Completion Time: 22h:24m:00s
Rating: 9/10

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First Time in Darkness

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Eternal Darkness is one of those titles that you constantly hear about over the years, but have never actually played yourself. I mean, that’s sort of the category it falls into for ME anyways, I’m sure plenty reading this have played this alre—that’s beside the point! I wanted to complete it last year for that October “GameCube Gauntlet”, but first I had problems with the disk that I had, and then I had to go out and buy a new controller because it turns out Eternal Darkness is one of the few GameCube games that doesn’t work with wireless controllers. It was just a big storm of things and eventually I ran out of time. But I’m here now! And I’ve gone through the game no less than 3 times just so that I could write this up with as much information as I could reasonably provide!

Truer words were never spoken

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Descend Into Madness

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Alex Rovias’s grandfather just died, and a secret to their family history lies in wait at his old mansion. The conceit of the game is interesting, you solve the occasional puzzle in the mansion so that you can find these book pages that reveal other elements of that exact history, playing as numerous individuals across different timelines and finding out their fates and bloodlines all interconnect. You basically hop between different time periods as you uncover revelations regarding the nature of everything, all while this skeletal Pious guy is pulling the strings to awaken his dark master. The characters have a wide variety of differing playstyles depending on their narrative and environment. Some are more puzzle heavy, while others focus on physical combat. The deeper you go, some use a heavy reliance on using the various spells that you’ve learned to cast from your tome.

Some puzzles are literally just out of Indiana Jones!

The “Tome of Eternal Darkness” is by far the most interesting and varied aspect of the gameplay. As you progress, you’ll learn runes which can be combined to create spells. And even later in the game, you’ll start to learn runes that can power up your preexisting spells to higher levels. Use these to heal your health and sanity, to enchant and improve items, to summon and wield enemies to your advantage, and to pull of plenty of other nifty tricks. Often these will play into the puzzles themselves, needing to cast a specific level of a spell oriented towards a different demonic entity so that you can, for example, destroy a magical barrier. There’s a rock-paper-scissors system going on with the magical alignment, that can be viewed as red beating green, green beating blue, and blue beating red. Say you want to remove a red-aligned magical barrier of three rune construction, you’ll want to cast the spell to destroy barriers with at least 5 rune construction aligned to blue (which is basically the God of sorcery and magic Ulyaloth dominating the God of power and strength Chattur’gha). It’s that easy! And if it isn’t, don’t worry. You’ll end up playing this game numerous times through if you want to complete it and you’ll learn.

You don't understand, Edward must cast the green spell to defeat the blue squid, it's science

If you know anything about this game, it’s surely the effects of sanity loss on your character. Each of the horrors you encounter will inflict some sanity damage upon seeing you, draining your sanity every so slightly until eventually it’s completely gone (there’s even one bat-looking thing that just KEEPS draining that meter). The screen will go further askew as you lose your mind, and slowly the soundtrack will start to be replaced by children screaming and women crying—very unnerving. Meta effects can happen as well, most commonly for myself being walking into a room and being taller or smaller than normal. Once I even exploded while trying to cast a healing spell. The worst of these I didn’t see coming at all, as I hadn’t heard about it. Playing as Alex in the hub world, I started to avoid healing my sanity on purpose since I hadn’t experienced many of the more famous effects yet. I was walking around the mansion, walked into the bathroom, and examined the tub because I couldn’t get a good look at what was in there. Queue a deceased Alex screaming at me before disappearing. Just awful. And if you aren’t seeing a ton of the meta effects with sanity loss, don’t worry: it’s SO much easier to trigger these in subsequent playthroughs. Things like sinking into the terrain and muting were near constant for me, and I felt like I was keeping my sanity level high. The scariest of the meta elements for me was that once I opened my inventory and it was completely empty, and I was locked on the screen. I thought the whole game had frozen! But thankfully, no. I think the game managing to have so many of these types of effects helped it to surprise me numerous times, even being familiar with its kinds of tricks. I mean, you really don’t want your game locking up, especially in an era of manual saving.

Please don't delete them all, I promise I'll be good!

To speak more to the characters themselves, I was surprised how intricately woven everything was. And, as overpowered as the tome can seem at times, it helps that each character you start out as must find the tome for themselves before using it. Experiencing ultimate power as Peter Jacobs in a cathedral and in the next moment walking around as the scrawny Edward Roivas with only a flask of whiskey to his name can be dangerous if you aren’t careful. But exploring each character’s obtainable arsenal and the purer survival horror aspect leading up to obtaining the tome really helps to vary the gameplay. Be sure to stock up on as much ammunition as possible, because you need it for some of these… things. And remember the rock-paper-scissors mechanics, you’ve GOT to.

I took more damage in this trap-laden excavation section than anywhere else

There are two true boss fights that you’ll engage in during a playthrough, though if you want to complete then you’ll encounter a few more. First up, depending on which of the three scenarios you lock yourself into at the start of the game, you’ll fight against one of the three guardians (that being Chattur’gha, Ulyaloth, and Xel’lotath). There are three stages to their attacks, and you just need to avoid the onslaught until you get an opening to cast a Magical Attack spell. The more Power Runes used, the more damage done (I’d just go for 7, it’ll instantly end each round). The last is the big fight, though it’s nowhere near as difficult. The corrupted Pious is working to summon his master, based on your selection of artifact in the game’s first level, and it’s up to you to run around and swap between hitting him and the teleporting artifact all while your chose guardian beats the other guardian in the background. This takes nothing to do and is a bit of a whimpering end to the title gameplay wise, though narratively it’s entirely satisfying.

Nothing quite like an old monk to take down and even older Roman skeleton

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Completing the Game

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I’ve alluded to it plenty by now, but to complete the game you simply need to beat it three separate times. After your first completion, save that off and start a new game from that memory card and the game will ask if you want to carry over information of the old save (which you should obviously agree to). From there, during your second playthrough select a different guardian artifact at the start, and then complete the game. Do this a third time with the final artifact and make your way through to get the true ending of the game. The boss itself never changes, and there's no "final confrontation" from all three campaigns like I was expecting, which was disappointing I won't lie. Maybe coming fresh off of Resident Evil 2 puts that at the forefront of my mind, but there should be a tad more than the ending cutscene of Mantorok fading into obscurity because all the guardians have been irradicated. Putting a lot of time into this should warrant something, ANYTHING more. And the other campaign runs to pull up very much. Upon completing the first run-through, you unlock the credits. For the second run, you unlock chapter select. But there aren't collectibles or alternate routes outside of what you're already doing for completion, so why? Not really worth it, in my opinion. At least the game itself is fun.

That's right, rot and fester down there you goopy pile!

I’m so happy I finally got around to experiencing this, and it still holds up today due to how varied everything is. The narrative is satisfying, the combat and magical systems not at all clunky, and some of the sanity effects still have some bite to them regardless of whether you know they’re coming or not. It’s a shame that we’ll probably never see a direct sequel, though maybe it’s for the best that its influence is all that carries on.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 48/652