It was the sanity effects that won me over.
Before I heard about those, Eternal Darkness wasn't even on my Maybe I'll Buy It list. The only screenshots I saw indicated some kind of Gladiator vs. Zombies thing, and the title: subtitle just cries of melodrama. Let me guess... ancient nameless evil seeks to enslave the world and you're the one guy that can stop it?
Sort of. The ancient evil has a name though. And there's three of them.
Eternal Darkness begins with Alexandra Roivas, who has just learned of her grandfather's murder. When the police have no answers, she vows to explore pappy's homestead herself in search of clues. What she finds instead is pages from an aged book made of skin and bone. These pages - supplemented by grandfather's research - tell the story of a growing evil and the efforts of humanity to stop it. When Alex finds a new page, the game turns the story into a level, with you taking over as the hapless person drafted into fighting the darkness. You'll control a Middle Eastern lothario, an Italian Renaissance architect, a WWI combat reporter, a 1990's firefigher, among others.
As you move through each person's story, you teach yourself magical spells and move certain plot points around so that eventually all signs point to Alex as the final savior. Since the focal locales for the Eternal Darkness don't change much over the 2,000 years covered in the game, you'll be able to visit several areas at various points in time... you'll see temples turn to ruins, and hallways fall to disrepair.
Enemies are pretty standard... but the way you combat them is not. Ignoring talk of magic for a second, Eternal Darkness has a very nice targeting system for hand-to-hand and ranged weapons. When you lock on to a baddie (R button), you can hold the stick in four directions to choose the part of the body you want to attack. Naturally, I favored going for the head; it seemed to be the fastest way to dispatch those damn grabby zombies. Quick-clicking the R button switches targets. One thing I did not like about the targeting system is how it highlights the selected body part (head, torso, r arm, l arm) a bright white. A more subtle glow would not have been so jarring. It wrecks the dark ambiance of many of the game's levels when you fire up a zombie head like a giant light bulb.
The absolute character control (right on stick is right on screen) is spotless, and it works extremely well with the dynamic camera angles. The old digital Resident Evil style just keeps getting outclassed! Some character animations take a little too long to resolve, notably the "finishing moves," but careful planning will keep you from being unfairly chomped while you're stuck in some long animation.
The puzzles are great. And that is saying something since most games of this type are happy to call box-pushing or item-fetching a puzzle. A few puzzles center on combining items... many more are sequence-based... but the coolest ones rely on your knowlege of spellcasting.
The "magick" here - "k" added for extra occult flavor! - is not just a throwaway excuse for colored lighting attacks and easy self-healing. Magic is cleverly worked into just about every level. There are three alignments of magic, red, green and blue... each color attached to one of the three ancient evils. The colors hold a rock-paper-scissors structure, so you often have to choose your spell's color alignment so it beats the enemy's magic. Like, using a green Dispel Magic spell to knock down a blue energy barrier. You can hotkey five spells to the extra buttons on your controller, so you have easy access to the best of the bunch. The most powerful spells come with a nifty in-game balancing function too: it takes longer to cast them, and you have to remain motionless during the spellchanting process. If a zombie or lightning bolt hits you, the spell fizzles. The boss fights require you to handle these sorts of timing issues very well... if you go for the obvious high level spell, you're likely to get fried.
One nice aspect of the spellcasting thing is that you have to experiment to learn all the abilities of the spells. The game does not lead you by the nose here. For example, when you learn the Recover spell, the game will illustrate it under the red alignment, which will only Recover your health. Instead, you can choose to cast Recover under blue, which will restore your spell energy. Or green, which will restore your sanity.
The sanity meter is another standout area. You'd probably expect the two typical meters here, one for physical health and one for spell energy. The green sanity meter adds a third element for you to manage. When your character stumbles across a monster, your sanity level drops a bit... because the characters are all normal folk who never expected to turn a corner a find a fetid corpse staggering towards them.
When your sanity gets low, strange things start to happen. First the camera angles will tilt and the soundtrack will change slightly, mostly to faraway sounds of women screaming and babies crying. Then you might walk into a new room and find everything turned upside down. Or the walls will bleed. Or your character's head might pop off and start performing Shakespeare. Or the game will turn it's insanity attentions outward and start bugging you personally, by turning down your tv's volume, threatening to delete your saved game files, or rebooting the GameCube itself.
After a few seconds, the sanity effect stops and your character returns to wherever they were when the lunacy began. All of them are cool enough that you don't mind seeing them (very, very few repeat, and some characters are more prone to insanity than others); they mainly serve to disorient you. I enjoyed riding my sanity low just to see the various effects, but fair warning: if sanity drops all the way down, you start taking damage to your life instead. Cast a green Recover!
Eternal Darkness's graphics are very nice. Every area is wonderfully detailed, with almost no noticeably repeated textures! Although the camera angles are fixed, the game will change them around for dramatic effect, which brings a nice fluid nature to the levels. It definitely avoids the slideshow feel of some other games. Incidentally, once you're in the game, load times are non-existant, as the game hides them with movies and voice overs.
The only graphical glitches I found was uneven lighting in the Michael Edwards level (his flashlight doesn't always hit the surface it's pointing at) and some places where the 3D models aren't as smooth as in others (like on most peoples' ears, of all places.) But those are both very picky. The vast majority of the game is an early high standard for GameCube titles.
Horror game fans have had a huge year. With this following up behind Fatal Frame and the Resident Evil remake, we've had three unstoppably great games of suspense and story.
