Eternal Darkness... my thoughts [Archive]

Squirrelinabox

01-01-2004, 04:07 PM

Alright, just got done beating Eternal Darkness for Gamecube. It is one of those games I heard so many good things about but never tried it out for myself... until now.

I'll give a quick rundown of the basics of the game first, then go into critique mode.

The game is somewhat like Resident Evil. No, it isn't the same, or even really that close. However, it is a horror adventure game. It is played in third person view, you get spells, you get weapons, and you gotta kill scarey bad guys.

The first big thing to point out is that you don't play as just 1 character, you play as something like 10 different characters (one at a time), and each are found in different periods in time. You play each character out through reading "chapters" from a special book (The Tome of Darkness). You will play as a monk during the inquisition, or a roman soldier, or any number of other characters/time periods. On one hand, this hurts a little since you aren't allowed to get too attached to a character. On the other hand, it helps a lot since you don't know how your character is going to end up at the end of a chapter. Most games, you know your character is going to live happily ever after in the end (if you beat the game of course) in Eternal Darkness, sometimes you character will go insane, or get their head zapped off. It adds a good bit of spice to each chapter, and draws you in since you want to know what happens to each character you play as.

Guess I should give a little of the storyline here also. Basically, you are this lady that finds her gandpa dead in his mansion. You decide to search the mansion for clues, and in the process you find the Tome of Darkness that allows you to gain the memories of the previous people touched by the book. You find the different chapters hidden in the mansion and read/play each chapter to find out more about what is going on.

So what is going on? Well, darkness is coming, more specifically Eternal Darkness. And all these people you play as all have their parts in trying to prevent the darkness from coming. That darkness comes in the form of a huge scarey monster.

Ok, that's enough story, you guys can play the game if you want more. It sounds cliche how I presented it, but it actually is fairly original and is very engaging. One thing to note, the voice acting in this game might be the best (or at least some of the best) voice acting in any game I have ever played.

Another big difference in this game (besides the multiple characters) is the introduction of a sanity meter. Any time a monster sees you you lose some sanity. The lower your sanity meter gets, weirder/scarier things start to happen. You may walk through a room with full sanity with everything looking normal, then come back with half sanity and now the paintings on the wall are bleeding, you hear footsteps echoing behind you, and as you reach for the door you hear knocks. If you sanity gets really low, even crazier things will start happening. I don't want to give too much away, but let me say that it will start making you think your gamecube is on the fritz.

Ok, there's the basics (I know that was a crappy summary, but there is too much to write about).

Next post will be my impressions of the game.

Squirrelinabox

01-01-2004, 04:44 PM

Ok, my impressions.

Story
As I mentioned already, the story is pretty engaging. I liked it a lot, and it was the key thing keeping me addicted to the game. I needed to know what happens to each character at the end of each chapter. It was cool seeing how the same church is used in the inquisition chapter, then used again in the world war 1 chapter, then see how they piece together to add to the story. The end wasn't so hot IMO, but maybe that was because it built up so much that nothing could really do it justice.

[Gameplay
Good thing the story was good, because the gameplay won't be keeping you into the game.

Monsters
The fighting gets VERY repetitive. There are only like 3 or 4 different monsters in the ENTIRE game. Yup, you heard that right, you can count the different bad guys all on one hand. That is unacceptable. One of the cooler monsters is a Trapper, which is a little crawling monster that can hear your movements, forcing you to sneak past them. If they sense you they will send out a wave that teleports you to a little "void" that you have to escape to get back. Sounds cool huh? Not really. You will quickly realize that you can easily just run past the trappers most times as long as you don't get too close. Even then you can run until you see them turn color, then sneak for a second, then run again. It would have been awesome if they had more trappers mixed in with normal monsters, but as is, trappers are almost always by themselves so you never have to worry about them while fighting. Also, even if they send you to the void, it has no consequence since all you do is wait for a colored circle to turn purple, then you leave. Lame.

The fighting mechanics are ok. You are able to choose where you want to attack on a monster (head, arms, torso) but you quickly realize you pretty much only ever want to attack the head. There are 2 good things that help break up the monotony of the gameplay, 1 being the weapons, the other being the spells.

Weapons
With many different characters in many different time periods you are given access to many different weapons. This is good, and helps keep the fighting from being too horribly redundant. You get various melee weapons, such as a two handed sword, a fire axe, a torch, etc. You also get ranged weapons, such as a crossbow, a pistol, and even an assault rifle (with grenade capabilities). Personally, I rarely ever used anything but my melee weapons.

Spells
The spells are the saving grace here... at least for awhile. The way spells work is that you collect runes that can be put together to form spells. Each rune has a funky name like "santak" and a description/label such as "self". Now, you can either try to put these runes together and hope they make a spell, or you can find a spell paper that will do it for you and tell you what the spell does. Most spells are easy to figure out without the paper, putting together a "dispel" rune and an "area" rune are going to allow you to dispel magic in the area. A cool thing is that you can't move while you are performing a spell, are the spell will fizzle. This is great since it would be much to easy to run around dodging things while you cast your spells. Each spell has an alignment as well, red, green, or blue. You find out early which alignments defeat other alignments (in rock paper scissor fashion). So if you want to dispel a green magic barrier, you would use a red dispel area spell. Now, there is a fourth alignment, purple. You can beat the game without it, as it isn't required to beat the chapter it is located on. I'd almost recommend not getting it since it unbalances the game way too much. Why? Because you can cast invisibility on yourself with it. Not only can you just walk through the rest of the game without getting noticed, if you attack a monster, it will just sit there and let you kill it. The only monsters that aren't affected by the spell are the trappers, which can't attack, just use their void thing. I quickly realized how crappy this was and chose not to use the spell for the rest of the game.

Sanity
Yes, I had to choose to make the game harder by not using a spell. Unfortunately, it was still incredibly easy. The sanity thing played pretty much zero part in my experience. You learn early on a spell that allows you to get your sanity back (you can also get it back by "finishing" monsters). So I was running around with full sanity nearly the entire game. I wanted to experience more of the insanity, so I decided to stop using the spell that recovers your sanity. Unfortunately, if your sanity goes to zero, you lose your health, so I still had to use it once in awhile to not die. It is pretty bad design that I am forced to try and let myself lose 3/4 of my sanity just so I can see the cool effects in the game. As such, I wasn't really scared ever in the game (ok, there was once but I won't say where since it would ruin it for you). I would have liked more scarey parts, there were some "creepy" parts but none that got me freaked out.

Puzzles
Eternal Darkness tries to break up the monotonous fighting by introducing puzzles everywhere. Yes, I said tries, because IMO, they failed miserably. Most puzzles are not really puzzles, more of hunt and gather type of experience. For instance, you will see a statue with a gold bracelet you need on it. You take off the bracelet and a door closes. Oh no, you need the bracelet but you also need to go through that door to get to the end. What to do!? Oh, there is a copper bracelet on the ground over there. I wonder if I should put the copper bracelet on the statue? Duh. Not only is the a puzzle, this is a puzzle you run into 3 or 4 times with at least a couple different characters. I mean it is the EXACT same puzzle. The same statue in the same place, just a few hundred years later. Cmon damnit. If the fighting is going to be the same crap in every century, in every location, at least give me a decent puzzle once in awhile. Unfortunately, there really isn't a good puzzle anywhere. Either they are all rediculously easy, like mentioned above, or they are trial and error. For instance, you might see a green block. You know you have to use a red something on it, so you start casting red spells at it, dispel magic, attack magic, etc. Eventually one of them will work and then you proceed. The puzzles are extremely lame.

Conclusion
Ok, with all that being said, I still would recommend this game to most people. I know it sounds like I hated it, but it was still a decent game. It is pretty fresh with its insanity meter (just make sure you let it drop once in awhile for fun) and its engaging storyling, and the use of multiple characters in multiple time periods. Key drawbacks are the lack of monster variety and lack of decent puzzles. Both are probably 90% of what makes up gameplay, but this type of game really isn't a gameplay game. If you play RE, or Silet Hill, or Myst for gameplay, then you need to rethink your idea of gameplay. You play those kind of games to get drawn into the story, to play through a different world/reality/story and see what happens. A cool thing about Etertnal Darkness is that the big bad monster you are trying to stop changes depending on what color you pick at the beginning. This means the game changes slightly depending on what color you pick, allowing for a little replay.

So with that, if you want a fast action packed game, don't get this. If you want to be brought into a fairly original story with some great depth, grab this baby. It is an average length game, took 12 hours for me, but most reviews I read said it took over 20 hours. I could easily have beaten it under 8 or 9 hours if I used the invisiblility spell throughout, I'd recommend never using it. Another reason why I recommend it is that it is cheap... real cheap. I bought it NEW from KB Toys for $14.99. I think you can get it used off ebgames.com for $8.99 right now.