It just doesn’t get any better than this. After Silicon Knights, once a Nintendo second party, left the company, it looked like we’d never see a sequel to the hallucinating masterpiece, Eternal Darkness. But after word from Director Denis Dyack’s Too Human blog, it looks like there will be a follow-up after all, it’s just pinning him down as to when it will come out that’s the problem.
With the planned Too Human franchise on the Xbox 360 looking to be a trilogy, a second coming of the Darkness saga could be years off into the future. And even though I haven’t even played Too Human yet, don’t hate me for saying this, but I wouldn’t mind if Too Human went the way of the Shenmue or the Xenosaga (both planned series’ that ended prematurely when people weren’t buy them) if it meant I would get another Eternal Darkness sometime in the near future.
For those who didn’t play the original on the Gamecube (and there seem to be a lot of you as it didn’t sell all that well), Eternal Darkness is the greatest survival horror game ever made. Period.
Much scarier than Silent Hill, and much more fun to play than Resident Evil 4, what made Eternal Darkness such a magnificent play was its looping storylines that overlapped from one level to the next. Told in chapters, the game’s engrossing plotline of evil throughout the years, spanned millenniums and took you from character to character, each wrestling with the darkness in their separate generation. But it’s probably best known for its sanity effects, which caused more than just one person to scream at their screen when they were fooled that all of their saves had been erased.
Seeing too many monsters all at once would start depleting your sanity meter, and the game would start flipping out on you. My favorite moment was when I started hearing footsteps on the floor above me only to find out that nobody was there at all when I reached the top flight. It is horrifying moments like these that make me believe in the power of the genre again.
