But these successes and failures are all secondary to the moment in the game which actually borders on the profound. The final visit to the great cathedral at Amiens takes place in 1916, and is seen through the eyes of a young war reporter. From its humble chapel beginnings more than a thousand years ago, you are now met with a vision of hell. Rocked by explosions and permeated with gloom, the cathedral is now a field hospital. The air is sharp with the moans of dying soldiers, the taint of mustard gas almost perceptible. The game, by this stage, has taught you not to believe your eyes. You’ve been schooled to dismiss visions of cruel and bizarre as this – ranks of young men, broken and burst by bullets and bayonets, barracked in a church. If you didn’t know any better, this moment would seem as absurd as any cheap-thrill insanity effect the game had tried so far. Yet not only is it real in the context of the game, it’s real for anyone watching. Forget the clever trick of the pretend volume bar appearing on screen, this is the game reaching out and grabbing a piece of human history. It’s a moment whose meaning is as grim as it is irrefutable: forget Chattur’gha, Xel’lotath and Ulyaoth. There’s no need to weave a fantastical tale about humanity coming close to destruction, about it being eaten alive from within by giant jellyfish. You need to look no further than the man in the next bed to see how close humanity is to evil, how close it came to destroying itself.



And while you can’t get much bigger than that, Eternal Darkness also excels at the small. This is a game that loves the details. A key feature of the combat is the finishing move – the moment when you plunge your weapon over and over into the mass of zombie flesh you’ve felled in combat. Somehow, this gruesome ceremony helps you recover some of your sanity, and each character does it with individual flair. From a callous shotgun blast to the head to a fat, clumsy boot to the belly, each character has a flourish that sums them up perfectly. Then there’s the continuity. As you revisit each area, you’ll find traces of your earlier adventures there. Prising a familiar sword out of the desiccated hand of a character you played as, and died as, centuries before is immensely satisfying. Recognising the corpse you unthinkingly transported to the mysterious Trapper dimension when you yourself are teleported there substantially bolsters the sense that this is a single, coherent universe where the things you do last and have consequences.

The Trapper dimension is a perfect example of the game’s unique approach to magic. Spells had a simple grammar – combine a verb (protect, absorb, etc) and a noun (self, area, item, etc), and you were free to invent a core vocabulary of vital magicks. These had to be cast live, each rune fizzing and sparking on the ground around you, and any attack would disrupt the spell and leave you defenceless. Many players found it unforgivably annoying, since it turned battles into a tedious game of bowls, rushing from one end of the arena to the other to gain enough time to complete a casting. There’s no question, however, that it imposed a rhythm and a drama onto the game, particularly in the later stages where you and your opponent would face off against each other, holding your nerve while the air shimmered and voices hissed and scraped: “PARGON PARGON BANKOROK CHATTUR’GHA PARGON SANTAK PARGON”.

If ever a game needed good magic, this was it, the clunky combat (not perhaps inappropriate for a set-up which had amateurs fighting zombies) disappointed many. It forced a lumpy, methodical pace onto many sections of the game that ill-suited its story and atmosphere. It had its satisfactions, however. The targeting system allowed you to slice through a zombie’s skull with a pathologist’s precision, and offered the entertaining prospect of relieving an enemy of head and arms, and leaving him to blunder harmlessly around.



Nor was combat the only disappointment. Most of the puzzles contained in the Roivas mansion were old-fashioned, either insulting or confounding the player’s intelligence. Finding buckshee pump-handles and letters hidden in spice jars seemed downright childish when compared to the sophisticated elements of the game. Other crude mechanics just seemed entirely pointless – requiring you to press the architect’s ‘survey’ button at key points in the level felt like a hangover from a 16bit past. And for all the atmospherics, the game’s N64 heritage is even clearer today than when it was released. Although many of the environments still convey a real sense of solidity and history, the textures, and particularly the wooden animation, serve as a reminder of how things used to be.

A masterpiece, then? Who cares. There are games that come much closer to perfection, without doubt. And certainly, those which have proved more influential. And many, of course, which have sold more copies. But few have as much to teach us as Eternal Darkness. As games become increasingly preoccupied with character and story, it’s shocking that the benchmark for games’ ability to emotionally affect players is still assumed to be the death of Aeris. That Eternal Darkness isn’t first on people’s lips when they open that can of worms is perhaps the greatest insanity effect of all.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in E144.