10 Overlooked Video Games That Were WAY Ahead Of Their Time

2. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

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Silicon Knights

Horror games are often destined for cult status, and few are cultier than Silicon Knights' masterpiece, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

This is the closest that any horror game has ever come to truly adapting the works of Lovecraft with any kind of grace. And it does that by not only messing with the characters' sanity, but going after the players' grip on reality as well.

Eternal Darkness' main gimmick is the Sanity meter, a mainstay of Lovecraftian RPG's like Call of Cthulhu. But Eternal Darkness' take on its effects on gameplay is the most clever the mechanic has ever been utilized. See, if the meter goes down far enough, your character doesn't just start acting crazy, the game itself starts to lose its sh%t. Textures will pop at random, the screen goes all flickery, and then it begins playing...tricks on you. Such as telling you that your save file has been deleted, or turning the volume all the way down. This, obviously, provides all the more incentive to undo the damage to your Sanity Meter, before it gets even worse.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is the game to play if you just want to feel like you're losing your mind.

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John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?