Genre: Adventure
Developer: Silicon Knights
Publisher: Nintendo

Like all Gamecube titles thus far, the graphics are a mixed bag; the textures are sometimes fairly low resolution and blurry, especially the character textures, and the game uses colored lighting excessively, making me immediately think "Quake 2 engine". Then in other areas, particularily later in the game, the textures look extremely sharp, and the Gamecube video chip's fantastic antisotropic filtering makes large rooms scale wonderfully and lose little detail. Fortunately, the latter makes up a greater portion than the former, and I would say that these are probably the best graphics on the Gamecube thus far.

At first, the sound effects were either A, not so good, or B, downright annoying, such as the 200%-volume voices that play when you cast a spell. After a time however, the sounds really grew on me, and gave the game a lot of character. There isn't a whole lot of music in the game, but not in a bad way- most of the "music" is ambient, whisper-laden eeriness, with some light tunes mixed in. It works really well for the game, in a Resident Evil sort of way.

Eternal Darkness consists of a mesh of a number of genres, including RPG's, action, adventure, and survival horror. Essentially, you equip a weapon, enchant it, arm your shield using a spell, and take on a nice selection of scary baddies. You can target various parts of a baddie's body, and utilize their weaknesses in order to kill them more easily. The title also features a unique "sanity guage", which drains a bit every time an enemy sees you. You must perform a "finishing move" on the baddie to regain a bit of sanity. The controls work well for the most part, except that the B-button is overused, and when you think you're about to finish off an enemy, you go through a door instead. Aside from that gripe, the control scheme is excellent.

Eternal Darkness is a game that successfully blends a number of other titles, and is probably best described as a cross between Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. There are some under/misused concepts present; the "sanity meter" is kind of a silly idea, and the only practical need for it is to stop you from simply running through half of the rooms, as if Silicon Knights screwed up in the overall game design and needed to add a quick fix to balance the gameplay. Also, the game features a spell "creation" system, but Morrowind this ain't; there are only a handful of spells in the game, and they just give you them via scroll eventually anyway. Complaints aside, Eternal Darkness is a highly enjoyable, addicting title that is worthy of any gamer's library, and is a joy from start to finish.