10 More Underrated Video Games Way Ahead Of Their Time
8. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Years and years before games like Undertale peeled back the screen to thoroughly mess with the player's mind, there was Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - a 2002 psychological horror that truly broke new ground for video games.
The game's big hook was the abundance of "sanity effects" - reality-warping illusions intended to throw the player off balance and keep them thoroughly unnerved.
Some of the more boundary-pushing effects included the screen going black, the GameCube startup screen suddenly appearing out of nowhere, a fake volume bar showing up on screen, and the game pretending to delete your save file.
Players had never experienced anything this playfully intrusive, and though the game received rave reviews from critics, it flopped commercially.
Because Eternal Darkness was a GameCube exclusive and remains "trapped" on that console, it's never been played or embraced by the wider gamer contingent, no matter that it did meta before anyone even knew what that word meant.
Rarely has any horror game so brilliantly toyed with the player's firmly cemented notion of reality, and releasing 20 years ago as it did, it was massively ahead of the curve.