Written By Shaun McCracken

Eternal Darkness has this kind of situation. Most people who see it and play it for about 5 minutes would easily disregard this as a Resident Evil clone. But there are so many things different about it that it has less to do with Resident Evil and has only a little in common with Silent Hill, that it ends up being a completely different experience from the previous said games. Eternal Darkness remedies what was wrong with the Resident Evil series (which it's not even a part of) and at the same time brings something new to the plate. The game spans across almost 2000 years, and allows you to become different people who each have their own destiny in their time. And all of these people are connected to the present day character, Alex Rovias, who is investigating her recently deceased realtive's mansion. As she finds "chapters" into the past, she discovers dark secrets about her bloodline, as well as the others connected to the "Tome Of Darkness". The "Tome Of Darkness" is a book fashioned from bones and skin, and contains spells called "magick" that protect you, show you hidden objects and more.

Eternal Darkness's game play is not as linear as you think it would be. The first couple of chapters are pretty sequential, but then I found two chapters, and I had a choice of picking either one. While the stages follow a certain path, it could be easy to miss some things along the way. There's a lot to discover and look at in this game. The depth of exploration is not like Metroid Prime's, but it far exceeds what Resident Evil has thrown. The game play also has a twist. In addition to your health and magick meter, you have a "sanity" meter as well. This is Eternal Darknesses key element which can totally shift game play to a whole other direction. The more your sanity meter drops, the stranger the surroundings become. The character starts to see and hear things that aren't there, and this will affect the player as well. Silicon Knights had a lot of tricks up it's sleeve when it came to the sanity meter. It could be something as funny as turning everything upside down when you enter a room or shrinking you down, or something as drastic as making it look like your game just turned off or exploding your body parts when you try to use certain magicks. The first strange sanity effect I noticed ever was when bugs started crawling on screen, which almost looked like I really did have bugs on my TV. There's probably many more strange things that go on than I know. But it's best to keep your sanity high by finishing off every enemy and replenishing it by magick, when possible. But the sanity feature is not a gimmick, it really does shape, mold, and intensify game play.

Eternal Darkness showcases what the Gamecube can do in terms of graphics. ED can easily be mistaken for an X-Box game with it's high-resolution textures, excellent lighting, bump-mapping and so much more. Plus, the game is very moody and atmospheric. This is a horror game done right, and there hasn't been one this good since Silent Hill. The game, best of all, is NOT pre-rendered like Resident Evil. Everything is in real-time, and there is a camera that does follow the action. And surprisingly, the camera is not problematic! Almost every time, the camera provides the best possible view. The character models, while look pretty good, don't seem realistic. You can tell they look like video game characters. The GCN remake Resident Evil and Silent Hill 2 hand more human-like models than what is here. It totally doesn't kill the gameplay, but it does knock a point or two when it comes to a realistic experience.

The sound is excellent. Just like Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness has the right cues to scare the crap out of you, and has the right environmental sound for the situation. And best of all, it's in Dolby Pro Logic II, for those who have a sound system that supports this. But even on a normal stereo, ED begs you to turn this one up. The voice acting, surprise surprise, is a lot better than Resident Evil. Here, professional actors that have come from other games (I think Soul Reaver was one of them) do the job, and they did it well.

Finally, we hit the controls. A lot of "survival horror" games were never able to get this right. Silent Hill 2 came close, but at times that still felt a little clunky. But ED is not "survival horror". It's an adventure game, and the controls need to reflect that. Luckily, it does. Control is so much smoother then RE's and so much easier as well. Here, I don't think you even need to hold another button to attack, you use the A button. The Control Pad can hold up to four magicks that you create for easy execution. A game like this demands precision control, and Silicon Knights game it to you.

Eternal Darkness comes as a surprise in a couple of ways. For one, it's a great horror game that brings a whole lot of new things to the table and changes the way horror games are made. Second, It's published by Nintendo and it's a mature-rated game. For those whoever thought of Nintendo as a kid-oriented systems really needs to re-think their position after playing this game. Nintendo and Silicon Knights have teamed together to provide gamers with something they won't forget, and remembers the importance of quality over quantity. If you love horror, suspense or the macabre, you owe it to yourself to pick up Eternal Darkness.