Although I own both this and Resident Evil, I have yet to play either one. I have an over-active imagination as it is and I get creeped out easily. I always planned on playing these games in the winter when I'm laid off from rangering, but now I live in a little cottage in the boonies with coyotes that make blood-curdling noises at random intervals in the field out back after dark. Oh, well. I'll get to them eventually. I do have a point-and-click horror game for the DS called Theresia that is pretty good. I ought to finish it one of these days so I find out how the story ends...
GLaD 1: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
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 On 03/01/2013 at 07:17 PM by Super Step See More From This User » |
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So as some of you know, I'm obsessed with the number three. That's why each blog this third month of 2013, in addition to tying in at least one game to whatever I'm discussing for GLaD (Game bLog a Day, abbreviation inspired/made by Yargz, general concept by me so that I actually force myself to talk about games for once, you may have seen Sneenlantern's entry today), I'll also be making a story out of the first three images that pop up on bing.com's "trending search images." At least, at 12:30am CT when I saved the draft for this anyway, now it looks like Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and an airplane are top searches ... which, considering they're both musicians, and there's a plane, sounds like a bad omen.
Today, the top three trending hits were Rachel McAdams, animal migration, and Bobby Brown. I don't know about you, but I'm already laughing more at the possibilities than any Mad Libz story I could come up with, so I'll leave a story involving those three things to your imagination for this blog.
Onto our Game of the Day, which I chose in honor of talking about my black cat Clinger for my first BaD (blog-a-day) entry on 1up this year as well. What the hell does that have to do with anything? He's dark, and that term is in this game's title. I refuse to think hard about these things.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is the first survival-horror game I ever played on a console, and maybe in general, as I only played arcade shooter House of the Dead before that, if it wasn't my turn to bowl right at that moment. It might be the only horror game I've ever played.
My brother had a Playstation and Playstation 2, so I knew about Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but I was too young when they first came out, and usually uninterested by later installments, save for RE: 4 on Gamecube, which I have yet to play, and a Silent Hill 3 demo on an OPM disc I found pretty creepy.
From memory, since I only rented Eternal Darkness, the basic plot involves your character, a female protagonist with a shotgun I think, finding a book that either is, or is a rip-off of, the Necronomicon, then traveling through time to different creepy locales, controlling a different character in each.
"Now where's that saw? Bond, where'd that crazy Scottish uncle of yours go with my damn saw?"
It looks like shit in every screen shot I've found, but at the time it was creepy as hell, particularly a segment that took place mostly in an old house, where I got creeped out just walking around; and finding dead people in a pool of blood in a bathtub, but also walking around.
Let me tell you a bit about myself when it comes to horror: the psychological is far more effective than the physical, because insanity can feel a lot less controllable than a guy chasing you with an object, which doesn't scare me, so much as make the Benny Hill theme play in my head every time I watch the ending to The Shining, and Jack Nickelson has to go through that fun and wacky maze!
Every time I see some guy with a chainsaw, or axe, or a jump scare, I just think "this would be shorter if one of you just shot the asshole, I don't care if he was your husband, it's pretty obvious he's a zombie now." But what has always scared the shit out of me is the cerebral bits of The Shining (blood in elevator, tricycle twins, etc.) and those black and white images from The Ring, because little or nothing is explained, it's just chilling imagery, and the mystery implicates insanity.
Eternal Darkness understood this and created various "sanity effects" where your character would think he was trapped in a cage, despite walking around in reality, or the world would warp around you, or, in true "let's take that Psycho Mantis bit from Metal Gear Solid, and implement it in a way that will freak players the hell out through pissing them the fuck off" fashion, this:
Notice that the only two options are to delete all your saves or continue without saving; this is not a menu you ask to have pop up, it does on its own if your sanity meter gets low, and there's one that just says it's erasing your memory card without any input from you (thought it tells you there was).
Having nothing to compare it to really, I can't say if this is better than other survival horror games, but it did understand that true horror is cerebral, and knew to mess with the player's mind, as opposed to throwing out jump scares. Why the hell it was a Gamecube exclusive, I'll never know, but I'm glad it was, and that I got to experience it. Even if it did force me to rage quit, and its graphics haven't aged well according to videos and images I found, at least it knew that breaking the mind is far more frightening than breaking the body.
What's your favorite horror game, and what scares you?
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