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Gaming, In My Opinion
Horror games are quite common nowadays. So much so that, apart from the great Resident Evil series, we can now predict when a badly animated bogeyman is going to jump out of a blatantly false section of the wall. Or perhaps we just aren’t scared as easily. But that’s just changed, thanks to Silicon Knights, a new Nintendo second-party developer, and their epic Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
As you begin, a cinematic sequence begins with a wonderfully voice-acted overture. From the second the film-like titles come up, you know it will be something special. The game revolves around the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a book made entirely of flesh and bone. The book had been passed down through the generations to a chosen few, giving them the power to defeat an evil magic race known as the Ancients in order to prevent them from throwing the world into Eternal Darkness. You access each of the eleven characters (each one in a previous time period, ranging from the Romans to World War Two) via the twelfth character, Alexandra Roivas. She is exploring her grandfather’s mansion in order to find some answers to her grandfather’s murder. She finds the Tome and as she reads each chapter, you play the character it involves. This means that the game is rigidly linear, but when a game has a plot so gripping and so well presented, you won’t care. Each chapter forms one level and some chapters return to old locales, so there aren’t too many different levels, but in this game the familiarity of the levels improves the feeling of the character’s destiny. The visuals aren’t as good as Resi. None are. However, these are some of the best visuals on the Cube so far. The lens flare, the animation of the humans, the lip-synching. It’s all here in Zelda-like glory. If Link’s escapades were set in the real world, they would look exactly like this. The game is very much like a real world Zelda in many respects; the visuals, the puzzles, and the addiction to playing it. The sounds are your run-of-the-mill horror game sound effects. As with most horror games, there are the things that go bump in the night, the electric beams the monsters fire, the swish of Indiana Jones-style blade-based booby traps. These are redeemed by Nintendo’s atmospheric music and superb voice-acting. But the piece de resistance is HOW the game scares you, not HOW MUCH? Aside from the health and magic meter, there is the sanity meter. The more the monsters see you, the less sanity you have, and the more you hallucinate. And the hallucinations are incredible and it’s almost impossible to spot what’s real and what’s not. And to really appreciate them, I can’t tell you what they are. It’s surreal. You can play this game on a sunny day, with people in the next room making noise, and still be scared out of your mind. It’s amazing how thoroughly you will be gripped by the storyline. This is Nintendo at it’s best – defining yet another genre, with great new ideas that it will take years to better. This game is a one-off. You must get it, even if you only rent it. The MUST HAVE Horror game of all time. VISUALS: Who needs pre-rendering? This is Nintendo at its best. 9/10 SOUNDS: Wear headphones at your own risk! So real, you’ll check to see that it isn’t your heart beating loudly. 9/10 PLAYABILITY: Great controls, Great difficulty curve, Great game. 9/10 LIFESPAN: Like Ocarina of Time, you’ll want to complete it again, and again, and again, etc. 9/10 VERDICT: It’s another Nintendo Revolution. Period. 90% |