I finally found time to get back to my replays of all my old survival horror games as I move on from the PS2 to the GameCube. First up was Eternal Darkness.
While this game plays smoothly for the most part and has plenty of zombies, it’s actually set up as a series of chapters that are all period pieces, with you playing a different character each time. We’re talking ancient history, sand, swords, and even blowguns. Blech. And it’s not so much horror survival as it is stand and fight, hack n slash stuff.
You get a variety of weapons depending on the chapter, beginning with a sword. There’s a targeting system that lets you hits specific spots on enemies—head, arms, torso. Hack away until an enemy drops and then you can hit a button to finish him off, which replenishes your “sanity” meter so you don’t hallucinate. If you don’t finish the baddie off fast enough, the body just disintegrates. It is a little challenging trying to target specific enemies when several of them are swarming you, so it’s good to try to run past them to make some room and hopefully get them to fall more into a line formation rather than a cluster so you can deal with them one by one.
There are some positives to the gameplay. For starters, the game pauses while you are in your inventory. There’s a reload button for guns, but you can also just go into your inventory to reload if you need a breather. In inventory, you can also access game settings, a map, and the save system. Best news of all? You can save anywhere! Yes! However, you can’t save when there are enemies in a room. Drats!
While there are run and sneak buttons, there isn’t a quick turn option, which is a little frustrating. Also, you use the same button to finish enemies off as you do to open doors, so if you’re standing near a door when you go to finish an enemy, half the time you’ll end up opening the door and automatically go through it instead. And the fixed camera angles and perspectives suffer the same issue as original Resident Evil games; walk into a room and the camera doesn’t allow you to see enemies that are in front of you until you walk close enough to them to change the camera angle, leaving you vulnerable to attacks. Argh!
The modern day story that ties the chapters together has a young woman in a mansion trying to uncover the truth about what happened to her father. Each time she finds a page from a magic book, we head into a new chapter. After each chapter, we temporarily return to her so she can figure out how to trigger the next chapter by searching the house, which gets scarier as the game progresses. Since you play a different character in each chapter, no inventory carries over. The magic book and spells you build up, however, do get handed off from one chapter to the other. Yay! The only catch is that it is not immediate; you have to walk through the right door to temporarily be transported to the realm where the magic book is stored to grab it for the current chapter.
Most importantly, when you begin the game, you have to choose which color rune to play through (red, blue, or green). You’ll have no idea what any of it means, so just roll the dice and pick whichever one you want. You will need to learn the hierarchy of these three colors (blue tops red, green tops blue, etc.), and the game plays somewhat differently depending on the color you pick for replay value.
Chapter 1
Very straightforward. Guy with sword runs around an ancient structure, fighting a few zombies and picking up stones that he then needs to put in the right spots in a main room to exit the chapter.
Chapter 2
A female character runs around an ancient structure. However, we are introduced to the sanity meter now. This is on top of a health meter. Whenever you encounter enemies, your sanity meter goes down a little, and when it runs out, your health takes a hit. I hate that shit. As your sanity lowers, you also start to panic and move slower. Eventually, your coordination gets fucked up, as does your vision, and you hallucinate. Ugh. I think the point of the sanity meter was just to offer an opportunity to throw in jump scares (the hallucinations), because without it, this game is really not frightening at all.
This chapter has bigger zombies, more of them, hallways with slice n dice traps and little darts shooting from the walls on either side of you if you step on the wrong color floor panels, and a part when your sword breaks and you get a fucking blow gun with limited ammo that takes forever to kill just one enemy.
Here’s the shitty part. You can have a human who happens to be nearby fix your sword when it breaks…but only if you kill two zombies first with the blow gun before they kill the human. Good luck with that. The human dies within seconds, and the zombies don’t. I had to play the rest of the chapter without my sword. You can just use your fists to try to fight, but getting too close to zombies is asking for trouble. Luckily, I was able to dodge the zombies for the rest of the chapter in my quest to find the lever that opens an escape route.
Chapter 3
This is when the game starts to get more complex and confusing. While you’re still doing pretty straightforward fetching and collecting missions, there are new elements introduced. First is the magic ability, which is really confusing and includes combining different enchantments, codexes, and runes. Ugh. You can assign some spells to five quick buttons on your controller if you can figure out which ones are most useful for the particular chapter you are playing, or you can go into the menu to make them when it’s time to use them as needed. The good news is that there are spells to heal yourself and to fix your sanity. You’ll really need to grab a magic mixing chart from the internet to juggle the magic concoctions.
This level introduces a new little bugger called a trapper. You can sneak past them, but if they catch you, you get sent to this sort of arena of platforms with different color portals and have to color match your teleporting way back to the platform with the portal that returns you to the game. However, in this dimension you can also jump from one platform to the other to refill health, sanity, and magic, so sometimes you’re going to want to run into trappers to travel here.
You wouldn’t know this without a walkthrough, but there is a kind of boss at the end of the level, and you can enchant your sword with magic to defeat him faster.
Chapter 4
The game is already getting repetitive at this point. To mix things up, after a few hits, a zombie will sometimes morph into some sort of aggressive, screeching monkey creature before you defeat it.
You begin collecting more magic for mixing, and by the end of the chapter you actually have to enchant your sword with a specific rune to use it as a key to open the final door. The magic menu is complex, so you’ll most likely want to limit magic use to just the most effective spells. Be aware that a) you can’t use spells repeatedly, because you have a magic meter that needs to replenish, and b) when you cast a spell, you get circled by a triangle of power that takes time to generate. If you move or an enemy strikes you in the middle of that process, the fricking spell is cancelled and you have to cast it again. In other words, only cast a spell when you’re totally in the clear.
In this chapter, you also get little weapons you can toss at those annoying trappers to kill them from afar before they can teleport you away to the other dimension, so that’s a bonus.
The downside of this level is that there are two different sections that lock you into a certain space and force you to take on several waves of enemies before you can leave. Ugh. That’s a lot of forced combat for a “survival horror” game.
Chapter 5
You’re in the mansion from the wraparound story, with a pistol, and there are servants cleaning up all over the place. You wouldn’t know it without a walkthrough, but there’s one servant you can shoot in the head to turn her into the monkey creature, then shoot it to the floor and perform an autopsy on it so it won’t come back. Kind of pointless.
Actually, as short as this chapter is, you really won’t know what to do for most of it if you don’t follow a walkthrough. Eventually, you’ll fight a big bug, and the goal is to shoot it as it’s casting a spell and then watching it whenever it teleports to get a good fix on it again. Argh.
Chapter 6
This chapter is much more involved than previous chapters. It introduces a new enemy that you face a soon as you start! It’s this winged creep, and the goal is to shoot him repeatedly until he opens his wings, at which point he’s vulnerable and can be killed. There are also zombies that seem to cast some magic of their own. It can hurt you, but they also take each other out. Yay!
This is heavy on rooms that all look alike, and maze-like hallways that introduce some new traps, including faster blades dropping, walls that slam together to crush you, and gas that fills the halls. And you’ll be running through these halls repeatedly, especially if you read the walkthrough, which tells you right before you finish the level that you should backtrack a super amount to do some extra stuff to score the most crucial rune in the whole game for your magic. You would never know to do this without a walkthrough. WTF?
You also start to learn, by trial and error, about the levels of magic, which are represented by different colors. When you encounter magic barriers, you have to use whatever color magic is more powerful than that barrier color to take it down. I had a fleeting moment of clarity when I thought I was beginning to understand how to use the magic system, but I still hate it.
Chapter 7
This is where the backtracking really picks up and gets super annoying. It’s also where you discover you have to know how to create new spells, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that unless you google the “recipes”. Argh. They might be embedded in the menu system somewhere, but I didn’t feel like clicking on a dozen different items to figure it out.
You also learn that all these tight quarters can make certain weapons a hassle to use, because they seriously get fricking stuck on shit when you’re in mid-swing, stopping your strike and allowing enemies to get a cheap shot on you.
Enemies become more prevalent, and of course because there’s so much backtracking, they game designers decided to pull the old respawn crap on you. Sigh.
Chapter 8
This odd chapter has you running around “surveying” a bunch of rooms in a crumbling structure. The usual enemies are in the way, and the most annoying one is the return of the winged creep, who now conjures the little trappers that transport you to the other dimension. So, you have to try to take him out with your sword, but if he conjures them before you do, you have to quickly switch to a bow and arrow to shoot them, then you have to switch back to your sword and take him out before he can conjure more of them. Argh.
The only new enemy comes right near the end, and it’s two big worm things that pop out of a hole, but they’re really easy to kill with just one slash of your sword.
The suckiest part of the chapter is that your character runs slow and has no stamina, and once you finally run through the maze-like structure to survey every room, you have to figure out how to get all the way back to where you started to end the chapter.
Chapter 9
Everything changes in this chapter because…there’s finally a boss battle. Dammit.
As usual, there’s a lot of running back and forth and solving simple puzzles just to get through the chapter, but you are in a location you’ve already been in a previous chapter. There are a lot of those damn screeching monkey zombies this time, as well as loads of trappers. However, you also discover that you need to use a summon spell to control one trapper to crawl it through a hole in a wall to then teleport a dead body away from blocking a door so you can get through it. How do you know this? You read a walkthrough. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea what to do, as usual.
So after you complete all the minimal tasks and fight the usual enemies, there’s that boss at the end. Turns out the boss is fricking different depending on which color rune you chose at the beginning of the game. I don’t remember the boss looking like the version I fought, so I must have never played in red before. What sucks about this bit of news is that you’ll have no idea how to fight the boss, and if you google its name, you’ll get all different techniques to kill it because there are different fricking forms of the boss based on your color, so each technique only works for a specific form of the boss. Sigh. The bottom line is, you basically have to dodge his attacks or anything he throws at you until he changes color, then hit him with a magic spell attack in the color that is more powerful than the color of the boss. Again, this requires understanding the hierarchy of the rune colors as well as how to make the spell.
Chapter 10
The chapters from the past really start to blend with the present at this point. You spend a good portion of the time trying to save servants around the mansion from a soul sucking creature that teleports to the basement to rejuvenate every time you beat it off someone. The bad news is that even when you’re not in the same room with this soul sucker as you run around, you can’t save at all until you finally get to the part where you can kill him. In other words, if you die, you have to do a huge segment of this chapter over.
The goal is to eventually find the piece of a key to fix with magic, then use the key to get into the basement to destroy the rune so the soul sucker can’t revive itself, and then kill the soul sucker.
Here’s the catch. Each time you beat the soul sucker away from a servant, the thing stays right near the servant, and if you accidentally hit servants, you can fricking kill them! Problem with this is that if they survive, they give you things…like a key to a gun cabinet with an elephant gun in it. Kill that particular servant, you don’t get the key and don’t get the gun. Argh.
Speaking of the guns, in this chapter you can get several of them, and you can mod them into double barrel guns. More powerful for sure, but they also use more bullets. However, there are loads of bullets to collect, and you’ll need them.
Here’s another catch. The weird thing about the soul sucker is that you seriously have to just wait in certain rooms for him to appear to fight him to eventually get all those key pieces, but you wouldn’t know this without a walkthrough. Terrible gameplay design.
Anyway, eventually you head down a ladder and into the interesting part of the game. You end up in a room with 9 points, and the goal is to turn them on one at a time in order to teleport to platforms to choose a rune on a panel. Yep, you’ll need a walkthrough to know which one. Anyway, picking the right rune turns on another teleporting circle which takes you to another room where you have to fight various enemies to pull a lever that drops a magic field that is blocking your exit to get back to the original room with nine points. Sound confusing? It is. This whole section really feels like a way to just extend the length of the game. It becomes tedious fighting so many enemies, including that big boss from before quite often, but it’s always good to kill all enemies rather than just pulling the lever and escaping the room, because the rooms are interconnected and you end up running through the same rooms over and over to get back to the 9-point room. Ugh.
In the end, pulling all nine levers opens the final doorway out of this chapter.
Chapter 11
You need to use several spells to get through this chapter, so you’ll need a magic recipe book and your walkthrough with you. There are lots of enemies you’ve fought before, and they’re only really a pain in the ass at the end of the level.
See, this level generally has very little backtracking, so you don’t actually get to see the sights several times to remember the various paths. This becomes a problem when you eventually plant a bomb…and then get a 3-minute timer to get the fuck out of there. Fuck me. You really don’t have any idea where you’re actually supposed to get to in order to escape, so a walkthrough helps. However, there are suddenly enemies everywhere. You can run past them, but at times they swarm you and you really have to take some time to fuck them up in order to keep running. The good news is that at the beginning of this level you get a rifle that can be moded to shoot three grenades at a time. It’s virtually a one-hit kill bonanza if you use them sparingly and save them for the end of the level.
Also, as you backtrack to escape, you do get a cutscene, which makes you think you’ve safely escaped, but…psych! You return to control of your character after the cutscene and have to continue running until you find the right ladder to climb up to end the chapter. Ugh.
Chapter 12
At last, you get to fully play as the main girl from the wraparound. Actually, the wraparound segment right before this chapter kicked off her involvement big time, feeling very much like a creepy, modern survival horror game in a mansion. The most notable, unique aspect to this game at the time of its release was the “insanity” effects that cause your character to experience weird shit, see things, make your screen go wonky, and most cruel of all, give you bogus error messages suggesting that your GameCube has malfunctioned.
But honestly? What a disappointing way to end the game. You have to revisit the room with 9 points and just do mini tasks with each point again to simply return to the main room to just then go to the next point. This section is much easier than the first time around, particularly since it uses mostly magic this time and has less enemies. You’ll need a walkthrough to know how to wield the right magic, but after you’ve cleared all 9 points, you get sent to the final boss.
While you’re busy fighting a small boss on a platform area, there are interspersed cutscenes of two huge, cosmic horror creatures fighting out in space. Your job is simply to enchant your weapon with the dominant color over the boss, repeatedly run back and forth avoiding his attacks while hitting him when you can, which drops big sculpture things around the platform, then run up to them and smash them. Repeat this to the point of boredom, and eventually you start to take the form of each of the characters from each of the chapters and continue the same process. At some point, the boss becomes vulnerable, and you can kill him. The end. It’s all very Lovecraft once you get the cutscene of the fight in space coming to an end as well.
