Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

Some feel that Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is one of the GameCube's best games, an underappreciated gem of the survival-horror genre, with one of the most interesting gimmicks in gaming history. I will agree with the latter two statements, but overall I don't feel this is in the must-play tier of games from GameCube's library. It was fun, but had some flaws as well. Still though, the game bombed despite its very intriguing premise and critical acclaim which has left many fans clamoring for some kind of sequel. If Eternal Darkness 2 came out I'd probably play it. The reason why is because Eternal Darkness has such a fantastic gimmick- the sanity meter. Basically along with health and magic meters found in all sorts of games, you also have sanity. Every time you run into an enemy you lose some, but if you kill him in a specific way you can recover your lost sanity. But if you start to lose, say, a quarter of your sanity bar, the game will start to get a bit uncomfortable. The camera starts to tilt, the music gets off-key, maybe you hear someone laughing at you in the background. Lose some more sanity and you'll start to hallucinate- phantom knocks on doors, phones will ring, statues will move, stuff like that. Fall to near-empty on sanity and the game will just flat out shit all over the idea of the fourth wall. The game will suddenly turn monochrome. You see the volume get turned down and your save file deleted. My personal favorite, after a big moment early on in the game, was a fake-out ending/sequel advertisement- "The darkness has been destroyed for now... but see what happens next in Eternal Darkness 2: Sanity's Redemption." Finally falling to empty will not only have all of these effects, but hurt your health bar as well. Seriously, the first few hours of this game when you can't really help what level sanity you're at can be seriously scary and fun, constantly making you think you accidentally hit your remote. The thing is, sanity is not the only thing in this game. The rest of the game consists of basically a time-traveling Resident Evil knock-off where you live through the experiences a dozen people have had over the course of history with a mysterious book, the Tome of Eternal Darkness. There's more of a focus on melee combat, and I rarely used a gun. There's also magic spells, which both help and hurt the game. They're actually set up in an interesting way, and it's pretty fun to experiment and discover new spells. Your magic regenerates as you move, and this leads to a downside- once you learn spells that can recover health and sanity, I found myself running in circles for a few minutes after tough battles just trying to get back to full health. It might have helped if magic regenerated faster later in the game. Also, once you discover the recover sanity spell, there's really no reason to ever hallucinate again in the game. I think a few segments where you can't access your sanity recovery spell would have added a lot of tension later in the game. Still though, these seem like easy fixes that could make this game a must-play. Rumor has it a sequel is being worked on for Wii U, so we'll see what the future brings.