Come to know fear as I have! Let's Play Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

A lot of enemies are placed as "[AncientOne] Zombie" and the alignment rune determines what shows up. Also, beyond the MP damage that Ulyaoth enemies inflict, I think spells might cost more to cast?

The meters themselves for each character are fixed, it's just that some chapters become significantly harder depending on the Ancient One (e.g. Paul has a really low health meter, so Chattur'gha enemies are even more dangerous).

I already voted for GREEN but here I am voting for it again. Also, are you going to showcase some of Purple?

It's not easy being GREEN.

Yes, but I'm going to refrain from using it regularly in-game, for reasons.

Also yeah, that's a definite vote for the green artifact. Shame, I was sort of hoping I'd get to show off blue. Oh well! I'll get the next update up sometimes tomorrow, probably.

If I voted for blue seven times would that push it over the top?

If so I vote for blue seven times.

- Eddie

I'll come out for blue if it's not too late. (We all know where that sanity meter is going to end up no matter what).

I'm actually fine with any of them. I like Xel'lotath best, but I can always just fire up my copy and re-watch the cutscenes. =)

I prefer the cheery blue.

Bah. This would be a lot simpler if youTube would stock the cutscene videos in individual colors, rather than everyone lumping them all together in a single horrendous mass of spoilers and continuity-breaking.

What do you guyses think? Should I just go "screw it" and link to the composite videos, or try to find those catered towards the color we end up choosing? (or perhaps to both green and blue videos, since both have lots of supporters)

Just do the composites, we'll explain to anyone who doesn't know the deal what's going on.

Fair enough!

Also, unless I miss my guesses (and I may be doing so out of fan-induced blindness) the votes indicate Blue is the winner. Those of you who voted for green: fear not, I'll be using green magick almost exclusively once we get it. Also, the ending will be super cathartic.

I'm just glad it's not red. Blue is entirely acceptable.

I wanted red because it makes the beginning of the game harder, and the Chatturga-only dialogue is kind of hilarious, but I'll concede your point.

IMHO, the final cutscene of Chattur'gha getting the beatdown from Ulyaoth is the coolest of the 3 possibilities. But that's just too small a redeeming factor.

Cutscene: The Eternal Darkness

Pious considers the green artifact momentarily, but eventually decides to claim the blue one.



The second his hand touches the thing, it lashes out at him with a strange ethereal energy. The pain of the artifact is completely unbearable, even to his battle-hardened mind, and he screams in pain and drops to the floor.



The pain continues for what feels like years, all thoughts of retrieving the artifact for the emperor blasted out of his mind.



When the pain finally subsides, only one thought remains in Pious' shattered mind.



He now serves a new master.



A pretty good read, overall, but the rest of the book just seems to contain indecipherable glyphs and illustrations, and a bunch of pages are missing, so Alex looks up and decides to check out the rest of the room she's in.



She keeps the Tome, though, figuring it might prove useful if she can learn anything more from it.

A good third of this description is a bold-faced lie. There is no experience to be had in-game, and enchanted items don't get stored in the book. Presumably, these were features intended early in the game's development and removed? I dunno.



Alex catches a glint of metal on the far wall, and finds a Gladius not unlike the one in that story earlier.



She takes a moment to strike a heroic pose! Looking good, Alex!

Don't let the sword fool you, though. Alex isn't going to be getting into fights any time soon. After all, the mansion doesn't have zombies in it.



On the wall opposite the sword, Alex spies a bit of parchment framed on the wall. She meanders over to have a look at it.

Alex pries out the page, entitled "Binding of the Corpse God", and sits down to give the page a thorough reading.



Cutscene: Binding of the Corpse God

Edward Roivas starts each chapter from here on out with his own words, as opposed to Pious' description for the first chapter.



Today's story focuses on a young dancer from ancient Cambodia named Ellia, who is not only capable of reading, but is capable of reading from the Tome of Eternal Darkness. In a bit of recursion, she's also reading this book, learning about the binding of a massive god-beast called Mantorok.



In an earlier time than this, we learn that this is no mere myth. Pious, now wearing charred armor and carrying a skeletal staff, spends some time trashtalking the pulsating mound of eyes and mouths known as Mantorok.



Eventually, Pious starts casting a powerful spell, adding some more zing to his taunts.



He concludes the spell by bringing his staff down to the ground, causing the spires of the cave to fall into Mantorok's bloated flesh. The monstrosity is clearly wounded, and the magick of the spell cuts off Mantorok's power, leaving him for dead.

Meanwhile, Ellia gets bored and quits reading the book. She thinks life as a Cambodian dancer isn't exciting enough, and wishes she could experience something as life-changing as those mythical fables.



The door to the temple closing and locking Ellia in happens with such timing that even Elan would call it trite.

Anyway, now we're playing as Ellia, and we have to find a way out of the temple! Ellia is... not a very good character. She's nowhere near as durable as Pious was, either in mind or body, and she's going to freak out a lot more if she has to fight zombies. On the upside, being a dancer and therefore not required to wear heavy armor, Ellia can sprint like crazy, meaning she can easily outrun any zombies.

She also starts with the Tome of Eternal Darkness, for all the good that does her, and a Short Sword, which starts out equipped.

The Short Sword is pretty much identical to the Gladius mechanically, for all I know.



The first thing Ellia notes is a strange series of glyphs upon the ground before her.

This will make more sense to us later, but for right now, Ellia just shrugs and moves on to the statue at the end of the room.



Necklaces from statues in a temple? How can Ellia say no?



Whoops. Taking the necklace causes the entrance to the left of the statue to close off. Ellia, you're not doing this whole "escape the temple" thing very well. She takes a moment to wonder why taking this necklace was such a good idea.

Quite a catch, even if it does mean locking off some random room. I'll show off the healing spell later, but this is all the magickal ability Ellia will get to see. It has 10 charges, and you'd think that would be enough, but if you're clumsy or crazy, you can end up using every last charge before the chapter ends.



Ellia can't go left from the statue, but she can definitely go right!



This relief has three candles, but only one matching the position of the sun is lit. This is a clue for a later puzzle.



Not three steps into the next hallway, and Ellia ends up standing on a pressure plate. With a grinding of stone...



Blades begin swinging out of grooves in the wall.

This is probably what makes Ellia's chapter so annoying. The traps can usually be avoided, but to do so, you have to take your time. The same goes for the pressure plates, which have a distinct pattern on the ground, and can be snuck around.



Ellia puts those feet of hers to work and avoids both the blades and the remainder of the pressure plates in the hall.



Upon entering the next room, the grinding of the door behind her is ignored in favor of a muscular, fresh corpse before her.



It stands up and begins marching towards her. Wait, what's with the laser eyes?



Yep, here's the bit of Eternal Darkness everyone knows about. In addition to health, every character that isn't Pious has a Sanity Meter. If an enemy notices you, you'll lose a bit of sanity, which will, as the description says, cause some hallucinations. These range the gamut from minor effects, like tilting the camera, drops of blood coming from the walls, and ethereal voices from nowhere, to the major. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to showcase most of these. If you run out of sanity, further sanity loss will cause you to take damage instead, which gives an incentive to not just play on empty and see every sanity effect in the game all at once. In order to recover sanity, you have to finish off an enemy, which can be difficult if they attack in packs, since some enemies disappear after a while if they're downed, meaning you're stuck with your sanity loss.



The more pressing issue at the moment is the zombie Ellia faces. Unlike those starved zombies Pious slaughtered en masse earlier, this is a red zombie. Red zombies are the nastiest of the bunch, not only having the fastest attacks and loads of health, but if you give them time alone, they'll regenerate any limb or head you chop off.



The headless zombie flails around the room for a good while before Ellia finally severs both of its arms. It's not going to attempt a kick, what with that whole coordination problem zombies have, so severing all the limbs of a zombie leaves us free to chop it up for the win.

Killing the red zombie opens up the door she came from, but the way forward is still blocked off.



Ellia turns her attention to the relief with candles.



This is the first puzzle of the game. I'm not counting that block-fitting mess from earlier because I am not in kindergarten. To progress, you have to match the candles with the stone display on the back. Since this room's display is midday, we extinguish the right candle while leaving the center one alone. You can relight candles if you mess up.



This partially opens the door on the other end of the room, but not nearly enough for Ellia to climb through.



So she loots another necklace as her prize. This necklace is bronze, but it doesn't have a spell attached to it.



Backtracking is made more fun or annoying by avoiding pressure plates from a different camera angle.



Oh, and the four or so zombies in the earlier room get up and attack, causing Ellia to freak out a fair bit, what with her sanity meter being about as long as my current supply of Vanilla Coke (i.e. sadly limited). Fun fact: if you decapitate a zombie before it sees you, you lose no sanity! I don't remember if I actually did that here or not, but long story short, compared to the red zombie, these ones are easy.



Ellia decides that the statue will most likely let her through if she gives up some necklace to it, and she nominates the bronze one on account of not having supernatural powers.



Success!



She moves through another sun-themed room, this one mercifully free of the undead.



The trap you may or may not see here is a dart trap. Unlike swinging blades, I'm terrible at dodging these, so I usually just rely on Ellia's ridiculous sprinting skills to get through before I get shot. It's pretty effective.



However, the best option is to avoid triggering the trap in the first place.



In the next room, Ellia finds herself face to face with a mummified corpse. These are green zombies. Unlike red zombies, they're pathetically easy to kill. Just decapitate them and they drop to the ground. Also unlike red zombies, they will get back up if you don't finish them off, damage your sanity with each hit, and can still see you and hit you without the appropriate parts (although they can only deal sanity damage if they lack arms). If they don't have anything to sever, they're a lot harder to kill. The lesson here, of course, is to finish them off.



Ellia drops the zombie with ease, then moves on to the candle puzzle.

This time, there is no sun in the background, so you must extinguish all of the lights to progress.



This opens up the hallway that connects the rooms with the red and green zombies. Ellia easily makes her way through the traps here...



And ducks into a side alcove to check out a pedestal with a blowgun on it.



Woo! Sigmund doesn't stand a chance now!



Whoops. Picking up the blowgun opens a trapdoor beneath Ellia.




She lands without injury, but her short sword is broken during the fall.



To make matters worse, two blue zombies are in the area, converging on a temple guard. Blue zombies aren't as strong as red ones, but they're probably second-strongest. The thing that makes them the most dangerous, aside from draining your magick, is that if you damage them enough without decapitating them, they'll start "singing". This will cause other nearby blue zombies to begin singing, and after a while, a singing zombie detonates, dealing hefty damage to any non-blue-zombie in the area (and also leaving you without a corpse to finish off). As such, the best way to tackle blue zombies, as with all other zombies, is decapitation.

In Ellia's current state, that's a big enough problem, but there's another issue. If she saves the guard, she'll get a reward, but the blowgun deals atrociously terrible damage. It does poison the target, but if you're firing blindly towards the zombie nearest the guard, that could get him poisoned as well, which is very bad.



Ellia's best bet is to get the zombies' attention, lure them away from the guard, and poison them. After a while, the zombies begin singing, safely out of blast range from the guard. After the two watch the fireworks, she turns to the guard, who offers to repair her sword. Nice offer, but I don't see a forge or anything. How do you propose to fix her weapon, Mr. Guard?



Oh, of course. By invoking unholy magick.

Anyway, let's check out the blowgun in more detail.

Yeah. It's a great tool while complemented by the short sword, but on its own, it turns combat ridiculously long. It has 100 darts, though, so running out of ammo seems unlikely.



Meanwhile, the blue zombies lumbering around triggered those blade traps. Oh good.



Further along the hall, we find the smasher trap. This one is even slower than the blade traps, but it deals a lot more damage, so be sure to avoid it.



The next room opens into a large area full of flimsy non-color zombies, dominated by a central pillar with a groove near the base of it, and a mural on the other wall. Ellia uses a combination of blowgun and sword to take the zombies down.



Ellia's finishing move looks sort of awkward for her build and weapon, but whatever works.



The mural shows off a skeletal demon befriending the Khmer people by denouncing their fertility god... I guess? Okay. Still, those two seem a lot like Pious and Mantorok, don't they?

Moving on, we find this delightful combination of traps. The blocks slam behind Ellia repeatedly, but are unlikely to damage her. The bigger issue is that they obscure the five or so blade traps ahead, which are all in close proximity. I screw up here and Ellia takes a few blades to the head, so I decide that now would be a good time to show off that necklace's healing powers.



Note that the healing spell is red, unlike the purple spells used by Pious and the guard. Starting to notice a connection?



In the next room, Ellia spies an interesting sight: a green zombie and a blue zombie are fighting! Different colors of zombies will prioritize attacking each other over hunting your character or any tasty NPCs in sight. The green zombie in this case manages to stunlock the blue zombie, causing it to sing a few times in a row, but the blue zombie's detonation knocks down the green zombie, leaving Ellia to run in for the kill.



Bam! Apparently, there were a few blue zombies off to the side that started singing too. Huh.



The mural here shows the skeletal demon from before torturing and killing the Khmer fertility god. Again, very similar to Pious binding Mantorok.




Cutscene: Chaos Entombed

The next hallway leads into a central chamber, where a horrific sight greets Ellia's eyes: the god-beast Mantorok itself pulsates in the central chamber.



The two guards warning Ellia to avoid Mantorok are quickly devoured by the dead god.



Pious shows up here to taunt Mantorok a bit more, causing Ellia to freak out even more. He tells her to leave if she knows what's good for her...



But Mantorok has other plans.



Ellia gets knocked face-first to the stone floor by the statue, and is approached by a strange man, reeking of decay and speaking with a powerful intonation.



He gives Ellia a weird, blackened, still-beating heart, claiming it to be the source of Mantorok's power. He says that if she guards this "essence", she'll live.



The essence is absorbed into Ellia's body, and the man lurches off.



To continue from here, we need to loot the Metal Staff off of this statue. This will be used back in the first mural room, on that groove in the base of the pillar.



Along the way, though, Ellia finds an unpleasant surprise: the second mural room has been repopulated with blue zombies. I failed to get a screenshot, but one of them sneaks up behind Ellia and grabs her, and begins chewing on her shoulder. If a zombie sneaks up, they'll hold you in place and drain health, which can be bad in a situation where other things are going after you, like this. Fortunately, they're easy enough to break free from, and so we survive.

The trap-filled hallway leading to the other mural room has also been repopulated, although only with the flimsy non-color zombies. Which is good, because you can't see them, but they can still trigger traps. The only indication you have is the sound of their footsteps and your sanity loss as they see you. Fortunately, the traps will probably make short work of them before you get close.



After hacking apart the new zombies in the mural room, Ellia slides the Metal Staff into the groove, and presses down.



This causes a door at the back end of Mantorok's chamber to open up.



Ellia makes her way back to Mantorok's room uneventfully, although navigating the narrow pathway next to Mantorok's gaping maws makes her uneasy.



Inside, she finds a room with another goddess statue, but she has very little time to examine it...



Cutscene: Death of a Dancing Girl

Pious apparently has been searching for the essence of Mantorok, which Ellia has, so he's cornered her here. He demands of her its location, but she refuses or is too terrified to speak.



Even when Pious threatens her with death and commands the guards to prevent her from fleeing, she refuses to speak.



Pious responds to this by incinerating her with blue energy.




Back in the study...



Next Time: Medieval conspiracy theorists rejoice

Elia's chapter is a personal favorite, because she can run for a long time without getting fatigued. There are some fatasses later who can't make it down a hallway without stopping for a short nap.

Also: your images are taking a long time to load. Uncompressed bmps are baaaad, especially at nearly 900kb a pop. Even just using MSPaint to convert to .jpg knocks them down to 10kb with no noticable loss in quality.

Pious is just going crazy with the different colors of magick. He just doesn't care! He doesn't care!

I just dislike all of the backtracking through trap-filled rooms.

Also, I'm saving them as .png files, but you may have a point either way. I'll try saving them to .jpg with the next chapter.

... is it weird that I never noticed before just how much Alex looks like Britney Spears?

Roberto's chapter is probably my least favorite in the game solely for this reason. At least portly and infirm Max gets fun weapons!

Allegedly, the mysterious dude who gives Elia the Essence of Mantorok was originally meant to be a playable character, but his chapter was cut due to time/budget constraints. Probably for the best; two chapters in the Temple of Mantorok was plenty.

The defeated general we see before Roberto's chapter was supposedly meant to be playable too. Thank god he was cut, I really don't need a fifth chapter in the Persian ruins.

Crazy speculation ahoy: Doesn't that look like a familiar outfit? And a familiar limp? As in, guy from the next chapter familiar?

But Anthony's corpse is still in the cathedral in Paul's chapter, several centuries later. And the ghosts of all the other dead characters seem tied to where they died, so I doubt he went halfway around the world to Cambodia.

That, and they have totally different voice actors. I think mysterious dude is actually voiced by David Hayter?

Apparently a heretofore unknown sanity effect has manifested itself on the images.

This... this can't be happening!

(We should probably add something about bandwidth issues in the Let's Play FAQ if there isn't one already.)

- Eddie

Oi. I suppose I can update to Pro. Is it easy to cancel a Pro account, offhand? I just don't want to redo the menagerie that was canceling my Xbox Live Subscription.