ETERNAL DARKNESS (AND GAME PRESERVATION)
Let me be honest: game preservation in 2099 is more important than it’s ever been. Original discs and vinyls started to wear out years ago, which is why organizations like Pixelblood exist, to preserve old games and abandonware that might be lost to time. If it wasn’t for Pixelblood, I wouldn’t be able to play this game, since working disc go for hundreds of thousands of ZG on eBay!!! I HAVE a GameCube (my baby) but the only compatible television I had broke last September, so I’d have to shill out money for an A/V TV ON TOP of the crazy prices the game itself goes for. Ever since the AAA-collapse in the 2040s, game preservation for stuff before then has gotten DIRE. But Pixelblood are WARRIORS!!Pixelblood’s whole library goes up to 2065 and everything on there is free to download. The copyright law battles they’ve gone through to preserve old games makes them a hero in my eyes. Support that group. Seriously. I learned how to emulate PC-98 games from a moderator in the Pixelblood Trainbow, the community is really great!! Shoutout Snowyboard!!! Love you man.
Eternal Darkness isn’t an unknown game, of course, it’s pretty foundational for a lot of 4th wall breaking horror, standing up with the greats like Doki Doki Literature Club, IMSCARED, and Darkball. (Those games rock too, btw. Eternal Darkness is still my fave out of all of those giants, tho.) (I would add Undertale/Deltarune & The Stanley Parable to the list, but they’re not horror games, lolz.) It’s just that not many people have actually played the game themselves, even though they’re aware that it exists and it comes up in discussions a lot.
Obviously it’s not as smooth as more modern shooters, or even stuff in the 2010s-20s— this was this weird transitional period where technical skill in graphics and gameplay was still improving but devs weren’t limited too much by corporate BS yet, so they could get SUPER crazy and still be licensed by companies like Nintendo.
The story of the game surrounds this girl named Alexandra visiting her family’s estate after her grandfather is murdered. She finds this book called The Tome of Eternal Darkness, which chronicles a two-thousand year old plot started by this Roman dude named Pious Augustus in 26 BC to awaken an elder god, and the various people over the centuries who work to foil his plot. Each level is in a slightly different time period, where you play as the different people working to stop Pious.
What I find cool is that in each level you learn a new magic spell, so when you go back to playing as Alexandra, you can still use all of the compiled spells, because she was reading the whole thing in the book! Really cool stuff. You use it for puzzle solving around the mansion whenever you finish a mission. Also, one of the later levels in the game has you play as a firefighter from Canada in the 90s, and he’s got a rifle, and it’s the coolest level ever.
Of course, whenever people talk about Eternal Darkness, the MAIN thing they think about is the “sanity effects”. You have HP, MP, and a bar called “sanity”, which goes down whenever you’re exposed to scary stuff. Once it goes down far enough, you start seeing really weird things, like your own head falling off (and when you pick it up it starts reciting Shakespeare at you), the game will make you think your inventory emptied, or you deleted your save file on accident, or that the level is upside down, and all sorts of super cool stuff I don’t want to spoil!!
The one criticism of this system that I know lots of other people have is that since the cool effects are tied to the “sanity meter”, which you’re encouraged to keep high, you’re basically penalized for trying to seek out the coolest part of the game. It’s a shame, because the rest of it is so cool!!!
I wish this game could get a sequel, but the company that made it is long-defunct and the IP is caught up in some weird copyright stuff anyway. Nintendo apparently copyrighted the type of “sanity effects” that Eternal Darkness used, which is BULLSHIT, but it’s also been almost a hundred years since then, so we’ve seen really cool fourth wall breaking stuff in things like Dragonphone and Endless Citystar (REALLY good Mirai games, btw). We’re definitely not starved for content similar to Eternal Darkness, but it’s a shame it only got the one game (especially since one of the sanity effects is a sequel-tease… pain…). I give the game an 9.2/10!!
If you’re interested in seeing the foundation for a lot of really legendary games, I highly recommend getting it! Just… probably emulate it. You can find the files on Pixelblood. Speaking of, if you can, send a donation their way!! All proceeds go towards legal fees & keeping the archive running, which is SUPER important more than ever. They’re reportedly working on an emulator you can run within the Nexus— as in, a world where you can play video games in it, if that makes sense— and it looks SUPER sick, but they’re still dealing with legal issues before they can make it official. I really want to see this become real!!!