Above managing your health and inventory in Eternal Darkness, you're also tasked with carefully monitoring a sanity meter that slowly depletes when coming into contact with the game's lurking monsters and ghouls. Let this meter sink too low and the game starts freaking out, throwing a bunch of fake-outs at you when you least expect it. Going into a new room with a low sanity meter was - and still is - nerve-wracking. Is your character going to spontaneously explode? Be eaten by zombies? Will bugs start crawling out the screen? Will it force you to delete your saved games? Yeah, you haven't felt true terror until you've been manipulated into thinking you've deleted all the progress on the really good game you're playing. You're always returned to the previous room after the effects of a depleted sanity bar wear off, but the tension that arose from not knowing if something was happening because of the empty bar or because of a glitch or bug in the system was always the scariest part of Eternal Darkness. How could any developer do this? A gamer's save progress is just off-limits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXcajQnasc
