by exaggerated carcasses and Mega Man bosses, your Sanity meter will take a hit and weird shit will start happening on screen, from discordant Gregorian chanting in the background to sudden door knock noises to bleeding walls. I won't spoil some of the more absurd sanity effects, but needless to say, many got quite a genuine shock from me while exploring the desolate and often run down environments. There's this genuine sense of powerlessness at times due to these effects and how the game loves to throw you in these situations where you're left bare without your excessive powers and weapons (a little more on that later) and have to run past scores of powerful enemies before you can fight back. It is true that you have to be playing a little suboptimal to experience some of the more harrowing effects, but this is easy enough to circumvent at least because the main protagonist, Alex, doesn't encounter any enemies in the mansion for a good while, and the Shield spell can at least mitigate damage taken while you have low sanity should you choose to go that path to get some more kicks.
So let's also talk a bit about the combat and gameplay. I've heard Eternal Darkness be compared a lot to Resident Evil due to its fixed camera angle presentation and 3rd person overworld combat + puzzles, though I think it more than distinguishes itself from Resident Evil in its exaggeration. This is because it has some wrinkles in its combat due to the targeting system; you can aim for specific body parts of enemies to systematically work through them. For example, aiming for the head does the most damage and will often leave the enemy blind and standing still, just attacking in place every now and then, while aiming for arms will make their attack animations a bit worse since they'll need a hand or two to deal damage. There's also a fantastic magic system; collect and combine runes to cast these fantastical spells like summoning monsters of your own or setting up a damage barrier, and sooner or later you'll feel that rush of power just plowing through the horrors with these flashy attacks. As a result, the game doesn't feel very difficult because there's this sense of overwhelming power just abusing spells and quickly taking down enemies with the generally precise targeting system, and that's perfectly okay; I think that just adds to how cheesy and over the top the game tries to present itself and it's a lot of fun treating it as this magical horror sandbox wizard simulator. And as I mentioned earlier, this sense of feeling overpowered just adds more contrast when your toys are taken away and you have to try and fend them off or evade the monsters without them.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story due to spoilers, but needless to say, despite how dumb and pulpy the narrative feels at times, I was genuinely engrossed in learning more about this winding tale that captured so many different moments in history caught up in the same supernatural disaster. There's four different locations across the game, and you visit them multiple times over different eras with different protagonists captured in the Tome of Eternal Darkness... think of it like a deconstructed Decameron, with Alex Roivas as the frame story reading from 2000 AD, only the stories all take place at different times and some of the people met horrible and exaggerated fates. While the main areas of the game are revisited chronologically (despite the Tome itself jumping back and forth through time), the game does a good enough job changing the different areas of the game to reflect its era to vary up the puzzles and atmosphere so you generally won't feel like you're going through the same motions. All the protagonists involved in the story have their own pieces to say, and it's a ton of fun speculating on how they fell into the narrative and everything that's going on around them. After all, it's Eternal Darkness and most of it is magical mumbo jumbo at the end of the day, but that's part of the fun; you don't need in-universe explanations for every single bit of lore and the writers recognize that and just go with the flow. Sometimes, the nonsense just works.
Now despite all my praise, there are some flaws here and there, mainly due to jank of this era or lack of polish in some sections. There was one section where I was trying to finish off a skeleton to regain sanity but because I was fighting next to a doorway, I ended up going through the doorway instead because the B button is used for both finishing off enemies and going through doors. One of the bosses near the mid to end "broke" because I decided to walk behind it and it decided to not become vulnerable for attack, and I did have to restart that fight. There are two sections at the end of the game that are pretty close to one another and more or less mirror the same gameplay strategy of dungeon crawling through many rooms, and that can get a bit excessive at times. There's also a room in the final dungeon that has a bit of a vague solution; I kept getting trapped in the room when it turns out you needed to sneak by the floor markings, and I honestly couldn't see any hints/clues alluding to this. I found one type of the enemies to be a bit of a bother, since they love wasting your time by teleporting you into a pocket dimension where you have to run to the end and can't cast spells; I think they more or less exist to give you a better excuse to use ranged weapons, since they can't be targeted by melee weapons. Oh, and there's a convenient "quick spell" binding option so you don't have to go back and menu spam every time you want to cast, but you will have to recreate spells in the menu every time you gain a power upgrade if you want to quick cast it. Fortunately, I found most of these moments to be fairly minor in the scope of the overall experience.
So this is a pretty easy recommendation from me; Eternal Darkness can definitely be an unsettling and at times, genuinely shocking game, but I think anyone who loves dumb, over the top, cheap horror thrills will absolutely get a kick out of this and it's a very fun game to play and stream with friends. I'm glad it seems to have picked up more steam in recent years and is getting the recognition it deserves; a shame that the proposed Kickstarters for a sequel never got off the ground running, but until then, we've at least got more cheap thrills at the source.
If you had asked me 5 years ago to play Eternal Darkness, I would have immediately shot back with "hell no." Back then, I was convinced I would never get into this genre. After all, I thought the original Ghostbusters was a terrifying movie as a kid, I had trouble falling asleep after reading the Wikipedia description of Clock Tower, and my friends had to actually make a "horror comedy" theme night during the Halloween movie event catering to me in particular so I wouldn't feel left out. That said, I finally talked myself into trying the game out after running through several Silent Hill games + Resident Evil 2 not too long ago. And I was hooked.
I can't overemphasize how impressed I am by Eternal Darkness in how well it appeals to its target audience; it thrives off of this pulpy, B-movie, comic book & over the top cheap thrills horror, and every bit of its presentation seems out of place yet so fine tuned to achieve this feeling. Cartoon beat em up sound effects whenever you slash someone with a sword? Check. Shitty low-budget movie caption font for subtitles and exposition combined with overly earnest and serious narration? Check. Purple gothic prose descriptions for every scene you can examine and the classic "non-choice" choose your own adventure book prompt asking if you want to progress the game or not? Check. (Hell, there's a dramatic reading of an Edgar Allen Poe quote every time you boot up the game.) Crash course obstacles of spinning axes and spike tiles? Check. The "FINISH HIM" prompt that plays when you've sapped an enemy out of all their health and can run through an exaggerated killing animation like hacking them to death with a giant sword or dropping a kukri like a parlor trick to send them back into the abyss? Check. The extents to which Eternal Darkness goes out to capture this low budget movie horror feel really impresses me, and kept me thoroughly engrossed in every detail of this game.
Now while I was very much soaking in all the little things here and there adding to the presentation, let us not forget this is a horror game despite its very cheesy aesthetics. That is not to say that the game isn't scary though; in fact it ends up being scary by keeping you just a little tense while pulling out its shock factor whenever it feels like it. See, the game works off of a Sanity meter, distorting your perception of reality within this B-movie horror world even further; as you get spotted by exaggerated carcasses and Mega Man bosses, your Sanity meter will take a hit and weird shit will start happening on screen, from discordant Gregorian chanting in the background to sudden door knock noises to bleeding walls. I won't spoil some of the more absurd sanity effects, but needless to say, many got quite a genuine shock from me while exploring the desolate and often run down environments. There's this genuine sense of powerlessness at times due to these effects and how the game loves to throw you in these situations where you're left bare without your excessive powers and weapons (a little more on that later) and have to run past scores of powerful enemies before you can fight back. It is true that you have to be playing a little suboptimal to experience some of the more harrowing effects, but this is easy enough to circumvent at least because the main protagonist, Alex, doesn't encounter any enemies in the mansion for a good while, and the Shield spell can at least mitigate damage taken while you have low sanity should you choose to go that path to get some more kicks.
So let's also talk a bit about the combat and gameplay. I've heard Eternal Darkness be compared a lot to Resident Evil due to its fixed camera angle presentation and 3rd person overworld combat + puzzles, though I think it more than distinguishes itself from Resident Evil in its exaggeration. This is because it has some wrinkles in its combat due to the targeting system; you can aim for specific body parts of enemies to systematically work through them. For example, aiming for the head does the most damage and will often leave the enemy blind and standing still, just attacking in place every now and then, while aiming for arms will make their attack animations a bit worse since they'll need a hand or two to deal damage. There's also a fantastic magic system; collect and combine runes to cast these fantastical spells like summoning monsters of your own or setting up a damage barrier, and sooner or later you'll feel that rush of power just plowing through the horrors with these flashy attacks. As a result, the game doesn't feel very difficult because there's this sense of overwhelming power just abusing spells and quickly taking down enemies with the generally precise targeting system, and that's perfectly okay; I think that just adds to how cheesy and over the top the game tries to present itself and it's a lot of fun treating it as this magical horror sandbox wizard simulator. And as I mentioned earlier, this sense of feeling overpowered just adds more contrast when your toys are taken away and you have to try and fend them off or evade the monsters without them.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story due to spoilers, but needless to say, despite how dumb and pulpy the narrative feels at times, I was genuinely engrossed in learning more about this winding tale that captured so many different moments in history caught up in the same supernatural disaster. There's four different locations across the game, and you visit them multiple times over different eras with different protagonists captured in the Tome of Eternal Darkness... think of it like a deconstructed Decameron, with Alex Roivas as the frame story reading from 2000 AD, only the stories all take place at different times and some of the people met horrible and exaggerated fates. While the main areas of the game are revisited chronologically (despite the Tome itself jumping back and forth through time), the game does a good enough job changing the different areas of the game to reflect its era to vary up the puzzles and atmosphere so you generally won't feel like you're going through the same motions. All the protagonists involved in the story have their own pieces to say, and it's a ton of fun speculating on how they fell into the narrative and everything that's going on around them. After all, it's Eternal Darkness and most of it is magical mumbo jumbo at the end of the day, but that's part of the fun; you don't need in-universe explanations for every single bit of lore and the writers recognize that and just go with the flow. Sometimes, the nonsense just works.
Now despite all my praise, there are some flaws here and there, mainly due to jank of this era or lack of polish in some sections. There was one section where I was trying to finish off a skeleton to regain sanity but because I was fighting next to a doorway, I ended up going through the doorway instead because the B button is used for both finishing off enemies and going through doors. One of the bosses near the mid to end "broke" because I decided to walk behind it and it decided to not become vulnerable for attack, and I did have to restart that fight. There are two sections at the end of the game that are pretty close to one another and more or less mirror the same gameplay strategy of dungeon crawling through many rooms, and that can get a bit excessive at times. There's also a room in the final dungeon that has a bit of a vague solution; I kept getting trapped in the room when it turns out you needed to sneak by the floor markings, and I honestly couldn't see any hints/clues alluding to this. I found one type of the enemies to be a bit of a bother, since they love wasting your time by teleporting you into a pocket dimension where you have to run to the end and can't cast spells; I think they more or less exist to give you a better excuse to use ranged weapons, since they can't be targeted by melee weapons. Oh, and there's a convenient "quick spell" binding option so you don't have to go back and menu spam every time you want to cast, but you will have to recreate spells in the menu every time you gain a power upgrade if you want to quick cast it. Fortunately, I found most of these moments to be fairly minor in the scope of the overall experience.
So this is a pretty easy recommendation from me; Eternal Darkness can definitely be an unsettling and at times, genuinely shocking game, but I think anyone who loves dumb, over the top, cheap horror thrills will absolutely get a kick out of this and it's a very fun game to play and stream with friends. I'm glad it seems to have picked up more steam in recent years and is getting the recognition it deserves; a shame that the proposed Kickstarters for a sequel never got off the ground running, but until then, we've at least got more cheap thrills at the source.