Eternal Darkness is intelligent, puzzling, has enough action to satiate you, and will make your nerves stand on end.
As far as gameplay, Eternal Darkness takes the gamer to new heights not yet tested, and the results prove productive. Eternal Darkness has a body part targeting system in which you use to target a certain body part of an enemy such as the head, or the main body, or the arms, or different in some cases. This will require some thinking on the gamer's part, as he will use this to his advantage to target weak points on the enemy he is currently engaged with. This is not just some run-of-the-mill hack & slash game. Eternal Darkness also introduces spells in which one would think to be just a gimmick but all the spells prove useful in their own way and is certainly in no way a gimmick. There is also a gauge that the character has which is called the Sanity gauge. When the Sanity gauge lowers, the game itself begins to confuse you in many different ways. At times you see blood just dripping off walls, you begin to hallucinate and see things that are not really there, the sound may just go off, everything just turns black & white, there are many times where you will just be bewildered and confounded for a period of time, then kick yourself later.
The graphics are very well done in Eternal Darkness. Unlike most games where the graphics deteriorate, Eternal Darkness’ graphics just get better and better. The changes you will notice are very subtle, but altogether are actually noticeable. There will be times when you notice that when you have revisited a location in the future, that there may have been lights put where candles once were, or maybe a door has a more modern look, etc.
The sound in Eternal Darkness is great! The voice acting was done very well and some may be able to recognize a voice or two from certain other games (e.g. MGS). The cutscenes are the only parts with voice acting, however. The game has quite a bit of reading when examining things and as I stated on the Review Deck, it is quite verbose and there may be quite a few words that will go over the gamer (Myself included). The sounds of the swords slashing through a zombie, a zombie's groan, faint whispering coming from the walls, it all comes together very nicely.
The replay value for Eternal Darkness may or may not be for you, bu tis certainly where the game lacks most. Eternal Darkness’ main point for replaying the game would be for the different endings you can cquire and in my case, I love multiple endings. Each one of the first three multiple endings' changes are very subtle but the last one is quite different indeed. I shan't spoil it for you however. But multiple endings are really what intrigue me greatly in games. But to be honest, this is usually not enough for most people, but is still a sufficient effort for some. Overall Eternal Darkness is just a great game, very fun, marvelously told story, innovative and sadly overlooked by so many due by very little to no publicity to whatsoever. Need a great horror game for you GCN? It's a must-have. Need a game in general for your GCN? It's still a must-have.