The Greatest Scary Game You Probably Never Played

In light of Halloween, I've been trying to present some alternatives for your scary celebrations. Tonight, I bring you one of the best, most unplayed horror games ever.
Screw Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark and all those other old classic horror games, as well as the newer stuff like Dead Space, which I admit has scared me so bad at times that I've yet to finish it - plus I'm horribly stuck in this one spot. Why do I keep admitting the things that scare me on the internet?

File under: Things I know that scare Nate.

I wanted you all to know about a game that I've been playing for about seven years, totally riveted every time I play it. It's a sweeping epic of a story with a great, Lovecraft-inspired mythology and a truly inventive gameplay system that effected the player as much as what would happen in the game.
You might ask, "Where can I play this game?" Well, sir or madame, dust off your GameCube - if you ever owned one - or find a controller and a memory card so you can boot it up on your Wii. That's right, this gem was an M-rated Nintendo exclusive. And people said the GameCube was a kiddie system.
It's name: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

Oh, thank God, finally. Something with good cover art.

Released way back in the summer of 2002, Eternal Darkness was developed by Silicon Knights - then 2nd party developer for Nintendo and now 2nd party developer for Microsoft. It originally began life as a Nintendo 64 game, but Silicon Knights began to rework it once the GameCube's hardware was released to developers. The game came out to stellar reviews from critics and the few consumers who played it. In terms of sales, the game was a total flop, which is probably why many of you have never heard of it.
So let me tell you why you need to play it. In short, the game is about the struggles of twelve different people in different locations over the course of two thousand years. Their fates, both in life and death, are destined to intertwined as they fight against the minions of three different ancient Chuthlu-like creatures that fight against each other to gain dominance in our world.
To go with this epic story is a wonderfully inventive gameplay system: the sanity meter. As your character stares down the shambling zombie that's fully intent on sucking your intestines up like spaghetti, he or she loses a bit of sanity. As your sanity meter drops, crazy ass things start to happen. Yeah, the walls are bleeding. That fly on your TV screen? That's not really there. Oh, I didn't tell you? The sanity effects don't just screw with your character, they screw with you. Try playing this game in the dark with a surround sound stereo on and tell me that the whispering and crying going on around you doesn't get to you. It will.

That's no hug...

Mix with that stellar writing and voice acting, and you've got yourself one hell of a game. Still not convinced? It's been on several top 100/200 games of all time lists from the likes of Game Informer and IGN. It won Outstanding Achievement in Character or Story Development at the 6th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards in 2002, along with being nominated for Console Game of the Year, Innovation in Console Gaming and Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction.
The problem with my recommendation? Well, the game is kind of hard to find these days, considering it's eight years old and that it didn't sell well enough to warrant a lot of copies being manufactured. Sorry about that.