Thoughts on Eternal Darkness

the limping horror — April 14, 2004

As you may or may not have heard, Nintendo recently let Silicon Knights go. Technically speaking, “we don’t know what really happened,” but given Dyack’s recent interviews, it’s pretty clear he would never choose to leave Nintendo on his own. All this bellyaching about if this split is a good/bad thing for Nintendo/Silicon Knights has dredges up bitter memories of what I consider to be the most overrated game I’ve ever played: Eternal Darkness. Reading the reviews — 9.5+?! — I felt like I must have accidentally played through an incomplete beta. Where was the greatness seen by everyone else? Here, in quasi-random order, are my problems with ED. (Warning: minor spoilers. Also, I haven’t played the game in nearly two years, so some details may be fuzzy.)

The story is not good. ED has a complicated and somewhat interesting plot, but that plot is revealed to the player in awkward, unclear fits and starts. It might look good sorted out on paper, but the way Silicon Knights tells it doesn’t make for a good story. Though there are twelve different characters, most of them are indistinct and poorly developed. Instead of an overarching, epic tale of mankind vs. the Elder Gods, we get a series of poorly interconnected vignettes. My characters did things, sure, and these things usually connected in some way to “the plot.” But despite lots happening, I rarely felt as if I was contributing anything to the overall story. I was just cashing in plot coupons to get on to the next interchangable character, unclear why I had just done what I did, and beyond caring by the time I found out. Just because the story is non-linear and multi-temporal doesn’t meant that it has to be revealed to me, the player, in a random, disconnected way.

The main villain is a zombie gladiator. Seriously, look at him. We have a story starring Elder Gods capable of extinguishing humanity with an off-hand thought in their sleep, yet they’re relying on Sir Bonesimus Maximus to do their bidding? What?

The magic system is broken. First problem: selecting an artifact in the first chapter is a hidden difficulty selection; though some paths are significantly harder or easier than others, nothing indicates this to the player. Terrible design.

Second, magic spells are boring, tending to either summon monsters, buff your character, or attack. The possibility of using magic to interact with the environment and solve puzzles in interesting ways is almost compeltely ignored. Magic is generally ineffective in combat; simply kicking the crud out of enemies is usually far more effective than trying to deal with them magically. Higher level spells, especially, are almost impossible to use in combat effectively, taking Pargon as they Pargon do Pargon forever Pargon to cast. Magic is also far too useful outside of combat; since MP can be refilled just by running around in circles, the ability to exchange MP for health and sanity effectively breaks the combat and sanity systems. What the game really needed was a counterbalancing dizziness meter … whee!

The game lacks polish. Some environments, like the church, look stupendous. Others look terrible, clearly betraying their N64 development roots. The quality of the character models also varies wildly. The game lacks fundamental niceties of the past thirty years of adventure games: clearly labelled keys should automatically unlock their clearly labelled doors; mergeable items should be mergeable in any order; puzzles should degrade nicely with helpful error messages, etc. The puzzles are easy and intuitive, sure — so easy and intuitive, in fact, that classifying them as “puzzles” is disingenous — they’re just “the things you obviously do now.”

Combat is boring. You can target the head and limbs of an enemy. Targeting a limb does very little; targeting the head completely incapacitates the enemy. Therefore, you always target the head. I also remember there being some serious balance issue with melee vs. ranged weapons, though I unfortunately can’t remember now in which direction it was broken. Basically, it was boring.

That big stupid spell at the end. Like 90 minutes of running around fetch-questing to activate all those pillars. And then, then, the game makes you do it again. Anyone who suffered through this rigmarole twice more on subsequent playthroughs deserves to be canonized as the Patron Saint of Patient Videogamers.

Roivas is “savior” spelled backwards. Jesus Christ, I thought we all got over reverse-word symbolism in middle school.

Magic is spelled “magick.” Also unacceptable. In general, the game’s prose is unpleasantly purple, gut-wrenchingly florid. It sets a mood; that mood is “LiveJournal.”

The game is not scary. It’s not. You could, I suppose, argue that it’s not supposed to be scary. But the game’s not even creepy or unnerving!Lovecraftian horror is all about unknowable terror lurking unseen; the threat of death (or, worse than death, insanity) hiding behind every corner. At no point in the game did I, the player, feel threatened. Even worse, I didn’t ever think that my characters felt threatened, either. It was all one big hallucinatory laugh.

The Sanity system is broken in ways both big and small. First, the game depends entirely on the sanity system to demonstrate the characters’ unravelling state of mind. Without the insanity effects — for example, if you play cautiously and keep your sanity meter high — your character seems totally unfazed and unfrightened of the goings on. You just pick up the Tome of Eternal Darkness, start slaughtering abundant zombies, and never once question it. For a game that depends so strongly on tone and characterization, this is a fairly humongous issue.

A skilled game player is denied the most interesting, mood-setting parts of the game. To enjoy the game fully, you have to play it poorly on purpose. What the hell kind of design is that?

A visible sanity meter greatly reduces the sense of tension; the ability to refill the meter using easily restored magic decimates it. What should be the game’s major selling point is, instead, a gameplay Catch-22.

Also, the sanity effects frankly don’t work very well — they only “got me” once. The rest of the time, I was just thinking “oh, a sanity effect.” If I feel scared, I assume my character feels scared. And if I feel bored, then I assume my character feels bored, too.

Lovecraft, Lovecraft, Lovecraft. Eternal Darkness is clearly based directly on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. There’s nothing wrong with that — who doesn’t like Lovecraft! — but it also rips entire short stories out of the canon and integrates them as “chapters” in the game. SK’s passion for the material is admirable, but next time, I hope they either use more of their own ideas or apply for the actual license from the Lovecraft estate. The line between “homage” and “plagarism” is a thin one, and Eternal Darkness is distressingly close to the latter. Interestingly, an early N64 build I saw at E3 years ago actually used the names of the Lovecraftian gods. I guess they were placeholder until they could run a search/replace.

So that’s why I’m not too fond of Eternal Darkness.

Edit: Someone asked what Eternal Darkness lifts from Lovecraft. Off the top of my head:

• The Roivas mansion is in Rhode Island, the setting of many Lovecraft’s stories.
• The “Ancients” are the Lovecraftian Elder Gods. Mantarok himself, as the never-present, ultimate evil, seems most similar to the dread Cthulhu. “In his house at Rl’yeh dead Cthulhu lies sleeping. That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die.”
• The Tome of Eternal Darkness is the Necromonicon, a dark book of flesh and bone written by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
• The bits in the Roivas mansion mirrors the the action of “The Rats in the Walls.”
• The subterranean city is stolen whole-cloth from “At the Mountains of Madness.”
• The police Legrasse shares the same name as the protagonist of “The Call of Cthuhlu.”
• The whole concept of extradimensional creatures of unfathomable power and evil moving to exterminate humanity, and only a few human beings temporarily and perhaps unwittingly stemming off the probably-inevitable destruction is Lovecraft’s entire schtick.