10 Popular Video Game Mechanics The Industry ABANDONED

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem immortalised itself in the annals of gaming history by popularising the "sanity meter" mechanic.

That is, the player must manage the protagonist's sanity throughout the story, and if they're spotted by enemies enough, they'll begin to suffer reality-warping hallucinations.

These can range from the walls leaking blood to the protagonist suddenly dropping dead, or the game even pretending to reset the GameCube console.

It was a brilliantly executed mechanic, enough that Nintendo even patented the particulars of it back in 2005.

While games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent have employed similar systems where players have to manage their character's sanity or risk losing grip of reality, it's been used surprisingly sparingly in the horror genre despite the obvious potential for it to seriously mess with players' heads.

Even if some developers have exercised caution due to Nintendo's patent, it expired back in November 2021, seemingly leaving the door wide open for any and everybody to now do as they wish with it.

That so few developers have taken the miniscule risk of running afoul of Nintendo's lawyers over the last two decades, though, suggests we're probably not getting a sudden influx of games with mind-bending sanity mechanics because, for some reason, the interest isn't there.