[This article originally appeared on the Destructoid Community Blogs]
Having already written about one of the scariest movies from my childhood, Dougal & The Blue Cat, I thought I would take the opportunity, at the turn of midnight on Halloween 2011, to also write about one of the scariest video games ever made and what makes it so damn terrifying. Eternal Darkness begins with a
monologue about how little we are aware of the consequences of our
decisions. The narrator, Edward Roivas (recently deceased), might as
well be passing a more specific judgment on game design rather than
humanity in general. Games rarely force players to deal with
consequences in any meaningful way, no matter how elaborate the action.
In fairness, it should be pointed out that no narrative medium explores
consequences in any great depth – action heroes don't have to do gaol
sentences for all the death and destruction they were responsible for –
unless it can be tied into the central plotline somehow. But because
gaming stories are by necessity padded out more than those of books and
film, where the users' experience of time is controlled by the author
rather than themselves, they are prone to including a greater number of
throwaway events - boss battles, isolated action sequences - that are
forgotten the instant they're over.
Originating on the N64, the game is unique in many ways, but arguably
none moreso than the importance it places on making players feel the
consequences of their actions. This is a factor of the game that goes
largely overlooked, even by those lauding it and its myriad qualities.
The sanity effects are brought up most often, referring to instances
when the player's character has tussled with too many monsters without
respite and apparently starts to lose their mind, resulting in such
meta-horror as the player being shown a message on-screen that their
controller has been unplugged, or their save file is being deleted when
it's supposed to be saving. Yet these broad strokes are more amusing
than terrifying, even irritating after recurring once too often. They're
inventive for sure, but rely too much on players being scared as
players outside the game than as the character in the midst of the
narrative. There are a handful which work well – the hammering on doors
as you approach never fails to be a little unnerving – but the likely
truth is that they're remembered more as being one of the game's most
distinctive features, even if its more subtle tricks are far more
effective.
Having put some playtime into the game in anticipation of this
article, the emphasis on making players live out the consequences of
their actions seems to me the real reason behind its success as a horror
game. It's easy to roll your eyes at statements that building strong
characters is key to drawing the most powerful emotional reactions out
of players or viewers, but finding that discernable streak of
individuality in the person through whom you'll be experiencing the
story does make you feel like you know them and have a stake in their
future. No-one has ever been scared in a Legend of Zelda game
because Link is designed to be anonymous. This approach has its benefits
in blurring the line between the gamer and their avatar's actions
on-screen, but makes it far more difficult for the developer to draw
tension or fear without that empathetic connection.
Eternal Darkness has a (relatively) enormous list of
playable characters occurring throughout various points in history. The
slightly hokey framing for this is that Alex Roivas, the game's official
protagonist, discovers a secret office in her murdered grandfather's
mansion where he was studying the Tome of Eternal Darkness, a collection
of knowledge accumulated by damned individuals throughout human
history. As Alex reads their stories, we flashback with her.
In visual design alone, these characters are so far removed from the
traditional gaming heroes - a Roman centurion, an 18th century
nobleman, a monk - that they immediately feel more real by
differentiation from what we're used to. Developers Silicon Knights
don't make these differences purely aesthetic: each character has a
health and sanity bar unique to them (among other invisible attributes,
like running speed and posture), which reflects the physical strength of
their appearance and the mental strength of someone in their situation.
The centurion and the fireman, for example, are more resilient to
losing sanity than a monk or Cambodian dancer.
Despite the clunky
animation no doubt leftover from the game's early days on the N64, even
the characters' finishing moves seem strangely appropriate to each of
them. Even though we interact with them no differently than we do any
number of identikit game protagonists elsewhere, it's in these fine
details that the player is first drawn into a world rich enough for the
fantasy, no matter how outlandish, to attain that all important grip of
credibility on our minds.
With distinctive characters anchoring the drama and its world,
Silicon Knights proceed to relentlessly punish players for their
sympathies. After giving you people to care about, the game starts
destroying them in front of your eyes, all while you're in control of
them and still powerless to change their fate no matter how many spells
you cast or monsters you defeat. Since we believe in these characters
and want to see them survive, this gives the world a real sense of
danger and foreboding. In almost any other game, forcing the player into
these cycles of predestined defeat would be blasphemous to the accepted
rules of design – players get their kicks from feeling like champions,
after all.
Yet by spanning the narrative across history, Silicon Knights makes
every small victory along the path feel that much more important and
rewarding. Discovering a new spell adds it to the Tome, which may not be
enough to save the character presently in your control, but will make
the journey easier for whomever is next in line to pick it up. Among a
cast of vulnerable, human individuals facing a supernatural threat of
divine magnitude, these tiny successes escalate until, when the time
comes for Alex Roivas to make her stand, she's empowered enough to do
so.
It's this sense of collaborative effort, enduring terrible suffering
so that humanity will one day be able to stand its ground when the
threat rises to the surface, that gives the game its emotional weight.
Finding the corpse of a character who had been at your control in a past
period in history becomes an unsettling reminder both of your previous
failure as a player but also the reasons you choose to persist in the
long struggle. This is a game with a real sense of passing time, where
the consequences of tiny struggles can be felt echoing thousands of
years into future where, as Alex continues to turn the pages of the Tome
in her dead grandfather's office, the monsters beneath the surface are
closing in on the present day.
This is a story where the efforts of the weakest person can have an
impact felt far deeper and longer than any number of heavily-armed space
marines. When the game talks about destiny, it's not just empty
self-aggrandising. Edward Roivas is damning of humanity for choosing to
remain ignorant of the consequences of its decisions. Enlightening us
might well be Eternal Darkness' most terrifying trick.
OTHER ARTICLES YOU MAY ENJOY
