Eternal Darkness is a criminally underrated survival-horror game for the Nintendo Gamecube. As you might have guessed from the game's title, the game plays with the concept of sanity and insanity, with many of the mechanics intended to make the player feel as if they were approaching insanity themselves. Each character has a health bar but also the more important sanity bar, when you're discovered by a monster, the sanity bar drops. When a player's sanity bar falls too low, strange events begin to occur not only within the game, but also in 'reality' itself. There are several insanity effects which break the fourth wall, some of which are fairly tame, while others are completely terrifying. A few examples mess with the TV display, blackening the screen as if the TV was turned off, making insects appear, or even lowering the in-game volume with a big green volume bar which mimics real on-screen TV settings. Occasionally, a player will attempt to save his game and be met with a prompt asking 'Would you like to delete all your saved files', with the answers being 'yes, or continue without saving', while neither answer causes any actual data to be deleted. The game could even be as cruel to give you a blue screen of death as if Windows had just crashed, it could falsely tell your controller needs to be plugged in, or even fakely congratulate you on finishing the demo. The sheer amount of different, innovative ways Eternal Darkness could mess with a player has never been met. The wall breaks are still fairly unexpected as Eternal Darkness is still quite an obscure game, due to it being an early third-party title on the Gamecube. Eternal Darkness may have broken the fourth wall countless times, but each time created a much more terrifying, atmospheric and gripping experience.
Sam is an experienced Film, Gaming and Wrestling writer, critic and journalist who was written for a vast number of different entertainment websites. Follow him on twitter at @Sams_Reel_Views.
