When games put you in control of a character with its own identity, rather than an empty shell that you’ve created yourself, there’s always a tension. ‘How can Link be Link if I’m controlling him? How can I be Link if he sometimes does stuff without me telling him to? And why am I calling him ‘he’ if he’s supposed to be me?’ Eternal Darkness stretches this tension even more. Each chapter takes each character through an identical arc. In the course of going about their lives, each person is drawn to the Darkness. Horrified, they discover that they understood nothing of the real nature of the world. They start out innocent and end up corrupted. It means that, despite the skills and information the player learns throughout the game, each chapter resets the character you play to newbie status. It’s here that the game’s central conceit, the Tome Of Eternal Darkness, comes into its own. Part elaborate menu system, part get-out-of-jail-free card, the moment each character finds this book is the moment when the player’s experience and the character’s abilities become fused together. Suddenly, they know everything you know, and the gap is closed between you and your on-screen persona. The Tome Of Eternal Darkness doesn’t contain the secrets of a supernatural conspiracy; it contains the secrets of how to design game characters which can withstand the contradiction of being distinct individuals and empty avatars for players to inhabit.



What demonstrates this most keenly is the game’s ‘real’ hero, Alexandra Roivas. This is who you’re really supposed to ‘be’ in the game. The other chapters are experienced as visions she endures while reading the Tome. As a consequence, she follows the rules of videogame hero design. Miserably bland in comparison to the other characters, it’s her clothes that send out the clearest signal. Throughout the game, from the moment she’s woken in bed at 3.33 in the morning to the moment, weeks later, when she finally faces the game’s ultimate evil, she’s dressed in the same nice, safe, hero garb – black vest, black jeans. The fact that she doesn’t change is supposed to reassure the player – look, here’s the person you’re really in control of. She’s not going to sneak off and do anything without you like, say, have a shower or change her pants. The intention was almost certainly to balance the unsettling character-hopping of the rest of the game, but instead it undermines it. The convincing richness of the monk Luther, madman Maximilian and firefighter Michael demonstrate dramatically that the secret to making a game character easy to identify with isn’t simply a case of emptying them out to make room for the player.

These characters, however, aren’t the most striking things about the era-skipping structure of the story. What’s truly remarkable is how each of them ends. No matter how well you fight or how smartly you puzzle, most of them end in failure. The characters you play rot before your eyes, sacrifice themselves to living deaths, descend into spittle-soaked madness or are simply crushed by the colossal powers they are trying to fight. It flies in the face of one of the most unquestioned assumptions in game design – that players like to win. In Eternal Darkness each chapter satisfies even when you can’t escape your fate; indeed, each lost character strengthens your motivation to defeat the evil that destroyed them. Players don’t like to win, they like the time they spend in the game to take them somewhere, to change the world around them. Eternal Darkness shows how much stronger a game’s story can be when the player character doesn’t have to be a Pollyanna or a John McClane.



These considerations, however, are all the backdrop to Eternal Darkness’ most famous feature – its insanity effects. As each character is dragged further from their normal lives into the Darkness their sanity erodes, and your screen plays host to a series of tricks and shocks to which no-one was entirely immune. It was here, however, that Silicon Knights’ lack of moderation shows itself most clearly. The insanity effects were endlessly inventive, but far too varied in tone and quality. The cleverest were the ones which reached out into the real world: the ‘controller unplugged’ error message as zombies swarmed all over you; the ‘deleting files’ progress bar that popped up when you were trying to save. The simplest were the most effective – notably the awful, desperate banging on the doors as you approached. The cheapest were the ones which undermined this skilfully crafted atmosphere of paranoia and apprehension: the statue that turned to look at you like something out of The Muppets; the slapstick plop of your limbs as they fell off as you walked into a room. Every single effect, whether skilled or clumsy, was spoiled by the Hammer Horror hysteria with which each character would howl (or whimper, or groan) ‘This… caaaan’t… be… HA-PEN-NING!’ after each effect had reset. Had the team had half as many ideas, but twice as much faith in them, Eternal Darkness could have been a truly scarring experience.