The creators of the 2002 GameCube horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem will launch a crowdfunding campaign for a "spiritual successor" called Shadow of the Eternals on Monday, the game enthusiast website IGN said today.

IGN says it will release the full details on the game on Monday; for now it has posted a trailer (above).

Denis Dyack, head of Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, is reportedly involved with the project. However, the website that the trailer points to shows that the game is in development by a brand new studio called Precursor Games. It has a Facebook page that was founded on July 9, 2012, but its website has no information other than a countdown clock to the commencement of the crowdfunding drive.

One assumes the connection between Silicon Knights and Precursor will be spelled out by the impending IGN story and crowdfunding campaign. The crowdfunding site Kickstarter has not been mentioned specifically, leaving open the possibility of Shadow using a different crowdfunding site or a custom one.

In October, as part of a behind-the-scenes report on the difficult development process of Silicon Knights' last game X-Men Destiny, Kotaku reported that the Canadian developer was down to a staff of five employees, and had been working on a pitch for Eternal Darkness 2 that it was showing to publishers. If this report was true, it's possible that Shadow of the Eternals is this very pitch, with the Eternal Darkness branding removed. Certainly its developers are not downplaying the connection to the GameCube game.

Update: Clues via Google Cache? ——————————-

Shortly following the announcement, a NeoGAF member did some digging and turned up a Google cached version of an old page hosted on the Precursor Games website. It appears to contain an in-progress version of the crowdfunding pitch, in which the game is referred to by the title Shadow of the Ancients.

The page says that the game will be a series of 12 episodes, each with 2-4 hours of gameplay. Like Eternal Darkness, it will feature in-game "Sanity Effects" that play with the player's mind, although it will ask the community to create and submit their own concepts for these. Again, according to this page, the game is planned for release on the PC and Wii U, around the third quarter of 2014. The game's plot is described thusly:

In Shadow of the Ancients, we follow the investigations of Detective Paul Becker, who is called to one of the bloodiest massacres in Louisiana state history. Only two survivors remain from a brutal conflict between two rival cults at the abandoned Pleasant View Sanitarium: one a suave, clean-cut business man – and the other a hardened, rogue-like biker. Both men have seemingly lost all memory of who they are – and yet they are compelled to kill each other. As Becker begins his interrogations of the suspects, their combined recollections create the world of Shadow of the Ancients. You play Paul Becker, a Louisiana police detective. You also play Clara Rusznyák, a handmaiden to the noblewoman, Erzébet Bathory.

Even assuming this information was accurate at the time the page was created, since this is clearly a work-in-progress, these details (like the game's title) may have changed. We'll see what IGN has to say about the matter on Monday.

Update 2: In response to the early leaks, IGN has put some early details about the game online well ahead of schedule, confirming the game's release in 12 episodes on the PC and Wii U.