Extra Punctuation  Extra Punctuation The Design of Consuming
Shadow  Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw | 3 Dec 2013 17:30 Extra
Punctuation - RSS 2.0 Consuming Shadow 06  And then there's
sanity meters. I once expressed that I'd rather a game didn't
use stats to explain how I should be feeling emotionally, and
the problem with games like Eternal Darkness where sanity is a
resource that goes up and down is that it's a rather mechanical
approach to something unquantifiable. And when the game has
sanity effects, such as blurry screens and funny noises and
pretending that insects are crawling on the camera lens, they
lose their impact once you've gotten used to it.  I added a
sanity meter to Consuming Shadow because I wanted to give a
sense that the journey your character goes on is constantly
wearing them down, even while medkits and hospital visits
routinely restore them to full health. So there are plenty of
things that chip away at sanity, but there are very few things
that restore it. You can inject recreational drugs t