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Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is my favorite horror adventure videogame of all time (along with the first Shadowman).

Not only is it incredible for its Lovecraftian atmosphere and the immersive soundtrack, but also and above all for its story which was told through the ages and through the numerous characters, in the form of chapters of the Tome of Darkness. In the game, in addition to the classic health bar, there was a sanity bar, an element that had never been seen in any other game, and here it showed its originality: every time the characters encountered horrors or were shocked, their sanity bar gradually dropped, and once it was emptied, effects such as hallucinations could occur. Yep, you were basically losing your head! And I also mean literally :-D

Other times, however, the game was making fun of you! I think the "joke" became famous where, once you lost your sanity, a screen could appear that forced you to delete your game saves. Of course it was a fake screen, but we ALL got scared the first time and screamed "NOO! What the fuck?!!" A true stroke of genius, which was able to play with the REAL terror of us poor players :°D Moments that in the history of videogames will probably never be repeated again!

In my set there are some photos that are inspired by these sanity effects, I hope fans will appreciate the effort! In the game there are two female characters, Alexandra and Ellia, but since I didn't feel similar to Ellia's physical characteristics, I chose the role of Alex.
 

Just a hint of the initial plot which directly concerns the protagonist of my set: Edward Roivas, Alex's grandfather, is found murdered, or rather literally torn to pieces by someone - or something - in his villa in Rhode Island, but there is no clues as to what may have happened. The police call the niece of Edward, Alex, to help them with the identification of the body - the head is missing and they can't even take dental impressions -, but there seems to be no clue or lead to follow, there are no clues, there are no signs of thieves or other footprints, nothing at all. The police can't explain what happened, so Alex decides to stay in the villa hoping to discover anything that could help understand what happened. Exploring the house she finally discovers a secret room where she finds an ancient tome called the "tome of darkness", but this is only the beginning of something much, much bigger than herself, and much older, which began thousands of years ago.

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In truth, Alex is exactly the opposite of the characters I usually play: she's blonde (and I've always thought I looked bad as blonde, she's not for me °. °) and she has a very simple look. In short, jeans and a black t-shirt. How boring for a cosplay, right? That's why I tried to add some details taken from the game to compensate for the simplicity of the "costume", both in terms of accessories and in terms of post-production of the images.

I had a lot of fun creating the Tome of Darkness: in the game it is described as a book made of human skin and bones, written in blood, similar to the Necronomicon. I thought it would be a problem to get the texture of human skin, but I think I did it quite well. To make the thick cover, I used a simple rigid cardboard, covered with EVA foam on which I engraved the texture of the leather using the tip of a pair of scissors. The bone details, seams and rings are made of foam paste. Everything is hand painted with acrylic colors. The inside pages of the book are old printing sheets, larger than a normal copier sheet, which I dipped in a coffee mixture to yellow the paper and create creases. I then made a makeshift gladius as best I could, unfortunately I had a poor and very small base to start from, so it doesn't give a good idea of the gladius, but I didn't have the opportunity to do a better job from scratch. Finally I added a fake rifle, since Alex in the villa fights horrors with different weapons, and often the most frequent choice is between the rifle and the gladius at the beginning of the game.

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For the photos, now my trademark, I took them alone with the autoshot, and as always I had several problems due to my reflex which no longer works very well. I had to do two sets on two different days (which is why in some photos the makeup is a little different). The first set, unfortunately, didn't come out well: most of the photos were blurry because the focus of the reflex kept blocking, so the quality suffered. However, I was sorry to throw away some beautiful poses, which is why some images have a stronger post production (but I have to thank the AI again for allowing me to recover the details of pics that would otherwise have been thrown away). The second set, however, came out much better! For the backgrounds, I used video game screens (in this case I took some glimpses from a horror section of Hogwarts Legacy), but I also tried to reconstruct part of a room from the game. There is a small easter egg that refers to one of the clock puzzles to be solved in the adventure, and which refers to the darkest hour. The clock behind me in one photo reads 3:33 am, it's a detail I paid attention to! I also tried to recreate one of the spells that can be cast via runes. I hope I was able to do at least a little justice to the atmosphere and interpretation of Eternal Darkness.

After this very long post, last but not least I want to give a very special thanks to ZeldaMoMoe, who agreed to collaborate with me by giving me consent to use her image of her fantastic Ellia cosplay (the other female character I was talking about ) for creating a photomontage together! I think it turned out a nice job, and her presence made the two images together more believable than using a CG image from the game! Thanks again, and I recommend you go and visit her page here too! https://zeldamomoe.com/ https://www.facebook.com/ZeldaMOMOe/

I conclude with a small note: the atmosphere of my photos is greenish because I chose the Xel'lotath artifact. And you? Will you make the same choice, or will you choose the artifacts of Chattur'gha or Ulyaoth?

Hurry up, though... the darkness come!