Eternal Darkness

Since spring break, I have played a game (not finished yet...) which my suitemate has been badgering me to play since last year: Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem. The basic premise of the game is simple enough: after the mysterious death of her grandfather, a young (naturally attractive and blond...) female protagonist returns to her family home in Rhode Island to unpack the circumstances surrounding his death. Lovecraftian in mood and heavily influenced by Gothic literature (gameplay begins with an Edgar Allen Poe quote), ED at first seems like nothing more than a standard puzzle-solving adventure game where you happen to encounter supernatural opponents to destroy. You take turns alternately playing (3rd person perspective) many of the historical figures who play a role in the century-sprawling narrative of the story surrounding the return of evil unknowable forces to our world.

However, the interesting thing about the game for me is not so much the gameplay or the narrative, though the narrative is particularly engaging and almost unrelentingly dark. Rather, it is the concept in the game design of 'sanity' as an attribute. Gamers will be familiar with health, mana, maybe even ammunition or stamina bars which deplete with use in many games, but this is the first game I have ever known to contain a sanity meter representing with a green-colored bar just how badly the character's interactions with the supernatural have affected his or her ability to perceive the world. You start with a full bar of sanity and every time you encounter a monster, your sanity depletes, but you may recover it by performing a special finishing move on a monster after you have dispatched it.

So what does the bar do and why is it interesting? When your sanity gets too low, the first thing you notice happening is a shift in the orientation of the camera, similar to cinematic reframing, that moves your view on the gamic world ever more skewed and asymmetrical. The actual game camera gets less and less coherent, and the angles shift askew and too close to your character. The camera already resists any sort of omniscience, dependent as it is on moving your character to specific locations before shifting the view. This makes for a deliberately antagonistic gameplay experience mitigated only by your ability to 'heal' your sanity meter later in the game, a facet which, though narratively cohesive, seems almost like cheating. It wouldn't even be fun to do but for the gravity and sheer 'what the fuck value' of the hallucinations your character starts to experience when your sanity almost depletes.

WARNING SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!

So here is the interesting part: when your sanity gets really low, your character starts having hallucinations represented in-game by programming designed specifically to break the fourth wall and mess with the player's head. For example, your character will walk into a room with low sanity, and at this point you will probably already feel a little uneasy with the skewed camera and creepy music and graphics, and then all of a sudden, all of your limbs will start falling off one by one, slowly enough for you to start freaking out before the screen flashes white and you reappear back in the room you just left, whole and in exactly the same position you were in before.

As you all are probably aware of, I am really interested in subjectivity, and particularly interested in how video games reinforce a certain kind of subjectivity in gamers. Eternal Darkness seems like it tries to break this. It deliberately antagonizes the character in a way that is non-competitive. That is, there is nothing you can do plot or goal-wise to prevent these hallucinations or beat them, they simply happen and you endure them. After you gain the ability to heal your sanity, a very curious conflict arises in the gamer: do you keep your sanity low and risk freaking out, or do you secretly enjoy the hallucinations?

I find this to be a phenomenally interesting question, and it raises many other thoughts on subjectivity: does a game have to reinforce an ideology of teleology to be successful? How does this kind of antagonism function in games as opposed to old media like film and the novel? If in fact hallucinations affect your gameplay, how does that construe your subjectivity and aim in the game differently than in other games which would superficially appear to be similar puzzle-solving types? How would any of the theorists we have studied so far respond to this?

One last hallucination (this one really freaked me out): I navigated to the menu screen to save my game. I pressed the save game button only to see a pop-up declaring 'deleting all save games' followed by a progress bar which moved for a brief few seconds that felt like an eternity. Afterwards, the game flashed me the message 'all saved games deleted' before flashing back to my character in the room I had been in previously, leaving me standing in a dark room somewhat hyperventilating over the perceived loss of nearly 10 hours of time.

The developers Silicon Knights are coming out with a new game soon called Too Human based on Norse mythology. I'll be the first in line at GameSpot.