10 Video Games Inspired By H.P. Lovecraft

The first M-rated title Nintendo ever directly published, Silicon Knights’ Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was released for the GameCube in 2002 and stands as the quintessential horror title for the console. Telling the tale of an epic generation-spanning quest to foil the plot of a Cthulhu-esque cult, players will need to keep the lights on to get through this one.

The game’s most memorable mechanic was by far its sanity feature. A staple of many Lovecraft-related pieces of media, encountering enemies in Eternal Darkness would drop the player character’s sanity which would, in turn, cause the game to pull a bunch of eerie, fourth wall-breaking tricks.

As sanity is relinquished, the game will pretend to change the volume, television channel, and in-game settings on its own in a bid to make the player question their own perceptions. Though most of these duplicitous tactics are outdated thanks to the fact that few play games on analogue TVs anymore, it remains an awesome concept.

Of course, when sanity gets low enough, the game will act like the save file was corrupted, which could still cause a few unwitting, anguished gamers to pull their hair out.