If you have played Eternal Darkness, a lot of the locations in the trailer for Shadow of the Eternals probably look familiar. I'm sure that will change later on, but even if it doesn't, I'm not bothered by it. Part of what made Eternal Darkness great was that in each chapter, you revisited previous areas you had been to. You were able to see how those locations changed over time and I loved that.
Earlier today, I sent a message to my friend asking her to help promote the crowdfunding campaign for SotE. I'm going to quote that message here, just to save some time rather than retyping it all again. Keep in mind, this was an informal message so it may not be very well-written, but you should still be able to get a grasp of why this game is so important to the survival horror genre. As a huge fan of Eternal Darkness and horror games in general, I am desperate to see Precursor Games succeed with this campaign.
"I don't know if you ever played Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube, we've never talked about it. But if you haven't, it was a REALLY amazing survival horror/psychological horror game. (Ask anyone who has actually played it. Amazing.) It's inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's work, so it deals with insanity. You play as a different character in each chapter, spanning across thousands of years, all their stories are intertwined.
To fight enemies, you could either use melee weapons or guns (specific to each time period and location) and magic. In order to use magic, you would have to find spell scrolls and runes.
The REALLY interesting part of Eternal Darkness was the inclusion of sanity effects. As your character went insane from looking at the enemies they faced, different things would begin to happen. The walls would bleed. You would hear screaming in the background. The rooms would tilt. The game also broke the fourth wall by appearing to give the player a blue screen, muting the TV, deleting save data, etc.
Fans of Eternal Darkness have been waiting years for another game to be released and it would be such a shame if this game didn't get funded. In terms of storytelling, it's right up there with Silent Hill (though its plot is nothing like Silent Hill's). It is also one of the most unique games in the survival horror genre because of the sanity effects. And Eternal Darkness was REALLY unsettling/scary, so I can only imagine what Shadow of the Eternals will be like, especially since they can do so much more with games now than they could in 2002."
As you can see, Eternal Darkness is a game I think very highly of. It's tied with Fatal Frame and Silent Hill 2 as my favorite survival horror game ever (it's impossible to choose between the three of them).
Shadow of the Eternals is going to be episodic. I know some people don't like that. To be honest, I'm not a fan of games like that either. I would rather have the entire game at once. And with a game like this (one I have been waiting/hoping for that I know I'll love), I would rather have a physical copy than a downloadable copy. There is a positive side to this though. The developers are actually going to listen to what the fans have to say and implement their ideas into the game. So if there is something that needs to be fine-tuned after playing the first episode, you can suggest it to the developers and they'll work to make it better. You can't do that with a game that has already been released in its entirety.
SotE is going to be released for the Wii U and PC, supposedly around Q3 of 2014, IF the fans support it enough. You can donate to the project here and help make this game a success.
