It should be said, right before I begin this Review, that I am one to be scared rather easily. The dark scares me, being alone in the house with nobody else inside scares me; the human component within me that gives me fear, as I sometimes figure, can sometimes give me too much. This is one of the reasons why I was at first reluctant to get a survival-horror game. However, with Resident Evil not scaring me one bit, I had figured Eternal Darkness wouldn’t be that different, as I was constantly telling myself within my head (as soon as I bought the game, I might add), that it wouldn’t be scary and that it was just a game. Plus, after hearing all the good things about Eternal Darkness (and reading Karma’s great Review on it), I decided to give it a shot.

Like Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, not many high-stakes were put on this game, but it had a little more hope for it, as I heard a good number of good things about it. This game is rated ‘M’, like all survival-horror games tend to be rated, for the usual stuff: Blood and Gore, Violence, and freaky imagery. Yes, this game is filled with freaky imagery. To put it in short, if seeing the typical bathtub scene in a horror movie accompanied by a blood-curdling scream and a bloody corpse is too much for you, do not get this game. As per usual, the 0-5 scale will be used, 0 terrible, 5 excellent.

Graphics: 4

At first, the graphics tend to be a mixed bag. The character models are somewhat dated, showing how it was originally going to be an N64 title instead of a GameCube title, but the environments themselves are amazing. The mix of a red and orange sky and a bright sun shining through the large windows as it's setting simply makes my jaws drop, and the fire effects are beautiful, your character turning towards a torch as a spark flies out of the flames. Also, the game happens to redeem itself as far as character models go later on.

However, one flaw that nags at me constantly is the zombie models. They’re, and I won’t hide it… dull. Often characterized by a thin, bony appearance, zombies look like Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas, just without the outburst of musicals and the emotions. They are what you’d expect zombies to act like, dragging their feet along the ground in a slow limp, but they just don’t cut the cake. They’re nothing like the zombies of Resident Evil, which were characterized down to the last bloodstain, rip on their clothing, and the last missing tooth in their mouth. They’re just walking sticks that like to swing their arms at you in an attempt to kill you. While a few zombies later on in the game tend to change this, it still is a disappointing factor in the game.

Another little flaw is the lighting. As amazing as it is, the game tends to toss you too many times into the darkness. As scary as this situation may be, the darkness is hard to play in. You bump into too many things and it isn’t that fun. While if you look closely you can see, it can be a nuisance at times.

The character models, as I said, can be a bit dated at times (and a bit blocky too), but even so, they’re still better-looking than the zombies. There’s not much to say about them, save for the fact that they each look like the person they’re supposed to be, so this is good.

Overall, the graphics are better than you’d expect, but not as beautiful as Resident Evil 4 or Metal Gear Solid 3. Character models are okay, though the zombie models are a disappointment, but the environment is amazing. To sum it all up, this is a good factor in the game, though it could be better.

Story: 4.5

Too busy trying to scare you witless, survival-horror games were never known for their stories and were filled with huge amounts of clichés. As such, the storyline of a survival-horror game was never really anything to have high hopes for. However, Eternal Darkness changes it with its bone-chilling story, which, considering the game genre it’s in, is surprisingly good.

The game starts off rather simple. You’re Alexandra Roivas, a college student who’s asleep one night when she gets an unexpected call from the Rhode Island Police, notifying her of her grandfather’s unexpected death within his mansion estate. Immediately heading to Rhode Island to find out what happened, Alex meets a gruesome sight when she sees her father’s body lying on the floor, headless and brutally murdered. With no signs of intrusion or any clue other than the body, the police are baffled. Alex than makes the vow of searching his mansion for the clues to his death. This begins your basic horror movie setting.

While searching through the mansion, Alex stumbles across a secret study containing dozens upon dozens of books and papers, and nestled upon one desk a huge ‘leather’-clad book. At the time, Alex has no idea that it is actually bound by flesh and bone. Overwhelmed by curiousty, she begins to read the book, which is called the Tome of Eternal Darkness. Reading each chapter, Alex uncovers tales from different time eras detailing the rise of deities known as the Ancients and their strive for the world’s end. Alex then gets tossed into a situation that puts the fate of the entire world on her shoulders.

Though the storyline can get a bit confusing at times, you’ll end up recovering from that little moment of confusion as the game reveals the answers for you slowly. This is a great story for a survival-horror game, and it was well done.

Length: 4

Eternal Darkness spans about 15 to 20 hours on your first play through, and this starts to decrease in time as you beat the game and play it again. However, the game somewhat coaxes you to replay the game, offering you the full game ending if you beat the game three times, reoffering the scares (which never seem to get old), and offering an Eternal Mode, where you’re literally invincible and capable of going on a full killing spree at your whim, along with the ability to get an enchanted version of one of your weapons. This game has high replayability, so it’s not bad…

Humor: 0

Uh… what humor? That’s right, Eternal Darkness abandons the whole humor concept to pretty much scare you witless with every chance it gets. This game has no humor whatsoever, unless you consider beheaded zombies swinging at each other blindly funny. This is a survival-horror game, and there is no moment where I felt the need to scream with laughter.

Well, I felt the need to scream in fright, but that’s a different story.

Sound/Music: 4.5

Music in this game is, to say the least, quiet most of the time, suddenly picking up when you least expect it, filled with weird noises to send the chills down your spine. This tactic works rather well, and it certainly caught me off-guard many times. In fact, looking at the entire music selection of the game, there’s not one in it that is the slightest bit cheerful. They’re very dark, even the tune when you collect an item (which is a bit of an Egyptian tune), which is quiet and nothing over the top.

The sound, on the other hand, is amazing. Eternal Darkness has everything covered, from the footsteps to the clanking of some of your characters’ armor. The crackling of the fire is present and believable, and sword strikes and gunshots make realistic noises when attacking the living dead. While the regular sound effects are good, what really shines is the game’s scare sound effects, meaning the sounds they use to scare you witless. Each moment you walk through hallways, hearing incoherent whispers in the background, along with Latin mumbling, a man screaming as he is tortured, a baby crying, and oh, the bloodcurdling screams, how I dread the screams this game produces, especially the bathroom one (ughh…). If there’s one thing I must congratulate the game on here, it’s how realistic it makes the noises in the game sound, making some believe the noise isn’t coming just from the game…

Voice acting has to be a big plus here. Each character has a fitting voice that suits them perfectly, and all the lines are performed well. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the voice acting, nothing.

Characters: 4.5

If there’s one thing this game has a lot of, it's characters. Each time you read a chapter in the Tome of Eternal Darkness, you play a certain character within that time period, ranging from a Roman Centurion, a messenger slowly becoming a zombie for Charlemagne the Frank, an Arabian swordsman, a reporter in World War I, and much more. You play as about 12 different characters throughout the game, each with a different story and fighting style, making the selection extremely varied. And their stats hold true to who they are. Priests and psychiatrists, for example, will have higher sanity (more on that later), but less  health. The fighters of the group will have more health, but their sanity and Magick (also more on that later) will be low. All fit who they are, and that certainly is a good thing.

Realism: 4.5

Eternal Darkness certainly wants to share the wealth with you, and by tossing the scares out to you, you’ll feel at times as if the frights are coming not from the game, but from somewhere around you. These scares sometimes pass over to real life. I can certainly say you’ll be eyeing a bust for a long time, wondering if it’s watching your every movement, and even more so you’ll be refusing to even look at your bathtub for an even longer time.

As for the settings, this game certainly does its job in making each time era feel like what it should be. From mansions, churches, temples, and all these different settings, the game makes you fear going to these places with each fright it tosses at you. It makes you come to realize that you might be walking in a similar area also, and it also goes to make you think that the same situations in the game could happen to you, even if they won’t.

There are a few spots in the game which are unrealistic, of course. The whole concept of the Ancients, for example, is a little whacked, these deities that existed long before humans walked the Earth, sealed away for millennia, waiting for somebody to bring them back from their sleep. Of course, though this certainly isn’t realistic, it still is small compared to how realistic the scares in this game can be.

Fear Factor: 5

Remember at the beginning of the Review, when I coaxed myself into reassuring myself that this was just a game? Looking back at how I rated this in the Sound and Realism departments, you can certainly tell I would at least be partially wrong, and that’s almost true.

I was completely wrong.

While Resident Evil’s approach to fright was more in the fear of running out of ammo or not being able to fight back against a zombie due to having little weaponry, Eternal Darkness turns to the real way of scaring people: the real frights, your sanity.

As you venture through the mansion with Alex at first, the only thing slightly scary is the setting and the ambient music. After reading a few chapters of the Tome of Eternal Darkness and having to find the next few Chapter Pages of the Tome, you’ll have to go out and search throughout the entire mansion, and with each chapter you read, a little chunk of sanity is taken away. That’s when things get… creepy. With the sound of footsteps coming closer and closer to you even when you aren’t moving, the sound of someone (or something) knocking on the other side of a door when nobody’s there, the walls and ceilings oozing blood, and the sudden screaming of bloody murder coming from your character, this game does its job of scaring you witless. I even refused to play this at night, and I still got scared senseless. I was literally rushing to get the Chapter Page with all the frightening activity going on around me.

Eternal Darkness is the epitome of survival-horror. In fact, it’s more of what you could call a psychological horror. This game provokes you to question your own sanity and surroundings with each new scare it tosses at you. I can certainly say this is the scariest game I’ve ever played.

Hankie Factor: 0

Crying in fear, yes. Crying out of sadness, no. Though the majority of the characters you control will come to a gruesome demise at the end of each chapter, this isn’t really anything sadness provoking. The Fright Factor by far shadows this section and makes it unimportant to the game.

Bosses/Enemies: 2.5

Throughout all the chapters, you will come to fight the many zombies that try to kill you. As I’ve said before, the zombies are nothing magnificently frightening to awe at, they just limp towards you and swing their arms in an attempt to kill you while taking bits of sanity away. They are extremely easy to beat also. All you have to do is cut off their head to blind them and keep them from taking away sanity, and then proceed to hack off their arms to render them useless. Even in swarms, just hack off all their heads and they’re completely useless to fight against you. This easiness in combat and their dull design makes them rather disappointing.

Later on, the zombies somewhat redeem themselves. You’ll come to face creatures such as the blind, yet advanced in hearing Trappers, which can lock you in a different dimension you must escape from through portals; along with the Horrors, these huge beasts with three eyes. However, even then these creatures can be rather easy to beat. Just hack off the eyes of the Horror and they’re finished, and just pick the Trappers off with long-distance weaponry before they can reach you. Their easiness is rather disappointing, but their main purpose is just to take away your sanity.

There are few bosses in the games, just the last boss and a few other no-names such as a vampire creature that you must fight around four times before you can finish him. They’re nothing to awe at, so they get a less than average score.

Gameplay: 4

Yes, this game knows that it wants you scared senseless along with the fact you want some fun out of the game, so they do just that. By combining the scariness of this game and the fun you want, this game comes and serves rather well.

Most of the time in the game you’ll be walking around, hacking away at the easy-to-defeat zombies while solving a few puzzles tossed at you to keep things from bogging down. While this may sound stale and repetitive, it certainly isn’t. Combat, while easy, is rather fun to do, with the ability to target different body parts and cut them off, but at times you sometimes ask yourself why they won’t toss in any variation, even if it is small.

While combat is good yet repetitive at times, where the game truly shines is in its two extras: the Sanity Meter and Magick. Before we get into the real deal of the game, Magick should be touched upon. Magick is simply magic with a ‘k’ added to the end, and with that said it serves its purpose as magic: fixing broken items, healing you, and other various things. However, the game decides to add complicated steps to the whole process of using this magic. You can’t just learn magic and cast it right off the bat. You have to find various runes, having to find out the right combination needed for them before mixing them and getting the spell. The runes, however, cannot be interpreted just like that. You need to find a Magick Codex to interpret what the rune is, and once that’s done, you can mix them and get the spell, which you can proceed to assign to a hotkey button on the directional pad for easy use. To add to this, you can increase the power of certain spells with a Power Stone, which varies in power depending on what’s inside it. This has to be one of the most complicated magic systems to ever grace video gaming, and in the end, it works.

Now, the most interesting concept in this game is the Sanity Meter. Each time you encounter a zombie and it sees you, its eyes will flash green and a huge green light will cover you. When that happens, your Sanity Meter, a green meter on the upper left corner, will drain. At first nothing really happens, but if you allow the Sanity Meter to get lower and lower, strange things will happen. The screen will tilt at an odd angle, and voices will come in the background: a woman crying, a baby wailing, your own character mumbling incoherently to him or herself. Then, weirder things happen. You might walk into a room to find yourself walking on the ceiling. Sometimes the game will pretend to delete your game file when you try to save, flies will crawl across the screen, and sometimes your head will fall off, and if you pick it up, it’ll recite Shakespeare ("To be, or not to be, that is the question") before you put it in your inventory, where you can equip it. If you let your Sanity Meter plummet to the bottom, it’ll start to drain your health meter, and then… well, you know the rest. In order to restore the lost sanity, you must use a Finishing Blow on a zombie when it’s downed, which usually results in you driving your sword or firing your gun through the beast’s stomach to make sure it's dead for good.

Puzzles in Eternal Darkness tend to vary. Some are rather easy, such as picking up easy-to-see blocks lying on the ground, which you must bring to a room with sockets on the wall, putting the correctly-colored block in its respective socket. Others may be tricky to figure out at first, but then they become clear, such as winding a grandfather clock to a certain time seen on another clock. Then, there are others which require more thinking, such as a riddle that involves finding "88 keys". The answer isn’t what it would seem.

Overall, Eternal Darkness’s gameplay holds true to its ambient setting, and was certainly enjoyable, even if I am too scared to play it anytime after the sun sets.

Difficulty: 2.5

Eternal Darkness, as fun as it is, can be rather easy to beat. Zombies are extremely easy to fight against, and as said before, lopping their heads off renders them useless. What’s more, upon getting the hang of the puzzles, you can get through this game rather easily. While it took me a while to beat this, that was a result of my reluctance to play this game alone… yes, it happened to be that scary. Nonetheless, this is a rather easy game and can be beaten in one sitting without dying if you keep playing it nonstop.

Controls: 4.5

Unlike the annoying controls of Resident Evil, stemming from the tank-like controls and fixed camera angles, Eternal Darkness does away with that. Though the camera does move around when moving through some areas, making controls a bit clunky at times, it does well. If you push left on the control stick, you move left. If you push back on the control stick, you turn around to face the screen. The controls are that responsive, unlike Resident Evil.

The rest of the controls are easy to get the hang of. R is the target button, locking onto a specific body part; you can then slightly hold A and use the control stick to switch what body part you’re locked onto. Holding R, then letting go slightly before pressing down again, will switch targets. ‘A’ is your attack button, used to attack enemies with your sword or gun, and ‘B’ is your examine or action button, used to examine items, pick up items, and activate Finishing Moves. Y and X are often reserved for a few puzzles, while the directional pad controls the hotkey buttons for Magick. Overall, the controls are easy to get used to it and are, save for a few rare moments, very responsive.

Fun Factor!: 4

This is a fun game, mixed in with some nasty frights and a rather good gameplay. I can’t say much else, since I’ve pretty much discussed every aspect of the game in the other sections of the Review, so I’ll say that this is good.

Overall: 4

While this certainly isn’t my choice for the best game ever, it definitely is enjoyable. If you have a GameCube and are a huge fan of horror movies or want something that can scare you senseless and offer a fun experience at the same time (along with the fact that you don’t mind the disturbing imagery and fright), this is the game for you. It was fun, and depending on what type of gamer you are, it’ll be fun or not to you.

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