Eternal Darkness, the ever beloved mind screw of a game from the early days of the GameCube, will never receive a sequel.  I have come to this belief now, because I’ve realized the people behind it have the apparent business savvy of Peter Molyneux.  The list of missteps from developer Silicon Knights, and its leader Denis Dyack, seems endless.  Even if some miracle happened and we did get another game, either a direct sequel, a spiritual successor, or a game that’s completely unrelated but wants to explore the same kinds of fourth wall breaking mechanics, I am certain that as long as the same people are involved, it will be, at the very best, thoroughly unimpressive, though more likely a little insulting.

A stealthy history of arguably sub par performance

God, where do you start with this.  Well, let’s start here…

Penny Arcade, never ones to pull their punches, even if they got sick of their fists…

This comic shows what seems to be one of the fundamental flaws in the Silicon Knights approach.  Eternal Darkness had struck a chord.  It was innovative, enthralling, and with it’s “sanity meter” mechanic, tried to mess with the player directly, rather than through the avatar of the character on screen.  It was so well received, it became the video game equivalent of the prestige movie, the kind of movie that you don’t make for profit, but for respect, and Eternal Darkness, and by extension Silicon Knights, got plenty of respect.  That respect seemed to get leveraged to make other games, as satirized in the strip above.  To get to the next Eternal Darkness, we’ll have to get through Too Human games (intended as a trilogy as well).  For those who don’t recall, Too Human was widely panned, and none of those sequels were ever developed.

Many people thought “Too Human wasn’t good, but we know Silicon Knights can do good work, it must have been a one off, troubled development”.  We thought that because we were optimistic.  We saw Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and Legacy of Kain and thought this was a solid dev house, ignoring their earlier, less impressive titles which would really put them at a .500 average.  In retrospect, I believe that Silicon Knights was an adequate dev house that fired on all cylinders for Legacy of Kain, were able to execute on a strong, high concept on Eternal Darkness, which got them the MGS remake opportunity, and then got a bit up their own ass.  Weather this was a collective head and ass, or Denis Dyack alone, I don’t know, but it was around there somewhere.

Success Breeding Failure

Too human is a game that carries the stink of the auteur.  A pet project, something that was made for the designer’s sake rather than the players. – Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw

Eternal Darkness had been a success.  MGS Twin Snakes was overall quite well received for what it was.  Silicon Knights had a reputation now!  Oh, lets ignore that Eternal Darkness’ success was limited, because it was a niche title that got a cult following, it was a game with a high concept and it was successful.  Let’s also ignore that MGS was set up to succeed.  The path to greater success would be the same creator making another high concept game, right?  Well, that gave us Too Human, a game where any defense of it you find is either based on the idea that Co-op game play is OK, or that you can buy it cheap since it’s all bargain bin now.

Ok, so Silicon Knights could be good, they just had an off step.  Too Human just didn’t come together, right?  It can happen.  Well, no.  After the disappointment of Too Human, instead of a return to form, there was an abysmal failure in X-Men Destiny, a slew of cancelled games, and sandwiched in there was a disastrous lawsuit against Epic Games.

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