Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Product Description

Battle a cosmic evil across space and time in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. From swords to guns to mind-warping spells, you’ll use an array of weapons in this epic adventure that unfolds over thousands of years. A new style of psychological thriller, the adventure gets even more frenzied as you battle your own dwindling sanity. Made in USA.

Review

It’s often argued that Nintendo makes the best video games in the world, but one thing the company isn’t known for is scary games. If you thought Luigi’s Mansion was frightening, then quite frankly you’ve led a sheltered life. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, however, is the real deal: it’s scary, it’s gory, and it’s really nothing like Resident Evil at all.

The game starts when you find out your grandfather has had his clogs popped by some unspeakable monster. While rummaging through his stuff (alone, at night, in his huge mansion) you come across a jolly little hardback called The Tome of Eternal Darkness, and upon reading it you suddenly find yourself controlling a Roman centurion in 26 B.C. Persia. And this is how the game continues–you find and read a passage of the book in the mansion and then control a series of 11 completely different characters over the course of two millennia.

Apart from the innovative structure of the game, the other big selling points of Eternal Darkness are its sanity effects–every time you see a monster and fail to kill it your sanity level will drop. If it drops too far, you start seeing things: flies walking along the inside of your screen, messages telling you your controller is unplugged when it clearly isn’t, and all sorts of other clever freakery.

The game’s not perfect, though; the combat is a little too fiddly, and it’s still not quite as scary as Silent Hill, but Eternal Darkness is an unusual and rewarding title that should finally shut up those annoying twerps that insist Nintendo only makes games for kids. –David Jenkins — Amazon.co.uk