Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is my most favorite game ever. I got it back during the summer I was going into high school as I remember the commercials for it just looking interesting and hearing the Maximillian Roivas line "may the rats eat your eyes...the darkness comes!" My brother and I were intrigued and playing it opened me to a world of fascination that I can now talk about for hours but ironically most of what I can say I have never said to anyone out of fear of appearing insane myself. From making games within the game based on choices made with the characters that aren't part of the main game but influenced by personality profiles I made based on the ancients they choose to deeper philosophical meanings I find in the choice of the aspects each ancient represents and how it's helped me make sense of the real world but also meet these concepts with healthy skepticism with always keeping in mind one of the greatest opening quotes in any media I've ever heard in "your perception will not change reality, but simply color it."
With all that said, because of the vast things I can go into with this game, it's stuff I plan on making posts and videos about over time. I replay it fairly regularly, granted it's been a little bit longer this time since the last time I played the game. But for this post I will just focus more on things I noticed this time around since while playing the game, there's different things I see, every time I play it again. The first thing that was new would require a quick explanation of how the game works, and what makes it unique. The game has your typical health bar as well as a magic bar for the magic spells you do in it but there is also a sanity meter/bar as well. Sanity is depleted whenever the character you play first encounters an enemy amongst other random things throughout the game. As the sanity meter gets lower, more strange things start to happen called "sanity effects." This can range from the screen tilting creating more of a Dutch angle effect to entering a room and seeing ammo everywhere only for the screen to flash and realize that really isn't happening along with other things where the character is killed suddenly without warning or even things messing more with the player than the character like getting the blue screen of death or it pretending that your console just restarted. Some of these effects are dated though, considering the game released in 2002 and things like it showing your TV volume going down out of nowhere or switching inputs reflects what is seen on the TV's at the time.
So one of the questions that's come up in online discourse is about whether Eternal Darkness would be remade today and if so, how would sanity effects be modernized? This is a question I've wondered over the years as you can't help but keep it in mind knowing that Nintendo has still been consistently renewing their patent and copyright for Eternal Darkness and the sanity effect mechanic. Over the years there's been different ideas that have come to mind that I may go into more in a different post or video and even discussed a new one I experienced in the game I played before replaying Eternal Darkness again, Among Ashes, which used the trophy achievement system, but first Nintendo would need to adopt their own system like that to do that in a remake. But I mention this to say that after decades of playing this game for probably close to a thousand hours if not more as I've replayed it many times, I actually encountered a new sanity effect this time, at least one that's new for me. This time when playing the chapter for one of the characters and entering a room that is played in a different chapter for another character, it actually transported the character I was playing to the other chapter with old film desaturated brown filter effect which is reminiscent of what's arguably one of the most difficult enemy encounters in the game, totally setting a stage for making you think you're having a similar encounter happening. Of course it all stopped as it was obviously just a sanity effect but it would have been absolutely terrifying if this was a first time playing in any of the three main story paths.
Another thing I realized with my adoration for this game that has been a foundation for many modern games that I've enjoyed a lot, is the freedom the game gives you to more or less choose your own difficulty except this happens more subtly. The way this is done is with the magic in the game. You learn spells throughout the game that lets you do different things from enchanting items to healing spells and creating shields and summoning monsters and quite a few other spells. The way it works is you align the spells to an ancient which would change the spell's effects and or effectiveness depending on the context of why you're using it. But there's one alignment that works more as a wild card. When using it at first some of the effects felt like nothing was happening but you have to experiment and take leaps of faith in some cases. Exploring and learning what the spells become with this alignment gives the player the ability to make the game extremely easy which is something I've seen that critics complained about with the later parts of the game. This makes me think of other games I've liked a lot over the years that have gotten the same criticism, namely Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. The criticism being the game shouldn't give you an option to make it easy. I feel ease in playing a game shouldn't be considered a negative aspect of it, if it's not forced upon you. There's a difference between having a cakewalk because you one hit every enemy and having a choice on how to play the game with different strategies for engaging with enemies. In Eternal Darkness, the spells I'm talking about you have nothing telling you about them, you just have to experiment but to be honest even with the spells at face value you can make the game pretty easy for yourself but you can choose to use other weapons or run as well and just heal your sanity as well too.There's very few enemies you actually have to fight in the game. But this is going into other things and other ways to play. But coming back to it and seeing the choices you're given makes me realize how this was the first game I played that gave these options and was honestly ahead of its time for this because it feels like it's really only been pretty recent where it's been more common for games to do this.
I'll just end with the most common thought I share or comment online which is my hopes that Nintendo, if they don't remake the game, at least port the original to the Switch consoles. This can be as part of their Nintendo Switch Online Expansion plan with the GameCube library or even just putting it on the Nintendo EShop, would probably sell pretty well since the game has gotten a pretty big name in the decades since in the horror gaming community and is recognized now as a classic that everyone should experience. Hopefully they bring it back in one form or another and even though I can play it on my older console still, I would be more than happy to get it again on Switch 2.