Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem/Sanity effects

Sanity Meter

Eternal Darkness offers a unique status meter called the sanity meter. When fantastic and scary events happen in the game (mainly the appearance of evil enemies), your sanity meter will decrease. If your sanity meter reaches empty, you will go insane and begin to experience disturbing events as you play the game (If you experienced the situations the characters in the game do, you would probably go crazy too!) The "sanity meter" feature definitely sets Eternal Darkness apart from other games of the genre.

Your sanity meter bar is located in the top left corner of the screen and appears if it becomes depleted or if it is dangerously low. When enemies appear, their glare will initially drain your sanity. If your sanity meter gets too low, you will begin to experience sanity effects. You can replenish your sanity meter by using the Xel'lotath Alignment (green) recover spell or by performing a finishing move on a downed enemy. The Xel'lotath creatures drain more sanity than other creatures, but also give back more sanity when destroyed with a finishing move.

Sanity Effects

During gameplay, when your sanity level is low, you'll experience some audio, visual, and control effects that will try and mess with your mind. Do not panic. What may seem as problems, are actually effects programmers input to fool you. As your Sanity Level lowers, the camera will tilted a bit, and you'll begin to hear strange noises.

Eventually, you'll get to the point when you'll experance the following effects, but not always at the same time.

Visual/Screen/Environment Effects

• Blue screen of death
• Blood dripping from walls/ceiling
• Picture of paintings change
• Head of statue follows you
• Pretends to delete your saved game
• Bugs will crawl across the screen
• Nails will scratch across the screen
• A Fly will buzz around the screen

Control/Character Effects

• Controller 1 not connected
• Character will grow as walking
• Walking on ceiling
• Body falls apart as you walk of which you can pick up your body bits
• Casting Spells will cause you to explode
• Character will turn into a zombie in the next room
• Controls are inverted

Audio Effects

• Mute sound

Misc. Effects

• "Blood Bath" (Only as Alex)

Forced Effects

• "Psycho Worm" (Only as Edward)