10 Video Games Designed To Totally Screw With You

6. Eternal Darkness Turns You Insane

Psycho Mantis metal gear solid
Silicon Knights

One of the core mechanics of Nintendo’s underrated Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is that whatever happens, don’t go insane. Sounds easy, but unless you’re absolutely never going to play this game (the easiest way to stay sane), then you’re going to have to fight against the game's sanity effects.

The changes are subtle at first, but begin seeping into both your character actions and cunning on-screen effects.

Maybe you’ll ‘die’. Maybe you’ll appear to shrink. Maybe your entire inventory has disappeared and your character can’t move because the controller isn’t connected. Whatever’s going on, confusion is the order of the day. The game will even skew the camera angles and decrease the volume because apparently insanity is a lot like accidentally sitting on a remote control.

What’s worse is when the game starts messing with your screen. Much like Metal Gear’s Psycho Mantis, Eternal Darkness can seemingly turn your TV off, crash the game or tell you that you’ve deleted all your save files. Now that really is scary!

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Contributor

Word-wrangler and video gamer on the rocks. Once completed the original Resident Evil in 1 hour 4 minutes. Prefers Irish coffee over any other kind. Former movie trailer writer, now rehabilitated. Wrote the viral videos for the movie Watchmen. Likes sarcasm, cynicism, smoking and you.