Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Nintendo GameCube Review)

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released June 24, 2002
Directed by Denis Dyack
Developed by Silicon Knights
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

If you surveyed Nintendo fans about what GameCube titles they want to join the Switch Online service, I think there’s a good chance Eternal Darkness would win the vote. The top three would probably be it, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Hell, you can probably cross out the Zelda game. I’m guessing there’s a good portion of Twilight Princess fans who consider the Wii version to be the definitive version of it (I’m not among them but to each their own), so it’s Double Dash versus Eternal Darkness. Maybe my insanity meter is running on empty, but I think I’d put my money on Eternal Darkness. The most popular model of Switch 2 has Mario Kart World built into it, and most Switch 2 owners probably also have Mario Kart 8 in addition to an already nice selection of Mario Kart classics on Switch Online.

Meanwhile, it’s a safe bet that a lot of people who were interested in Eternal Darkness never actually played it. It might have been a critical darling, but it was a bust in sales and not the system mover Nintendo was hoping for. I think a big part of that was skepticism by consumers after the game jumped from a late Nintendo 64 release to an early GameCube one. Or maybe it just felt like Nintendo was trying too hard to court older audiences. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t find any global sales figures for it besides “it sold less than X units.” But, to give you some perspective, in Japan Eternal Darkness sold so poorly it didn’t even chart (Wikipedia calls it 18,000 units but I couldn’t verify that). That can’t be chalked-up to lack of interest in the genre or being on the “wrong platform” either. Resident Evil Zero, released almost exactly a month later, sold 400,000 units in Japan alone. OUCH. Canada reports similar numbers, and for a game designed in Canada no less.

Based on those figures and similar sales of other key games, my “pulled out of my ass, this is not an actual sales figure” guesstimate is that Eternal Darkness probably sold around 150,000 units globally, and that’s my most generous ballpark. That means there’s a LOT of people who missed out and have had to listen to two decades of glowing accolades and high placements on such lists as “best GameCube games of all-time” and “best horror games of all-time” and even “best video games of all-time.” So in my hypothetical fan vote, if Eternal Darkness didn’t get a plurality of the votes, it’d finish top-three for sure. That’s why I wanted to do this review. I figured there was no way it could possibly hold-up to THAT type of reputation. I wanted to know if Eternal Darkness is one of those games that had a finite window of relevance, and if that window has since slammed shut. And now that my introduction is out of the way, I have to give you the following warning:

⚠️THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS⚠️

The final paragraph with the verdict is spoiler free.

Eternal Darkness’ is the story of the Nintendo funding middle school quality Lovecraft fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. The game centers around the Necronomicon Tome of Eternal Darkness, a book bound in human skin that chronicles the struggle of humanity against The Great Old Ones Ancients, a race of cosmic deities that want to, like, be evil and eat humanity and stuff. Full disclosure: I don’t know sh*t about the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ve never read it. It doesn’t interest me. So I’m not really concerned that Eternal Darkness’ story cribs so heavily off Lovecraft and was fine letting the narrative stand on its own. Okay, I think it’s really f*cking weird that the game actually acknowledges the existence of Lovecraft’s lore within its world. It reminded me of Alan Wake’s constant references to Stephen King. Like, you can’t just do that sh*t and expect even a non-fan like myself to not find it cringey.

So, the cosmic horror plot didn’t really do much for me. But, as was the case with basically every aspect of Eternal Darkness, every negative is also made positive and every positive is made negative. The lame story creates a compelling framing device for a sprawling epic that takes place in such far-distance time periods as 2000 AD. They didn’t even have iPhones back then! F*cking barbaric! The game is divided into twelve chapters that each takes place in a different time and stars a different character. This was probably Silicon Knight’s most unambiguously successful concept for the game, because each of the twelve different player characters feels completely different. They move at different speeds, have different weapons, and their life/health/sanity meters are all different sizes. Eternal Darkness screws up many good ideas, but they didn’t f*ck up actual gameplay spread over thousands of years through the eyes of twelve different characters INCLUDING the main villain. That would be a genuinely remarkable achievement for any era. No notes there.

Each chapter is introduced by main character Alexandra “Alex” Roivas. Playing as her, you search the mansion using clues or abilities learned from the previous chapter to locate a page torn from the Notcronomicon. Sometimes the page is literally right there next to her (especially early in the game), and sometimes she has to do rudimentary “use object A on object B” puzzles. And clearly the developers had very little faith in people exploring because sometimes you’ll immediately get a letter that says something to the effect of “I left something for you in this room.” It’s like a horror game directed by a helicopter parent.

Selecting the pages in the menu starts the next chapter, and in all but the first chapter, you play as a character who comes into possession of the Notcronomicon. That first chapter sees you take the role of eventual antagonist Pious Augustus. Pious? Seriously? Okay. The first major problem with Eternal Darkness reveals itself here as this glorified tutorial level (1) lacks the trademark insanity effects and (2) presents players with three different relics that change the cosmic horror Baron Von Evil will pray to. One is green, one is red, and one is blue. Each of the three colors represents a different difficulty setting, but the problem is that those consequences aren’t told to players, nor is the game’s color-coated rock-papers-scissors mechanic explained before this. Well, unless you notice a context-free picture in the hallway of the house that shows it.

In Eternal Darkness, red beats green and also pisses off bulls. Green beats blue and also indicates a healthy diet high in fiber. Finally, blue beats red, which is really sad when you think about it. If the two colors could settle their differences and get along, together they could make movies appear to pop out of the screen. Eternal Darkness leans very heavily into the color rivalry. Pick the green item? You’ll be mostly fighting green monsters and casting red spells to solve puzzles or buff your weapons. It’s more than just the facade of a difference, too. The color you choose also decides what cutscenes you see, which versions of basic enemies you fight, an entire boss battle, and the order of which you gain the tools needed to cast specific colors of spells. Also, each color specifically ties to a different meter, which is how the difficulty is adjusted. Red is the hard mode because enemies directly target your health meter, while blue enemies target the magic meter and green the sanity meter. Also, major enemies change quite a bit. Like, the “horrors” in the green mode look like this:

While in blue mode, they look like this:

By the way, the red one looks just like a three-headed Predator.

If this whole thing comes across like needless padding designed to turn fifteen hours worth of gameplay into a forty hour game, well, that’s exactly what it feels like. I wish I could have opted-in to JUST fighting the different bosses or maybe even unlocking the ability to replay each chapter with a different color after the credits rolled instead of having to play through the whole game two more times. There were some interesting differences. I was surprised by how different Skeletor behaved in each of the two quests I played. In the green quest, the evil dark god Xel’lotath (also voiced partially by Jennifer Hale) is a bit a of a smart ass and playfully knows Pious is planning to betray it (nothing comes of that) but kind of rolls with it and the two have a tit-for-tat partnership and come up with their evil plan together. In the blue quest, a galactic space jellyfish named Ulyaoth is the dark god and Emperor Skullface the Wicked is a total submissive bitch to it while Jelly the Doombringer does all the planning.

So at least there is SOME effort to make the three different modes feel different, but it’s just not enough to justify the things that had to be done to make it work. I would have much preferred a more optimized single quest that had a much bigger variety of enemies because there’s not enough creatures OR locations in Eternal Darkness. Despite having twelve distinct characters, the action only happens in four specific settings: the starting mansion in modern (well, 2000) Rhode Island, a temple that’s supposed to be part of the Angkor Thom area in Cambodia, a gigantic cathedral in France, and a temple in ancient Persia. I’ll be generous and count the gigantic underground area connected to the mansion as a fifth setting, but that’s still not enough to keep the sight-seeing fresh, and this in a game with a story that does things that I found to be frustrating as a viewer. Like, some chapters start with the heroes being chummy with guys who look like f*cking zombies and are clearly evil, but they don’t acknowledge it at all. They’re so polite about it that they don’t even look at these obviously demonic humanoids like they have a booger hanging out of their nose. It happens a lot, too. Chapter Three does it:

Chapter Six does it.

Chapter seven REALLY does it.

And there’s really no other way to look at it: either the heroic characters are polite and naive to a fault or they’re complete dumb f*cks. It’s another one of those things that gave me a “they didn’t have faith in the players” vibe. Visually, it’s telegraphing like you would expect from a Saturday morning cartoon, not a psychological horror game made for adults. Did the villains HAVE to look like demons right from the start in every chapter? Wouldn’t it have been so much scarier if they looked like normal people, at least at first? Then again, the bad guy in the last two pictures is Pious Augustus in disguise, using the names “Paul Augustine” and “Phillipe Augustine.” It’s just too stupid to take seriously and it’s not scary or even suspenseful storytelling. Scary and suspenseful would have been populating the game with more NPC characters and leaving an air of mystery as to who Pious was posing as in each chapter. You can’t do a big, sprawling multi-generational saga if you don’t have the patience to tell the story properly.

So I thought Eternal Darkness’ story was f*cking lame. The idea is solid, really. The execution wasn’t good. It’s kind of telling that they could cut a playable character named Joseph De Molay at the eleventh hour, reduce his entire contribution to the narrative to a context-free cutscene between chapters, and then slot in a new character with no connection to the plot at all, literally never interacting with Pious or the evil gods, and nothing feels lost. Such a thing should have been heavily damaging to the flow of the story, but because all the portrayals of evil are so comically over the top, the heroes so completely clueless, and the writing so on-the-nose that you’d swear it’s being made for young children, it doesn’t make a lick of difference. But, as bad as the writing and character models are, the settings, enemy design, and architecture are genuinely spooky. Some of those enemies are absolute nightmare fuel.

And the story isn’t even the worst problem. Having four levels is bad enough, but their layouts are especially awful. There’s too much backtracking, and sometimes there’s so much of it that I actually got angry about it. In the seventh chapter you take the role of a friar and a potential ally needs to see proof that the guys who have taken over the church are evil. I mean, they literally look like undead demons and are talking about absolute power and have unholy literature laying around the entire f*cking church, but this guy really believes in due process I guess. Just talking to him requires a lot of busy work and backtracking, but to get the evidence, you have to re-backtrack through areas you’ve already been into far away from where this guy is located to grab a single item that you then must return to him in the same room you last met him in located on the literal opposite side of the map. It’s not like enemies always respawn, so it’s mostly backtracking through empty rooms. It leads to a lot of dead air that’s made more tedious because you’ve already seen some of this location once already, and indeed, you’ll see the same location again later on. It’s horrible design, completely unoptimized for both horror and action.

It didn’t have to be this way, either. Have the ally show up when you get the item. Have there be a passage that leads directly to the end of the level. What were they thinking with this? The only way I could spin it in a way that makes logical sense is that they wanted to leave open the potential to be hit with more sanity effects (assuming they played like I did and deliberately kept their sanity low), but by the seventh chapter you’ve probably seen most of them already anyway. Maybe if they had more settings they wouldn’t have needed to pad the game out to the degree they do here.

The final third of the game is somehow even worse about it. At the end of Chapter Ten, you have to activate a device that looks an awful lot like the titular device from Stargate and then teleport to eight different locations to input a rune stone. Then, after each one, you don’t just teleport back to the Stargate chamber. You have to make your way through a room either fighting monsters or solving puzzles, then return to the room before the Stargate chamber, which is like the hub. Then, in the final chapter, you have to do the same thing again, only with different puzzles AND additional busy work, because this time, the floor in the main hub is covered with this:

The floor zaps you, requiring you to cast a fully-charged magic shield nearly every time you return to the hub. It’s the same thing you’ve already done eight times over, repeated an additional eight times, only with added steps that are little more than busy work. So not only is Eternal Darkness padded to all hell, but it’s overindulgent in how it goes about doing it. None of this is in service to a player’s ability to enjoy the game. The first time you do this sequence, there’s a mini-boss that has to be killed, but once it’s dead, it doesn’t come back. The mini-boss isn’t there the second time, and instead you have this electric piss stain you have to cast spells against. That’s boring. All this backtracking and all the repetitive crap that doesn’t involve slicing up enemies is boring. If you could cut all this gristle out of the game, it’d probably only be six to eight hours long, but that six to eight hours would have been edge-of-your-seat the entire time. Hell, maybe if they dropped the three-routes concept, they could have added a couple extra levels and squeezed ten AMAZING hours out of the narrative in a natural, satisfying way. Alas.

Re-reading everything above, it probably comes across like I completely hated Eternal Darkness, but I didn’t. The action is pretty fun. Clunky, but fun. Combat is based around locking-on to enemies and performing unlicensed amputations on them. Early on, you mostly just chop off their heads and both arms. Decapitation and dismemberment is always fun by itself, but the enemy behavior really puts it over the top. If a room has multiple zombies, it’s absolutely a valid strategy to lop off all their heads before you finish them off. Headless zombies stop chasing you and flail aimlessly when you’re close by. The non-humanoid enemies lack that charm. For them, targeting specific parts lacks the visceral thrill of tearing them limb from limb, but it’s still satisfying enough when they die, I guess. Oh, and Eternal Darkness is the rare game with both guns and edge weapons where the stabby things are more fun to use than the things that go boom.

I’ve waited long enough to talk about the sanity effects. It’s the thing everyone talks about with Eternal Darkness, and they usually also note how Nintendo literally has a patent on the concept of a sanity meter. As I said above, I kept my sanity deliberately low in order to experience as many things as I could. Some of the effects work, especially when they’re tied directly to the live gameplay. Hearing footsteps, a banging door, or having the camera tilt into a dutch angle? That’s the stuff that worked for me. Pictures change from serene landscapes to hellish ones. The music changes and you hear unsettling sound effects. I can’t stress enough that the sound design of Eternal Darkness remains God Tier to this day. Worry not, dear readers. Unlike most games, I played this one with the volume turned the f*ck up, which hopefully makes up for my inability to play games in the dark.

But ultimately, I found most of the effects to be more like a series of juvenile pranks that run out of steam well before the game is over. Like, I must have walked into a room turned upside-down at least a dozen times over my first playthrough, which is ALSO happening in addition to the camera tipping over in the above picture. Neat gag the first time. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, but then it kept repeating over the rest of the game and it just became a massive waste of time every time it was rerun. It got to the point where I immediately turned around and tried to open the door to end the hallucination. Same with walking into a room and being swarmed by enemies and the attack button doesn’t work, which happened, again, probably at least a dozen times. Taking a few steps only to have my head explode? Probably a half-dozen times, then add three times where the head fell off and recited poetry. Other times, whatever happened was so subtle that I never even figured out what happened. I’d walk into a room and would be making my way to the next door when the flash would happen and I’d be back at the previous door. The one off gags were much better, but they were VASTLY outnumbered by the sh*t that kept repeating.

In total, two effects REALLY “got me” and one was entirely situational because I had botched using the save/load menu a couple times, saving when I meant to load. So when the game asked me if I wanted to delete all my files, I was like “oh crap!” for about one second, until I realized it was probably a sanity effect. Had I not screwed up before, I don’t think I would have bought it. The other one that got me was walking into a room that was littered with shotgun shells. I was delighted because I knew the level had a boss fight and I figured it meant it was about to happen. But nope. After I picked up six or seven of them, the flash happened, the guy screamed out “THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING” and I found out how aerodynamic my controller was (not very). That was a mean one, but then later in the game, it repeated and I didn’t buy it because I’D ALREADY F*CKING SEEN IT!

It’s ironic that Nintendo got that patent on the meter, because the meter IS the problem, along with not having enough gags. If they wanted to prank the players with tricks like resetting back to the opening screen or faking out like you’d finished the game and the story would be continued in the sequel, fine. I admit, I laughed a few times. Like when this happened:

*I* knew it was coming. It was one of the few sanity effects I remembered from my original 2002 playthrough that I now realize I never finished (I didn’t quit because I was only 13 and terrified of the game. WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?!). But my father didn’t know it was coming, and since I was using an emulator, he bought it. And we laughed at things like having the controller disconnect or the TV shut off. I don’t know how SCARY most of these pranks are. I mean, maybe if Ashton Kutcher had showed up afterwards to tell me I’d been Punk’d, and that’s only scary because it’s still the year 2002 and Danny Masterson can’t be far behind.

But it would have worked so much better if the designers had just designated areas to have context-sensitive gags and ditched the meter altogether. Then they could have tailored specific hallucinations to specific situations and incorporated it better into the gameplay. Later games that have sanity effects figured this out and feel much more psychological and less like you’re on the gaming version of the Candid Camera. Because they didn’t create enough gags to last the entire runtime, Eternal Darkness’ pranks stop being funny and start being annoying. Very, very annoying. For that reason, the effects feel more gimmicky than inspired to me. Like almost everything else about Eternal Darkness, it’s a good idea that’s run into the ground.

For all my bitching, I found playing Eternal Darkness in 2026 to be compelling enough to see it through to the end, then go back on my vow to not play through it a second time. In fairness, I needed that second playthrough to get a feel for the differences between each of the three opening choices. If not for the fact that I was writing this review, I would never have played it a second time, let alone twice in a row. I certainly can’t say the second time was better. I was SO BORED during that second playthrough. There’s a LOT of unavoidable downtime in Eternal Darkness, and replaying the game immediately and knowing all the stretches of backtracking I had to look forward to made shudder. I found myself leaving enemies alive just so I’d have something to do on the return trip. That’s NEVER a good sign. And yet, I was constantly reminded by several highlights in each chapter why this made so many best-of lists. There’s a terrific game buried somewhere in this corpse of a once-great game.

Is Eternal Darkness a masterpiece? Maybe once upon a time. It’s one of those games where I can see how players at the end of its console cycle could cite it as one of the greatest games ever, but time has not been kind to it. Every aspect of it, from the combat to the sanity effects and even the Cthulhu Mythos homage, have since been done better. Especially in areas like writing, where I think modern gamers would actually be embarrassed for Eternal Darkness because it’s SO badly written and produced from a cinematic point of view. There’s nothing original left that belongs only to it or where it’s still among the best representations of its genre, and that means the horrible level layouts, on-the-nose writing, and repetitive sanity effects stand out much more today, in 2026, than they did back in its day. The only element that can stand side-by-side with all the similar games that have hit in the two decades since its release is the sound design, and if that hasn’t aged one bit by this point, it never will. Oh, and the variety of characters, but that takes a major hit from how bad the actual levels they occupy are.

While I think a Switch Online release will happen, I hope for the sake of Eternal Darkness it’s sooner rather than later. The more time that passes, the worse this game will get. The gameplay, level design, and script are only going to continue to decay. In the state they’re in, I think people under thirty who weren’t raised on GameCube won’t get the appeal in Eternal Darkness at all. Hell, I think that’s true of people who wanted to play it in 2002 but never got around to it. The window for Eternal Darkness winning new “best of” fandom I think is closed and now the game sits firmly in the “you really had to be there” category, at least if you expect an all-time classic. Eternal Darkness is a tragic reminder that games aren’t made to be timeless. If that happens, it’s a bonus, but they’re designed to appeal to players by the standards of when they’re released. As a 2002 game, Eternal Darkness is a tantalizing glimpse into the potential of games. As a 2026 game? Eternal Darkness was NEVER going to completely stand-up to the test of time. It’s not reasonable to expect it to do so.

BUT, I also think there’s just enough meat left on the bones for Eternal Darkness to still stand on its raw gameplay merits. The combat, dodgy as it might be, can also be very satisfying. In the rare instances where the level design shines, there’s an Indiana Jones-like vibe to the action. Of course, since there was no IP they didn’t, ahem, liberally borrow from, at one point an Indiana Jones stand-in shows up that lends itself to the whole 9-year-old’s Cthulhu fan fiction feel of the whole thing. “And then the Alien shows up only it has three heads! And then Indiana Jones shows up and he gets the Necronomicon from Army of Darkness! And then there’s a Stargate!” It’s, at most times, silly. That sucks because when it goes for scary, it usually succeeds. I wish it went for scary a lot more.

As eye-rolling as it can be, I’ll be damned if the set dressings and sanity effects aren’t worth seeing once. I mean, you’ll see them a lot more than once, but you know what I mean. And the sound design really should be studied in game design school. It’s so well done. There’s also a sincerity to Eternal Darkness. For all of its lifting of the ideas of better writers and storytellers, it never feels cynical. So no, Eternal Darkness didn’t deserve to bomb. It didn’t deserve to age as badly as it did either, but that’s just how it works. Who knows? Had this same game been on PlayStation 2, maybe Silicon Knights survives to this day and Eternal Darkness becomes a major franchise. I’m sure there has to be at least one timeline where it happened.

My unofficial theme of 2026 seems to be “set your expectations accordingly.” I don’t think Eternal Darkness holds up enough that it should still be appearing on best-of lists. I think anyone who sees it on such a list who never played it during the GameCube’s lifespan and tries it today won’t see what all the fuss is about. Well, I’m guessing that’s because most of those list makers are basing their ranking of Eternal Darkness on how the game made them feel in 2002, but it ain’t 2002 anymore. Eternal Darkness is aging so badly that it’s barely holding onto relevance. If you still expect an all-time classic, you’re going to need a time machine and temporal amnesia to forget about all the games you’ve played over the last twenty-four years. It’s probably going to let you down.

But, if you temper your expectations and instead go into Eternal Darkness expecting a relic of its time that has elements that can still be fun today, it isn’t a waste of time. I also think there’s valuable lessons, good and bad, for game designers. The only thing I care about is that I had more fun than not, and I think I had just about the bare minimum that Eternal Darkness needed to still be worth a look in 2026. This was as close as any game I’ve ever rated and I went through several stretches believing Eternal Darkness was heading for a NO! The all-time great never emerged, but I did enjoy a solid early 2000’s style action-adventure game in a horror setting that desperately needed streamlining for its level design. Set your expectations accordingly. I think Switch Online subscribers will probably get that chance in the not too distant future. But I’d much rather prefer a remake or an extensive remastering to a re-release. Pushing this out as it is in 2026? I think most people will react the way I did: just barely satisfied and also hugely let down. With as far as gaming as come, I’d rather see Eternal Darkness rise from the dead with a brand new remake, and maybe this time, it’ll find its audience.
Verdict: YES!