Eternal Darkness: The Movie The Game

Coming back to Eternal Darkness many years later, what struck me right away is that while I'd remembered its failings at being a horror game, I'd somehow overlooked its successes as a cinematic experience.

A lot of games are emulating movies. In the vast majority of cases, this is a colossal error right from inception and the actual execution only makes things worse. Making a game movie-like usually means forcing the player into trying to do some Cool Thing exactly as the developer intended with inadequate explanation, or forcing the player to sit through hours of non-interactive cinematics interrupted occasionally by thirty seconds of gameplay (This is less of an exaggeration than you might think), or otherwise means having the narrative experience intrude upon and damage the play experience, sometimes to the point one wonders why they bothered to make any gameplay at all.

In Eternal Darkness' case, it means that its cinematic moments borrow from what Hollywood has already established as Good Practice. It means that the camera is focused on what matters, that interesting and relevant imagery accompanies dialogue whose meaning can't be directly represented visually, and that people's expressions are part of the story.

And then when gameplay starts up, the game steps back on the movie thing and leans on established good practices for game design until the next time Hollywood has something useful to say.

Eternal Darkness is actually so successful at this that I find myself reflexively coming to criticisms or disappointments I would normally never even think for a video game; for example, near the start of the game Pious Augustus wanders into the center of a circle of stones, gets zapped with lightning by them, and thus teleports somewhere underground. I've felt for a while that it would have been a lot cooler for that scene to have instead done a side-on view where we watched Augustus walking along, and then one of the standing stones passed in front of the camera and completely blocked our view, and once the camera came out the other side we saw Augustus standing somewhere underground still surrounded by a circle of stones but now looking around in confusion, uncertain how exactly he got here.

This is the kind of visual cleverness I expect out of movies, and normally never go 'man, this video game would have been improved by employing this cool movie thing'.

The focus is smart. A big part of my issue with modern triple-A titles is that they often want to put in the effort to ensure you can see the sweat on people's brow so it all feels Realistic but then they can't be bothered to ensure that entities seem to act with awareness and agency. Cinematics will happen where monsters sit in the background playing idle animations and staring at nothing in particular when their attention should be on whatever is most attention-grabbing or of personal interest to them or something in that vein. The result 'looks great' by which I mean it's blatantly fake and I don't care how many polygons are crammed onto the screen, that won't make it stop looking fake.

In Eternal Darkness, even the zombies look at what's happening of interest. An early cinematic involves watching a man with a torch flail at a Mantorok Zombie to defend himself, causing it to set on fire and go stumbling away into a cloth barrier and thus set it on fire too before expiring. At the edge of the shot, two other Mantorok Zombies quite clearly stare at the burning zombie until it hits the ground and stops being interesting, at which point their attention turns to the current player character.

Oh, and even better, that brief little cinematic is also educating the player on the twin facts that some enemies can be set on fire with a torch and that cloth barriers can be burned away to open new paths using a torch. So not only is it a nice little moment as a cinematic but it's very efficiently delivering important gameplay information with not a word of dialogue!

Eternal Darkness may have been a bit lacking when it came to the horror/terror end of things, but I really really liked it anyway and it's quite interesting figuring out why I did given the 'core point' was so meh.

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