"Sanity's Requiem" from Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the Game Cube (2003)
Composer: Steve Henifin
Spoken Word: William Hootkins
Album: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem Sound Track
Label: Nintendo of America
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Silicon Knights
I wanted to use this song today for a couple of reasons. The first is because, as you may or may not know, I love Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and William Hootkins' performance as Maximillian Roivas is some of the best insanity voice acting I have heard in a video game. The way that he portrays cosmic horror induced insanity, to me comes across as determined and desperate. I could probably write another couple of paragraphs just gushing about Hootkins' various lines of dialogue throughout the entire game.
The second reason being that this has been the second week of self-isolation, Sheltering in Place, working from home, et cetera. Hopefully, everyone is staying as sane as they can with their current living situation, Eternal Darkness and other psychological horror games have been at my mind's forefront recently.
But we are also here for the music, here written by Steve Henifin. I think what he does here with ambient music perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the game, waiting for something horrific to slither out of an adjacent room to wreak havoc on the mind of Maximillian Roivas. Even some of the music has an echo quality to it like you are hearing parts of it through the rotting halls of some massive subterranean cyclopean city. If you do take our Maximillian's ravings, then this track could just be boiled down to ambient background, but for me, having those bits of dialogue, the monster sound effects including the Trapper all taking advantage of stereo audio, help to elevate this song to a nice encapsulation as to what this game has to offer; which is pretty amazing.
~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
We Are Vain, And We Are Blind
No comments:
Post a Comment