After recently playing through a string of games I felt mostly lukewarm about, it's a fantastic feeling to revisit a game from my younger days that actually felt better now than when I first played it. (granted, that's mostly because I was a wuss when I was young and only played with cheats, but that's neither here nor there.)

I decided to go in for the authentic experience, eschewing the standard WASD/mouselook scheme and using the original keyboard controls, playing on the normal difficulty (Hurt Me Plenty). While it took a while to get used to and circle-strafing felt very stiff, it felt fantastic to experience the game as it was balanced for. I spent a fair bit of time on a knife-edge on the brink of death but the game never felt unfair (until the bonus chapter).

The beauty of this game lies in how it can suck anybody in and give you a viscerally satisfying experience no matter your skill level. I spent much of my run moving cautiously and conservatively while trying to kite enemies; an expert player would engage aggressively and blow through the levels with a time-attack approach. Both extremes are just as viable and just as satisfying thanks to some of the best level design I've seen in FPSs regardless of age.

With only brief text interludes between chapters, the game still manages to tell a story through its in-game details; the architecture becomes less mechanical and more organic as you descend further into Hell, and the dread you feel as you see the dead Hell Barons at the beginning of a certain level is one of the most iconic moments in all of gaming for me.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack, which is both amazing as well as 100% suitable for the game's tone. One very small quibble with the soundtrack is how often they fall back onto the same chord progression. Fun activity: try to see how many tracks you can sing the Adam West Batman theme to. The answer: most of them.

This review is so gushy because there's so much good about the game. The secrets are rarely completely obtuse, but are so well-hidden and thought out that I missed out quite a few of them despite having played it before. And it seems the developers really thought of everything: you automatically switch to another weapon if you run out of ammo during a firefight, but the game is programmed to never auto-switch you to the rocket launcher so you won't accidentally blow yourself up. The amount of detail and thought put into every single aspect of this game was unmatched at the time, and I'd put this near the top of any list of games that everyone should experience at least once.