Eternal Darkness: The Greatest Lovecraft Game Nobody Played
This video has been sponsored by Surfshark (ominous music) There are things much, much worse than fear. The sensation of “being afraid,” in most cases, is an emotion that can come as quickly as it goes, especially when we’re talking about video games. A loud sound, a brief flash of something startling, and BANG! -you’ve got a powerful moment that is quickly over and done with, but can nevertheless stick in the player’s head for a long while.
But is this kind of horror in games actually SCARY? It is surprising, absolutely. Startling... memorable, without a doubt. (creepy droning) There’s a whole sub-genre of internet reaction videos for this because of how much fun it is to watch someone startle themselves silly. - AM I DEAD?! - But as anyone who has endured one jumpscare too many, over their time, will tell you, the overuse of this “loud-and-in-your-face approach can become quite exhausting, very quickly After a few too many abrupt, no-context jumpscares, you’ll suddenly find that you’re no longer scared. You’re... annoyed. (shrill screaming) Or even worse, the cardinal sin in gaming, you’re BORED.
And that’s because “fear” is really just a temporary, fleeting emotion. It’s a situational reaction to something happening TO you, a response to environmental stimulus: Here one moment, and then gone the next. Fear, then, is an ultimately ephemeral thing: Easy to summon, but hard to capture in a bottle.
And yet there is something even greater and more potent than fear, something that so many games have tried and failed to invoke. TERROR: That overwhelming feeling of an ominous and existential threat, lingering just on the periphery of your awareness. It’s the ever-creeping certainty that you are not safe, that hope is an impossibility, and that it’s merely a matter of time until you tire, slip up, and fall prey to the all-consuming dread that haunts your fever-dreams. This is no mere flash-in-the-pan jumpscare. This is true COSMIC TERROR.
If you were to set things up like one of those dopey and indecipherable “political alignment charts, “Cosmic Terror” would reside at the extreme opposite of Humanism. To the Cosmic Terror devotee, humanity isn’t just insignificant; we are beneath contempt. We are totally and completely at the mercy of vast eldritch entities.
Monstrous mega-deities for whom the span of a human life is but a brief flash in the boundless and unknowable procession of the cosmos. In other words, we’re all damned and doomed, and attempting to struggle against this grim fate will only bring us to an even more horrific and unfortunate end. And no writer or creative mind has done more to define the contours of this mythology than America’s probably most famous Rhode Islander, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The works of HP Lovecraft have become extremely popular in recent fiction across all forms of media. Every other movie, game, or TV show over the last half decade seems in some way or another to be inspired by the Lovecraft mythos. (shrieking) But in this moment of near-total Lovecraftian ubiquity, it’s easy to forget that not even 20 years ago, Lovecraft’s most famous works, like The Shadow Over Innsmouth or At the Mountains of Madness, were considered cult-obscure relics.
Lovecraft himself made barely any money from his writing while he was alive, and died broke and near-penniless. And more than two decades ago, one legendary game studio took inspiration from the works of HP Lovecraft and worked to translate his tales of eldritch horror to the modern living room TVs of gamers everywhere. That studio was the inimitable Silicon Knights, creators of the classic action-RPG Blood Omen, which I’ve covered on this channel before.
Now, up until this point in the late-90s-early-2000s, there really only had been a handful of high-profile games that had dabbled in Lovecraftian fiction. Quake is the title that many will point to first as a Lovecraft-adjacent title from this era, but there were other games where the inspiration was even more direct and apparrent, like the survival horror progenitor Alone in the Dark, or the classic point-and-click adventure Shadow of the Comet. Which I've also covered on this channel. But while developing their as-yet-untitled project for the Nintendo 64 in the late 90s, the team at Silicon Knights fixed their gaze upon even greater ambitions.
By harnessing the power of next- generation console hardware, they could expand on the work laid down by these classics, and create a cinematic horror game with the mythological scope of HP Lovecraft and the poetic flair of Edgar Allen Poe. And so the labor of these Silicon- Knights-of-the-Round gave us the game that many consider to be THE crowning achievement by this massively underrated studio, and one of the finest survival horror tiles ever conceived: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which was released in 2002 on the Nintendo Gamecube. This game would have the dubious honor of being the first-ever M-rated title published by the notoriously “family-friendly” Nintendo. And this little bit of trivia is also perhaps the LEAST interesting thing about this game, and that’s saying something! - [Narrator] Nintendo - Eternal Darkness was a game with tremendous ambitions: Literary, cinematic, AND ludic.
This was a title that set a new high mark for home consoles, and truly pushed the boundaries of cinematic presentation in games. It was also an early contender in the “Games Are Art, Actually” debate, nearly a decade before Roger Ebert muddied the waters with his terriblest of takes. But even more impressive is how confidently and competently Eternal Darkness DELIVERED on all of these ambitions. The result is, beyond a shadow of a doubt over Innsmouth, one of the greatest and most celebrated survival horror game experiences ever released. Eternal Darkness is an incredible game. An incredible game that, sadly, next to nobody actually played.
(Monsters of the Week title song playing) Alright, before we go on, a thank you to Surfshark VPN who sponsored the making of this video! I assume you do know what a VPN is, right? Basically it’s when you route your internet activity via a server somewhere else in the world. It’s like masquerading your online activity and data, so to speak. This might not protect you from the all-seeing eyes of The Eldritch Old Gods, but it’ll efficiently shield your traffic from those that spy on you and use your activity against you like your Internet Service Provider, Advertisers and The Government. Surfshark makes this process incredibly simple with their easy-to-use app that tunnels your traffic with 256-bit end-to-end encryption via servers of your choice in over 60 different countries across the globe, that run exclusively on RAM memory so no data ever gets stored. And it’s not just for protection. Like, you might not know this but I’m actually a somewhat avid Tennis-watcher; yep, Ragnar likes the sportsball; the cat is out of the sack, and whenever there’s a grand slam event like Wimbledon, it gets virtually impossible for me to live stream it from where I’m at due to annoying legal crap.
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It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee; so if it's not for you, just drop out any time. So, thanks a lot again, and now, I hope you enjoy the rest of the video! (foreboding music) Fresh off of the success of Blood Omen, the crew at Silicon Knights had big plans. They wanted to take what they’d learned from Blood Omen and bring their fantastical visions to life with truly cinematic presentation, via the latest and greatest advances in polygonal 3D rendering. Eternal Darkness began development as an N64 title, but it soon became clear that only the forthcoming generation of systems- -meaning the PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube generation- -had the raw horsepower the studio needed to truly realize their vision. Sure, nowadays you can emulate the N64 and the Gamecube on a wide range of PCs, or heck, even your phone. But it’s very easy to forget that, at the time, these consoles represented the absolute bleeding edge of processing and graphics power, the kind that wasn’t even available for most consumer PCs.
And so Silicon Knights signed a “second-party” exclusivity deal with Nintendo to produce two games for the mysterious forthcoming Gamecube, which, at the time, was known only by its codename: PROJECT DOLPHIN. For their first Nintendo-exclusive project, the team decided to take a stab at the big Cthulhu title they had been planning for years. It proved to be a wise choice. The Gamecube was, hardware-wise, the most technically powerful system of its generation, outstripping both the PS2 and Xbox. Games like Eternal Darkness, and later Resident Evil 4, were a testament to the technical wizardry and eye-candy that skilled developers could summon from this humble little cuboid.
- [Leon] Sir... - And central to Eternal Darkness would be the game’s dark, moody, and deeply literary exploration of the Lovecraft mythos. Cosmic Terror had finally arrived on your home console.
For one, the use of Lovecraft helped to give this game its own unique style and identity since the Cthulhu mythos was still very niche at the time. But there was also another added benefit to this approach: The writings of HP Lovecraft were, and remain to this day, in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. Yeah, Lovecraft’s works are not and have never been under copyright lock-and-key.
You can go to your e-book depository of choice right this moment and download the entire Lovecraft canon, free of charge. And what’s more, this means that the Lovecraft mythos is, for lack of a better phrase, entirely OPEN-SOURCE. Any aspiring writer, artist, content creator, or what-have-you can pull from the Lovecraft canon and mix- and-match its constituent elements at will Cosmic Terror is a monstrous void, yes, but it’s also an amazing creative sandbox. And it’s one that the team at Silicon Knights great use of in developing Eternal Darkness. To distinguish their new game from what they saw as the more campy, "b-movie horror” of other survival horror contemporaries, Silicon Knights decided on some key narrative elements early in the design process. Eternal Darkness would be a time-traveling mystery story that was as much adventure- game as survival horror, (thump, squish) featuring just as many cerebral psychological thrills as straightforward “haunted house jumpscares.”
(thunder) And this is one realm where Silicon Knights absolutely distinguished themselves with their work on Eternal Darkness, - Venture no further or be struck down where you stand! - just as they did with Blood Omen before it. The plot of Eternal Darkness isn’t some after-the-fact afterthought whose only purpose is to provide “story beats” that structure the gameplay. From the outset of the design process through to the last moments before the gold master disc was pressed, narrative is ALWAYS been front-and- center for Silicon Knights titles. - [Michael] Just as much as I know, you know.
- These were lofty creative ambitions indeed for a videogame in the early 2000s. And yet the core concept that gave rise to the development of Eternal Darkness was actually both simple and incredibly topical. As Silicon Knights studio head and Eternal Darkness director, Denis Dyack, told the Escapist in 2006: “Videogames were under fire for messing with people’s heads, and being accused of being murder simulators. So, we thought, wouldn’t it be a good idea to make something that really does mess with people’s heads?” Of course, a horror story with ambitions this epic required a suitably sprawling setting to support it- -a saga of blood, betrayal, and eldritch lore that stretches across more than two millennia.
But this is no fable of righteous heroes wielding sword-and-sorcery to vanquish their foes. This ensemble tale is Lovecraftian to its roots, a “multiple viewpoint story” that follows 12 ordinary men and women who become caught up in a titanic battle against the cyclopean cosmic terrors that seek to drive us all to madness and consume our world. The game begins with a straightforward framing device: Young Alexandra Roivas, voiced here in her early pre-Femshep years by the wonderful Jennifer Hale, - [Alex] Hello? - [LeGrasse] Miss Alexandra Roivas? - Um, yeah... who's this? - This is Inspector LeGrasse of the Rhode Island Police.
I'm sorry to disturb you but... - [Ragnar] learns her grandfather has been murdered- -decapitated while sitting in his study in the dead of night. She travels to the ancestral Roivas mansion in Rhode Island, and she’s barely set foot inside before she discovers a gruesome Necronomicon hidden in the house: The Tome of Eternal Darkness. Upon leafing through the dessicated, human-skin pages of the Tome, Alex is thrust into a saga spanning across thousands of years of human history, both oriental and occidental. Each of the game’s dozen playable characters follows a single thread of this tale, with the tangled web becoming more and more decipherable with each chapter in the Tome you complete.
These 12 souls are engaged in a desperate struggle with cosmic terror far beyond the ken of mere humans. They are not mighty wizards and warriors, but rather doctors, engineers, journalists, and architects. Each protagonist is a near-powerless mortal, barely capable of defending themselves against the enemy’s arcane emissaries, and certainly ill-equipped to square off with monstrous and all-consuming eldritch deity. And in the best tradition of Lovecraft, those who try to take a stand against the cosmic terror always come to an unhappy end.
(energy bolts sparking, screaming) They're eaten alive, consumed by deadly magicks, or annihilated entirely. Others who attempt to flee the looming darkness may escape physically unharmed, but are mentally scarred for life by the horrors they’ve witnessed. - [Maximillian] (whimpering) Death... Darkness! - The story of each era of human history is revealed to be intertwined with the legacy of cosmic terror. The tribune of mad gods that are vying for control in the universe are also the masterminds behind The Inquisition, the First World War, the Puritan's Witch HHunts, and the Persian Gulf War- -all in service to their dark designs. And yet, there is a greater purpose to each seemingly-hopeless act of defiance, even if the unlucky martyr cannot recognize it themselves in that moment.
Each life chronicled in the Tome of Eternal Darkness builds upon the one that came before it, handing hope and the promise of salvation down through the generations like history’s most desperate baton-relay. The human impulse to keep hope alive perseveres, even in our darkest moments, and even when we ourselves cannot appreciate our contribution to the larger struggle. It’s a sly and ironic invocation of the humanist principle, embedded in a Lovecraftian mythos that is so often famous for the exact opposite. Through the pages of the Tome of Eternal Darkness, Alex becomes enmeshed in a globe-spanning, time-traveling mystery to uncover her grandfather’s killer.
The player will shift between a veritable constellation of different playable protagonists, locations, and historical eras: Modern Rhode Island, Roman-occupied Persia, Cambodia at the height of the Khmer Empire, And Dark Ages France. The voice acting in particular deserves a special nod here for how much it underpins the epic presentation. Silicon Knights was justifiably impressed quality of Metal Gear Solid’s voice acting because they hired nearly the whole dang squad to voice the cast of Eternal Darknes All our faves are here! Colonel Campbell, - [Paul Luther] I... I found him lying here.
Dead! I called the guards! Liquid Snake, (screaming) - [Anthony] What sorcery is this?? A spell? I am bewitched! - Mei Ling, - [Ellia] I only wish something that fantastical with a higher purpose would happen to me.. - Even big-man-on-campus David Hayter himself makes an appearance! - [Legionnaire] Do you believe that it really exists, Centurion? - [Pious] I do no doubt our emperor's beliefs... or his orders. - Just like Metal Gear, these actors put on some truly BRAVURA performances.
And is that- -oh ma gawd- -OLD BIG BOSS?! - [Pious Augustus] I am the SCOURGE of GOD Appointed to chastize you. Since no one knows the remedy for your iniquity... except me! You are wicked, but I am more wicked than you… So BE SILENT! (screaming) - Mechanically, Eternal Darkness bears more than a passing resemblance to other survival horror classics of the time, like Code Veronica and Fatal Frame. And there are definitely some similarities to the presentation: You’ll navigate maze-like environs in a third-person perspective, clash with dangerous foes who can overwhelm unprepared players, solve light inventory puzzles, and carefully ration your health and resources to win through each encounter.
But Eternal Darkness is also quite remarkable for how much it did to innovate on the established survival horror design formula. In a genre famous for purposefully clunky and cumbersome controls, Eternal Darkness is actually quite straightforward to play. For one, this is a fixed-camera game, but not a fixed-PERSPECTIVE game- -and the Dagoth is in the details. Early Resident Evil was both fixed- camera and fixed-perspective, where the camera remains in place within each scene and does not shift until the player has moved to the next screen, loading in a new scene. And this camera scheme is how we got “tank” controls, where movement is always relative to the *character* rather than the *camera*. Eternal Darkness, on the other hand, uses fixed-camera, but not a fixed perspective.
The player does not control the camera as they move through the game’s environments. Instead, the camera will follow along behind you, more often than not, panning and zooming as though you’re watching a super-extended dolly shot play out. Besides taking inspiration from Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, you can also tell that the team at Silicon Knights were huge fans of the early Silent Hill games. This, combined with the game’s extremely well-realized and well-thought-out implementation of camera- relative non-tank controls results in some absolutely breathtaking and cinematic playable sequences. And thanks to the inventive controls and camera, you actually get to PLAY these scenes yourself, rather than just watching them play out in a cutscene.
There’s also a surprising amount of depth to the combat, the kind of mechanical complexity that had never really been seen before in a survival horror title like this. A limited targeting system allows the player to aim directly at specific enemy weak-points; either doing extra damage for the finishing blow, or stunning them just long enough for you to beat a hasty retreat. There are no cheap deaths or surprise insta-kill moves to contend with here. If you mess up and die, you will always understand what went wrong, and quickly come up with something to do next time, to avoid it happening again. Of course, it’s not all combat and inventory management.
Another way that Eternal Darkness distinguishes itself is through its complex magic system, which is the key to solving some of the game’s best puzzles. The player builds spells via combinations from a glossary of runes hidden deep within the Tome of Eternal Darkness. Some spells can heal and protect you, others will help you repel your foes, and some magicks will help you progress past obstacles and apparent dead-ends. The game does offer scrolls that reveal how to craft certain spells when you need them for a specific puzzle, but the player is also given plenty of space for arcane experimentation.
As soon as you have the right combination of runes, you can cast any spell you’d like well before you acquire the corresponding scroll, which allows for some fun minor “sequence breaking” by inventive and skilled players. (magical swooshing) Many of the later bosses and puzzles will test your understanding of this magic system, and will reward you for thinking laterally or nonlinearly in this way. Each of your trips through history is bookended by short sections in the mansion where you return to playing as Alex.
These segments are much quieter and slower than the main game, playing more like a point-and-click adventure than survival horror. But that doesn’t mean there’s no horror to be found here- -far from it. As Alex explores, the mansion will begin to change around her in ways both subtle and startling. Tranquil paintings will shift to scenes of demonic hellscapes; the statuary will come to life and appear to “follow” you as you trek through the mansion’s cavernous hallways; wails of anguish and torture will ring out from seemingly abandoned and walled-off parts of the manse. Everywhere you turn, your mind seems to be playing tricks on you. Whenever you are noticed by an enemy or perform certain environmental interactions player’s “sanity meter” will begin to deplete.
And as your sanity drains away, the world around you will begin to change. At first, the shifts are subtle: The camera begins to tilt at an odd dutch angle, occasionally “twitching” as though it’s attempting to right itself from under the weight of a great force. You’ll hear whispers and moans in an otherwise-empty room, or you’ll catch a glimpse of rivulets of blood trickling through the walls. Then suddenly the phone will ring, and no one except a disembodied voice will be on the other end when you pick up. (dial tone) You’ll move from one room to another, and you’ll suddenly sink through the floor like quicksand, arriving somewhere else entirely. As your sanity further depletes, the game “breaks” itself in even stranger ways.
Footsteps will echo around you when your character is standing still. You’ll stumble upon a treasure- trove of weapon ammunition, only for the game to suddenly reverse itself and take away your loot. (Paul screaming) Soon, your character will begin muttering and whimpering to themselves, wildly swinging their weapon at unseen foes with no input from the player. (gunshot, glass cracking) And as you continue to lose sanity, resulting in ever-stranger hallucinations, it will quickly become clear to the player: You are not playing the game. THE GAME is playing YOU. You’ll see bugs crawling across the inside of your screen.
The game will raise and lower the volume by itself, or turn the screen off entirely, leaving you alone in the dark with only the snarling of unseen abominations to keep you company. You’ll be in the middle of a pitched battle, only to suddenly see a fake “blue screen of death” appear on your TV. And perhaps most diabolically of all, the game will even pretend to delete your data while you’re trying to save, which is practically guaranteed to cause your heart to jump up into your throat the first time it happens. If Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid is the series that first popularized this kind of meta fourth-wall-breakery, it is Eternal Darkness that elevated it to an artform. And to bring the cross-pollination between these games full circle, more than fittingly, Denis Dyack and his team at Silicon Knights eventually ended up developing Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, the GameCube remake of the first Metal Gear Solid which originally inspired the iconic game design of Eternal Darkness.
These “sanity effects”- –they are the secret sauce, the je ne sais quoi that makes this game so unique and timeless to play. There was simply nothing like it when it came out, and there has never been anything quite like it since. No, really: I mean there has quite literally never been anything like it because Nintendo put a fucking patent on the game’s sanity system, only to never employ it again. So much for open-source. [error code 2305: buffer overflow CRP2\{}] (swoosh) Eternal Darkness is definitely not an *underrated* game.
It’s rightly considered to be one of the finest survival horror games ever made, a genre pillar that is still supremely playable and enjoyable to this day. But while the game was highly *critically* and won a shedload of industry awards, audiences were...mostly indifferent at the time. Eternal Darkness had the bad luck of competing head-to-head with the release of the shiny new Gamecube remake of Resident Evil, which the vast majority of players apparently preferred. And hey, for good reason, because it just so happens to be another contender for the crown of the “greatest classic survival horror game of all time.” (gunshot, shrieking) But that meant Eternal Darkness was a near-total commercial-financial disaster, selling fewer than half-a-million copies worldwide and falling short of the sales needed to recoup its development costs.
Silicon Knights began work on a direct sequel to Eternal Darkness shortly after the first game’s release, but the project was quietly canceled by Nintendo, who still hold the game’s IP under copyright lock-and-key to this day. The series has been permanently put on ice, and it is unlikely that it’ll ever see the light of day again. Although, hey, apparently we’re getting a port for the Wii U Fatal Frame game for the Switch soon. Never say never. Silicon Knights would continue on and release two more great games in the coming years with The Twin Snakes and Too Human, followed by an X-men tie-in game that is better left unmentioned. (loud stuff and silly screams) But in retrospect, it’s easy to see that Eternal Darkness was the beginning of the end for the studio.
Following the disbanding of Silicon Knights, more than a decade after the release of Eternal Darkness, Denis Dyack and the original team tried to get the band back together for the Kickstarter project Shadow of the Eternals, a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness by the original developers. It was a miserable failure, earning less than 10% of their requested pledges. Eternal Darkness has never been ported to another console, and is even rarer due to the fact that there were no additional copies of the game released after the first pressing, making this one of the rarest retro survival horror games of its generation. Right now you can expect to pay easily US$100 for a used copy of the game, and it should be stressed here that no one from Silicon Knights OR Nintendo, for that matter, will see a single cent from games you purchase on the secondhand market.
That money goes straight into the reseller’s pocket. And so, it’s that time again everyone: - Arrre 'ya ready kids?? - AYE AYE CAPTAIN! - I can't heeeaar yououuu - AYYYE AYYYE CAPATAAIIIN - ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Right now, the only way to play Eternal Darkness on modern hardware and preserve this classic piece of gaming history… Is through emulation. If you'd like to play it yourself, as always, I've added a Google Doc, which is linked in the description of this video, that shows you how to set up the Dolphin Emulator to play Eternal Darkness on your computer. And it plays and looks beautifully, as you can see. Just like the Tome of Eternal Darkness for which it is named, the game itself languishes forgotten in some dusty and shrouded corner of the Nintendo Vaults waiting for a reader to chance upon its pages.
But actually, the parallels here are even deeper and more profound than I initially thought. So, indulge me for a moment as I take off my critic’s hat and don my Game Theorist’s dunce-cap. (fart) In a book tucked away in the recesses of the mansion’s library in the game, we learn that the Roivas family were Mediterranean immigrants who fled Europe only to be persecuted in the New England witch hunts. And even though I first played this game almost 20 years ago, it is ONLY NOW that I realized “ROIVAS” is “SAVIOR” spelled backwards. A ROIVAS-SAVIOR of Mediterranean origins… Locked in perpetual battle with the forces of chaos and darkness... Hated and persecuted by the corrupt authorities of their era… Who held aloft the light of hope for the future...
Carrying the torch for humanism down through the ages... So, here goes: ETERNAL DARKNESS IS THE GREATEST AND MOST SUBVERSIVE CHRISTIAN-ETHICS GAME EVER MADE But hey, "tHatTs JuSt A tHeOrY..." (swoosh) - [Alex] THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING! - Just as Eternal Darkness compels us to keep hope alive through the ages, so too can we retronauts keep this game alive through the dark ages of planned obsolescence and anti-social mega-corporations... - [Edwin] Yees, this is it. It HAS to be! (Zizek-sniff) Eternal Darkness is something of a relic: An artefact from a time when top gaming critics would cheerfully contend that “story in video games is just like the story in a porno”- -usually silly, always superfluous, and only there to move the action along.
But the team at Silicon Knights believed differently. They believed that STORY MATTERS, and this narrative first-approach to their game design still shines through today. Despite the fantastical premise, Eternal Darkness tells a story that is not only believable, but also entirely internally consistent and coherent. Everything just makes sense within the rules established by its universe. And it’s the highest compliment you can give the game: Despite all of the narrative’s far-flung hijinx around time-travel, magicks, and multiple timelines intersecting, the story always feels easy to grasp. And that’s why, despite all the years, Eternal Darkness still is just as playable today as it was when it was first released.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this game has held up far BETTER than so many other more “polished” or “technically advanced” horror games that came out after it. Because while...fear may be fleeting… Darkness is Eternal. (orchestral crescendo) (Andrew Hulshult's Prodeus soundtrack playing) Hey everyone, thank you for watching! For... anyone who discovered me with this video,
hey, I'm Ragnar and on this channel I cover old games, horror games, indie games or combinations thereof and try to bring attention to games that have fallen into obscurity as well as outstanding indie titles that I want people to not miss out Like in this credit segment, you see me play through a level of Prodeus, a currently in early access retro first person shooter by Mike Voeller and Jason Mojica who’ve worked on titles like Doom 2016, Payday 2, Bioshock Infinite and Singularity before this. Prodeus is unashamedly inspired by the original Dooms and translates their soul successfully to modern engines without transforming the actual core gameplay, mashing up the best elements of id-tech and Build engine FPS games while looking both incredibly nostalgic and technically impressive with its blend of pixel-sprite based enemies and entities, unfiltered textures, dynamic lighting and PBR textures and excessively satisfying amount of particle effects. It has, to me, I’m not exaggerating here, the most satisfying gunplay I’ve come across in any shooter so far, really- -enabled by the unbelievably juicy sound-design, supported by incredibly smart and playful level design and endlessly amplified by the amazingly kicka soundtrack by the legendary Andrew Hulshul It also has amazing community content support built in from the get-go with a highly accessible and functional map-editor and directly implemented community map-browser, which is a deep embrace to the community s that kept old DOOM games alive for decades Now, despite being early access, this one already had me playing non-stop for many hours, and I keep coming back. High recommendation. If this looks satisfying to you then playing it will probably be that multiplied with at least a 2-digit number. It’s incredible.
If you wanna check it out, you can follow the link in the card that just popped up in the top right which you can also find in the description of this video that leads you to the GOG version of the game, that comes without any DRM. And, disclaimer: if you buy through that link, I’ll actually get a tiny affiliate commission- –from GOG; It's not cut from the developer’s earnings or anything; so that could be a neat way to help me out a little in the process. But speaking of funding the work on this channel: Making these videos and the financial support of everyone who partakes in making them is primarily crowdfunded. So, if you’d like to help us shed light on forgotten and overlooked gems in the future then it’d be a great help if you considered dropping a buck or two over on my Patreon. It gets you access to high quality version of my videos, one to several days early, as well as the chance to leave your mark in the credits of my videos. The support makes a tremendous difference.
It realy does-it is the de-facto financial backbone of this channel. So, thank you for considering and a big THANKS to everyone who supports me there already! And a special thanks this time goes out to: www.patreon.com/RagnarRoxShow Until next time... ta ta! (ludicrously juicy minigun massacre)
2021-08-02 19:04
