Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 55, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Thanks to the strong foundations of this horror game, it remains inherently creepy all this time later in a way some other older horror titles have not.
I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.
The first time I played Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, nearly 20 years ago now, I was blown away. It wasn’t horror based on jump scares, or a shortage of ammunition or healing items, but instead, it attempted to make a setting that would get into not just the heads of the characters you played as part of the story, but into the player’s head as well. There is a reason that Eternal Darkness wasn’t referred to as “survival horror” but as “psychological horror.” It sought to mess with your mind as it played, and in that, it succeeded.
I wouldn’t play Eternal Darkness again until last year, when it came under consideration for this list. Despite my initial love for the game, I can’t tell you that my expectations were particularly high when it came to how well the GameCube horror classic had aged. The combat was always a little wonky, controls-wise, and the industry as a whole has only seen improvements on that front in the ensuing years. Some of the tricks the game played on you — pretending to error out in the hopes you’d turn off your GameCube — weren’t going to work as well today, when you were already aware of their existence and also not 15 years old, because there was just no way for them to hold up as well as, say, Silicon Knights’ other system trickery in another game, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. In that remaster of the original MGS, there is a boss that can “read” the mind of your GameCube and Snake, but you can get around this power by switching which port your controller is plugged into. That still works today, in a fun, fourth-wall-breaking kind of way! A fake blue screen of death that you just need to wait out? Not so much the second time around.
On the other hand, the kind of psychological trickery the game deploys against your character, which then bleeds into your own mental state? That stuff holds up, and remains unsettling today. It’s stunning, actually, how good Eternal Darkness still is, how effective its psychological horror remains, how it builds a specific kind of tension that remains creepy even when you’re used to the graphics and horror thrills of the present day. Maybe it’s because “psychological horror” as a genre never took off the way that “survival horror” did. In fact, I recently replayed, well, every main series Resident Evil game. The very first game in the series (which I should stress, I still love) is remembered as this major horror title, and it was, but the horror aspects don’t hold up all that well, either. It’s mostly about jump scares and the survival aspect over the horror portion of things, with a whole bunch of weird puzzle solving and exploration involved. You end up so focused on remembering where objects and paths are in the mansion that you’re too busy to be horrified by its secrets.
At least in Resident Evil 2, Mr. X chasing you around Raccoon City’s police station manages to be horrifying and dread-inducing (and in the recent remaster, is so effective in its terror that I’ve recently been debating whether it has passed Resident Evil 4 as the top in the franchise). In the original, though, the game play answer to the horror is the equivalent of “drink water and get a good night’s sleep.” Preparation can stave off the horror aspects and make survival a breeze, and it helps that the focus of the plot is on science, corporate greed, and the lengths man will advance the former in order to satisfy the desires of the latter. In Eternal Darkness, you are part of an incomprehensibly large battle spanning dimensions, time, space, and beings of power that your mind cannot grasp the scope of. The vagueness, the ill-defined nature of it all, works in Eternal Darkness’ favor in the same way it did for the source material — Eternal Darkness is based on the old gods universe of H.P. Lovecraft.
In Stephen King’s memoir and guide to writing, On Writing, he explains that he writes in such a way — descriptive, but not too descriptive — so that his readers will terrify themselves filling in the blanks themselves more than he ever could with his own words. Eternal Darkness, along with Remedy’s forays into horror (which, in the case of Alan Wake, certainly paid attention to Stephen King) are some of the only obvious video game equivalents with this thinking in mind. Eternal Darkness leads you down a path your own mind has trouble escaping, and that’s why it still works today, multiple console generations and even more graphical upgrades later.
The game tests your sanity, and does so literally, with a meter tracking it. Whereas Resident Evil forced you to pay attention to how many bullets and healing herbs you had, Eternal Darkness makes you keep an eye on your sanity. When enemies spot you, your sanity suffers. When your sanity suffers, your character begins to see things that aren’t there. At first, it’s just little touches to the environment, like making walls bleed. As your sanity dips further, though, the environment begins to shift in ways that make you question what is real and what is imagined. Enemies that do not actually exist begin to appear, but you need to fight back all the same, because you don’t want to end up actually dead instead of just hallucinating a horrific end for yourself. The sounds you have been hearing are no longer trustworthy, as they might not be real, but you have to treat them as such, because if they are real and meant to be a warning, you will regret not heeding it. You might go through a door that leads to a room that isn’t real, and after an unsettling hallucination plays out, you are returned to reality.
It all adds to the mood of the game, which has you on edge, but for much different reasons than other horror titles, even to this day. The sound also adds much to the experience, ensuring that you are never quite comfortable. The music is just part of it, too. If you enchant a weapon, whenever you use that weapon, until the enchantment wears off, it will whisper magical incantations. The screams, whether real or imagined, sound the same to your ears. The breathing of the enemies is audible, and so is your character’s breathing, which suffers as their sanity and health do. In my playthrough for the purposes of these rankings, I wore headphones throughout. It added to the experience, but I imagine a good sound system with directional audio would present a similar psychological-afflicting aesthetic.
The protagonist of Eternal Darkness is Alexandra Roivas, the lone member of the Roivas family that yet lives. It turns out her grandfather was part of a millenia-spanning struggle against Lovecraftian forces of darkness, and so, she dives into a book she finds in his study as she tries to figure out just who would have murdered him, and why. The book, by the way, is made out of human skin, and is full of dark secrets, spells, and enchantments, but the only way to utilize what is within the book is to understand and unlock the pasts it has lived through. So, Alexandra begins to read, and sees the lives of those that have wielded its powers in the past, in the process slowly losing her grasp on her own sanity.
That’s because this book of human skin has been held through the centuries by those battling the various elder gods and their minions, and you will take control of those various warriors… not all of whom are actually warriors. You’ll play as a slave dancer, as a priest, as a young messenger boy suddenly cursed with something akin to zombification by an ancient evil, a reporter, an Indiana Jones wannabe, a guy who is good with a sword who just wants to get laid and hoo boy did that not turn out the way he planned it to. These characters all have different resistances to damage, different magical strength, different stamina, maybe not all capable of going toe-to-toe with minions of ancient gods, and with various levels of sanity, too. They’ll work through cathedrals and tombs hiding secrets, meet up with an undead skeleton from Roman times posing as any number of people in power who don’t, well, look like an undead magical skeleton serving an elder god in the dimension that Earth resides in since the elder god can’t fully manifest there themselves, and all end up dead, too.
What, did you think the Inquisition-era priest was going to survive beyond sharing his experience in the book so that Alexandra could be traumatized by it in the present?
It all leads to an eventual confrontation with one of three elder gods who are all obsessed with defeating Mantorok, the corpse god, as his existence on Earth’s plane of existence is keeping these other elder gods from undoing existence there, but who are also obsessed with the idea that one of the other two ancients they’re working with will turn on them and claim power for themselves. Mantorok isn’t your ally in all of this so much as not your enemy — that’s an old god with their own agenda, and might I remind you that I referred to Mantorok as “the corpse god” a couple of sentences ago? — but hey, not actively trying to ruin existence right in this moment, but maybe some millenia later, gives Mantorok a leg up on the competition.
You won’t get the true ending of Eternal Darkness until, as Alexandra in the present, you’ve opposed each of the three old ones in separate campaigns, but it’s not quite the same as replaying the game three separate times. The first playthrough takes the longest, so, about 15 hours. The second playthrough takes less time, in part because you know what you’re doing but also because of what’s carried over, and so the third takes even less time. You’re looking at maybe 30 hours all told to get the true ending, where it turns out — spoilers! — Mantorok has been manipulating time and space so that the events of three distinct timelines merge into one, meaning all of your various playthroughs as Alexandra Roivas count as one, dimensionally speaking. Turning the ancient evils against each other, one at a time in different dimensions, until there are no ancient gods left to oppose Mantorok. Good plan, Manty.
Even if you just want to play the one time, though, Eternal Darkness is worth it. The combat is simple so long as you pay attention to what the game told you to do, but the mood the experience generates remains a lot more stressful than if you were just counting how many rounds you had left afterward. You need to discover spells, cast buffs and debuffs, enchant weapons and items, discover more and more of the secrets of the book that is again, made out of human skin and looks like it and oh, is your inventory and spell menu, too, in order to progress. You’ll discover a plot spread across time and dimensions, and your role in it. The sound and ambiance of the whole thing makes the sanity trick work, and you’ll find yourself more creeped out than you might have imagined yourself to be by a nearly 20-year-old game that often looks the part.
It also helps that Eternal Darkness is the lone entry in the series, which means it’s the only game of its exact type in a corner of the horror genre that few have ever bothered to occupy. Nintendo, as publisher, owns the rights to it, and has done nothing with that license since. The original wasn’t a big seller even if it was a critical darling, and Nintendo has since found other sources of rated-M games to go on their systems, through partnerships with developers that didn’t get sued into oblivion for stealing engine code, or for potentially shifting around funds from publishers in ways they shouldn’t have, or for harboring abusers, or… well, if you haven’t kept up with the history of Silicon Knights or what founder Denis Dyack has been up to since it dissolved, you might want to, is all I’m saying. That history includes failed attempts to crowdfund a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness, even. So… yeah. Unclear if Nintendo will ever want to do anything with the property.
At least we’ve got Eternal Darkness itself, and it holds up.
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