My friend Garrett got this game for me the day it came out, back when lockdown first started in 2020. I was in the middle of packing at the time because I was going to move back to California in less than two weeks. For the week-and-a-half I had left in Portland, Oregon, I played a lot of Doom Eternal in an empty apartment, in a barren bedroom with only a desk, a computer, a mattress, and the last two-and-a-half years squared away into nine or ten boxes.
I first played the original Doom in High School on the Xbox 360 arcade (Gen Z self-reporting). I bought it for $5. I convinced my friend Garrett to buy Doom and we played through the whole game together. I played the whole game alone a few times afterwards.
I played a lot of gzdoom on my then-Windows 7 PC. I also played games like Half-Life 1 and Quake. I played 2009's Wolfenstein on Xbox 360. I didn't like it. I preordered 2011's Rage on Xbox 360 and went to my first Gamestop midnight release. I only remember a few people were there for Rage, and I was one of them. There was another line for another game (maybe it was Dark Souls? I don't remember). I remember staying up that night to play Rage. I remember being surprised the game ran at 60fps on my Xbox 360.
I upgraded to a GTX 970 to play Fallout 4. I preordered Doom 2016 on PC. I remembered falling in love with the new movement, the graphics, the soundtrack, the guns. From the first "Rip and tear," to the final title drop with Mick Gordon’s take on “At Doom's Gate,” I was hooked on id's newest rendition of Doom.
But fast-forward to that day, in that cold apartment: I sat in a bedroom, half-empty, and stoked the dying flames of precious time I had left in Oregon. I committed myself to Doom Eternal and to enjoy my last days away from home no matter what.
My first playthrough was on Ultraviolence per Civvie11's proverb that it was “the Gentleman’s way to play Doom,” which is even funnier in hindsight if you’ve seen his Doom Eternal video. I watched it again just now and noticed that his tone changes towards the game around Level 3, when the game has introduced all of its mechanics and (as Civvie11 later reveals) when he bumped his difficulty down to “Hurt Me Plenty”. I can’t really blame him either. When I first played Doom Eternal, I really believed it was supposed to be the same rhythm as Doom 2016, even thought I’d been out of practice when I started dying over and over in level one.
No, the game is really just that fast. Almost too fast. Like the-wheels-are-about-to-fall-off fast.
Doom Eternal expects you to learn quick. You have a chainsaw that you need to be using every 30-60 seconds for ammo. You have a flamethrower you need to be using every 15-30 seconds for armor.
Imps and zombies are no longer just easy rhythms. They’re supply crates on legs with weapons. They’re a feasibly never-ending resource fountain. Fodder gamifies the inventory management of Doom Eternal. Since your ammo reserves are so low, you’ll need to use your chainsaw a lot (and you can use your chainsaw a lot because it regenerates one of its uses over time); since you can be killed in a few hits, you’ll need health to stay alive, and armor to cushion the blows (and you can get health by performing finishing moves (glory kills) on enemies, and you can get armor by setting enemies on fire with your flame belch, which also regenerates uses over time).
There’s also the blood punch, a super-strong melee attack that can be charged by performing the same action which rewards health – the glory kill. You can later upgrade the blood punch to be charged when collecting health or armor while you’re already maxed out; in other words, by playing well, you can use more powerful attacks more often.
It’s just a really good gameplay loop. Players really need to use everything to their advantage, every tool, every weapon. Most first-person shooters will give players a problem: an enemy with a similar arsenal, or an even stronger arsenal, wants you dead; pick whichever gun you want to solve this problem. Doom Eternal gives players similar problems, but asks different questions: what enemies are you up against? What are their weaknesses? Do you have the resources necessary to defeat these enemies? How many fodder enemies are nearby to aid you in such an encounter?
That’s just one example. There are a lot of questions Doom Eternal asks. Although it may not seem like it, Doom Eternal is asking you hundreds of questions every minute. Every combat encounter is a test, an appraisal of the player’s ability as well as their decision-making in a stressful environment; as in any test, it always feels like there’s a few questions I haven’t seen before. I’m thinking usually, “Crap, we were supposed to study for this?” Doom Eternal captures that same feeling of, “I didn’t know this was going to be on the test.” And really, that might’ve been why I was so rattled when I’d first played it. It was too much at the time.
The original Doom is a pretty spooky game. Although it’s easy to dismiss its dated visuals nowadays (for posers and criminals), back then it’s obvious there was almost nothing else like it. Even nowadays I still tense up during sections where visible light dips to levels of near-blackness in combat encounters, or the many mazes in the first episode where the lights only come up intermittently, seldom revealing the monsters stalking the myriad narrow hallways.
A lot of people have reassessed Doom 3’s action-horror direction as the wrong choice; essentially, NOT Doom. Personally, I think it was an understandable decision. Although the game does take some cues from Half-Life (as did every FPS at the time), it was still nothing if not an admirable reinterpretation of Doom for a modern audience.
Doom 2016’s horror is understated, really only tactile in its art, its lore, its atmosphere… the game moves at 100mph almost every level though, so it’s difficult to feel “scared” at any point. As Steam User BACONGUDEN puts it, the game is a “reverse survival horror game, where the demons are trying to survive”.
Doom Eternal’s horror is the awful, icy dread of hopeless unpreparedness. Even so, the game offers players a generous amount of 1ups – like, ACTUAL 1ups, extra lives that let you respawn mid-combat with full health, zero downtime. I thought this was a weird decision but on my second playthrough I really started to understand and appreciate them; then, I went right back to thinking they were a weird decision…
On my first playthrough I died plenty of times, burned through all of my lives early on, and only considered these 1ups “get-out-of-jail-free cards” (Gmanlives). Although they were useful sometimes, I was always frustrated when I died – typically because of something stupid – knowing I’d wasted an extra life instead of just being able to respawn always felt like being kicked while I was down.
On my second playthrough, I kept a surplus of extra lives – around ten or fifteen – and rarely died. 1ups kept me in the action. Death was a momentary lapse in combat, a slap on the wrist, and then I was right back to gore-soaked ultraviolence.
I had to wonder, was this too easy? 1ups started to feel like a crutch. In a lot of ways, they were and are. Some tools seem to offer almost too MUCH leniency; thus, the prospect of a self-imposed challenge becomes a worthwhile consideration. I’m sure many players choose to ignore 1ups as they choose to ignore the BFG-9000, or the Unmakyr, or the Crucible. Personally, as I neared completion on my second playthrough, I fought the urge to use many of these “crutches,” and would rarely default to them. These were still good and, in my opinion, necessary additions to the player’s arsenal if only because they DO lower the bar to entry for some players. Even if a player has to scrape and claw their way to a victory, that’s still one more player able to roll credits due in large part to the game’s concessions.
Doom Eternal is not the Dark Souls of FPS games, although it can certainly feel that way on harder difficulties. Much more comparable would be the frenzied, fast-paced encounters of Bloodborne with its phrenetic combat, weapon “modes”, and health regen mechanics, although to anybody that’s actually played these games, the comparison would be superficial at best and tenuous at worst. I would argue that Doom Eternal is much easier if only because of its traditional difficulty options. Self-imposed rules and challenges seem only secondary to the developer’s actual intended experience. Although we may consider them “crutches,” these additions are here because developers intend for us to use them.
I understand that “crutches” does have something of an ableist connotation here, but I think it may be appropriate. Some people need crutches to walk. Some people who need crutches don’t get them. In some cases, people only need crutches until they can learn to move without them. Ease of access is a type of accessibility all on its own. I could’ve turned down the difficulty at any moment but that wasn’t how I played Doom. Then again, I never really learned the lessons I needed to learn that first playthrough. I scraped and clawed my way to victory over and over, but it’d never felt earned.
I wasted so many lives on the first Marauder that I felt embarrassed finally tearing him down for the first time. At the end of that first encounter, I realized how big of a disadvantage I was at, really, because of how many lives I’d wasted. So, imagine my reaction to finding another Marauder only two levels later.
But it wasn’t like the game hadn’t been preparing me for this scenario. The first encounter with the Doom Hunter is bookended by the game throwing an additional pair of Doom Hunters at the player which, on my first playthrough, did feel like a cruel joke. The original Doom kept players on their toes with a variety of “Gotcha!” encounters, that is, the now-often frowned-upon “monster closets,” ambushes where enemies would descend upon the player all at once. Some people still find this trope acceptable or, at the very least, manageable – I can breeze through the original Doom fairly quickly nowadays, but that’s only because I’ve had well over a decade to acclimate myself to the map layout and enemy variety of that game.
The first time I rolled credits on Doom Eternal, I felt like I’d missed something. Every review heralded the entry as the Second Coming of Boomer Shooter Christ, but Doom Eternal felt distinctly un-Boomer Shooter to me. Doom Eternal’s breakneck pace left me reeling between combat encounters. All its shiny new mechanics and gameplay elements were sharp, polished, serrated spikes of a suffocating Iron Maiden of player expectations.
I realize now that my aversion towards the game in the subsequent months and years later (2020 and 2021) were almost entirely personal. I’d’ve given Doom Eternal a 6 or 7/10 and resigned, “Good, but not for me”; I’d’ve imagined myself too stubborn, my playstyle too ingrained, an old dog with no new tricks.
But my friend Nikko, bless his heart, would not stop talking about Doom Eternal after he’d finished it. He’d played Doom 2016 and enjoyed it, but he was head over heels for Doom Eternal, which surprised me. I watched him devour the Master Levels like they were nothing. He swore that the Ancient Gods Part 1 DLC turned him into a war-hardened Doom Eternal veteran. He asked me when I would play the DLC, and I told him, “I don’t know”. I always want to play new games, broaden my horizons, expose myself to unique experiences – very rarely do I return to games within a year or two’s time.
Eventually, however, after Nikko bought me the Ancient Gods DLCs, I decided to prioritize playing through Doom Eternal again (it took me a year to put aside this time, for an idea of how congested my backlog currently is).
When I finally returned to Doom Eternal, I decided to play again on Ultraviolence. Although I would usually return to play most games on harder, higher difficulties, I thought, “No, let’s pick up where we left off and go from there”.
My experience with Doom Eternal in 2023 was like riding a bike. Not only did I remember how to play, but my time spent away from the game almost seemed to heighten my experience in regards to the austere, rigorous playstyle required to conquer Doom Eternal’s toughest challenges.
Areas that once seemed utterly impenetrable were suddenly picturesque playgrounds, perfect plateaus, peaks of videogame virtuosity – an interpretive ultraviolence cascade of blood and gore, every keystroke another headshot, or glory kill, or vivisection; horrendous mutilation turned mundane over time, the moment-to-moment was murderous frenzy, the results immediate, mere moments of mastery compounded into countless hours of adrenaline-fueled, demon-shredding Zen.
I remembered that original experience of playing Doom Eternal on a GTX 970, on a 1080p monitor, barely hitting 60 frames, in a half-empty bedroom in a dead apartment; then, there I was, snapped into blistering, death-defying speeds, well over 100 frames on an RTX 3080 Ti at 4K, in the bedroom I grew up in, California.
To be honest, coming back home was my only failure state when I moved to Portland five, almost six years ago, now. And I failed. Really, I fucked up plenty of times. Made enough to pay rent on temp jobs and gigs alone until the lockdown, and then everything went to fresh hell and nothing made sense during a critical time in my life, which was the worst possible time for everything to capsize, but shit. There I was. End of my rope. Playing Doom Eternal and trying to ignore that I was already game over.
I’m not someone who believes in living without regrets. I’m positive nobody does everything they set out to achieve. There’s always should and shouldn’t-haves, moments I wish I could redo, but yeah, I know it doesn’t work like that. Doom Eternal is a hyper-literalization of the countless conflicts we often confront, as in every opponent regards the player with contempt – and although some problems exist to empower us (fodder), others appear to ruin our lives, forever.
The problems don’t change, but we adapt and overcome. Of course, this is a video game with upgrade systems, and secrets, and get-out-of-jail-free cards, but nonetheless, we adapt and we overcome.
So, it didn’t kill me, but what doesn’t kill us doesn’t always make us stronger, though sometimes it may invigorate us, or inconvenience us, or ingrain us to expect one thing or another, although the main thing is that we never stop learning. We never stop developing strategies. We never stop improving, building on the foundation beneath us. Doom Eternal is not 1993’s Doom, neither is it 2016’s Doom and, in some ways, it’s hardly even Doom – Eternal claims its stake as a monstrously original and unparalleled shooter experience, transcending FPS hallmarks and boomer shooter staples, and carving its methodology into the unsuspecting psyches of players daring enough to meet its hellish difficulty head-on.
My first time was a nightmare. The mistakes piled up over time. I was already living neck deep in them. I even remember the level where I could physically feel myself lagging behind, unable to keep cadence with my demonic dance partners. I died again, and again, and again. Slow. Sloppy. Mediocre. I still hadn’t seen my first Marauder at that point.
I returned to that same room with dread in my heart two years later, but it was different this time. It was cold, calculated murder, but I was lightning, ripping through unending hellspawn like giftwrap.
I remembered that cold, empty apartment, and it’s a lifetime away now. I rolled credits again. I can hardly remember that first playthrough anymore. The hopelessness, the frustration, none of that registers now.
I returned to Doom Eternal and saw what I wish I’d seen when I’d first played it. If only I’d seen it then.
“You remain... unbroken... for your fight... is eternal.”
I first played the original Doom in High School on the Xbox 360 arcade (Gen Z self-reporting). I bought it for $5. I convinced my friend Garrett to buy Doom and we played through the whole game together. I played the whole game alone a few times afterwards.
I played a lot of gzdoom on my then-Windows 7 PC. I also played games like Half-Life 1 and Quake. I played 2009's Wolfenstein on Xbox 360. I didn't like it. I preordered 2011's Rage on Xbox 360 and went to my first Gamestop midnight release. I only remember a few people were there for Rage, and I was one of them. There was another line for another game (maybe it was Dark Souls? I don't remember). I remember staying up that night to play Rage. I remember being surprised the game ran at 60fps on my Xbox 360.
I upgraded to a GTX 970 to play Fallout 4. I preordered Doom 2016 on PC. I remembered falling in love with the new movement, the graphics, the soundtrack, the guns. From the first "Rip and tear," to the final title drop with Mick Gordon’s take on “At Doom's Gate,” I was hooked on id's newest rendition of Doom.
But fast-forward to that day, in that cold apartment: I sat in a bedroom, half-empty, and stoked the dying flames of precious time I had left in Oregon. I committed myself to Doom Eternal and to enjoy my last days away from home no matter what.
My first playthrough was on Ultraviolence per Civvie11's proverb that it was “the Gentleman’s way to play Doom,” which is even funnier in hindsight if you’ve seen his Doom Eternal video. I watched it again just now and noticed that his tone changes towards the game around Level 3, when the game has introduced all of its mechanics and (as Civvie11 later reveals) when he bumped his difficulty down to “Hurt Me Plenty”. I can’t really blame him either. When I first played Doom Eternal, I really believed it was supposed to be the same rhythm as Doom 2016, even thought I’d been out of practice when I started dying over and over in level one.
No, the game is really just that fast. Almost too fast. Like the-wheels-are-about-to-fall-off fast.
Doom Eternal expects you to learn quick. You have a chainsaw that you need to be using every 30-60 seconds for ammo. You have a flamethrower you need to be using every 15-30 seconds for armor.
Imps and zombies are no longer just easy rhythms. They’re supply crates on legs with weapons. They’re a feasibly never-ending resource fountain. Fodder gamifies the inventory management of Doom Eternal. Since your ammo reserves are so low, you’ll need to use your chainsaw a lot (and you can use your chainsaw a lot because it regenerates one of its uses over time); since you can be killed in a few hits, you’ll need health to stay alive, and armor to cushion the blows (and you can get health by performing finishing moves (glory kills) on enemies, and you can get armor by setting enemies on fire with your flame belch, which also regenerates uses over time).
There’s also the blood punch, a super-strong melee attack that can be charged by performing the same action which rewards health – the glory kill. You can later upgrade the blood punch to be charged when collecting health or armor while you’re already maxed out; in other words, by playing well, you can use more powerful attacks more often.
It’s just a really good gameplay loop. Players really need to use everything to their advantage, every tool, every weapon. Most first-person shooters will give players a problem: an enemy with a similar arsenal, or an even stronger arsenal, wants you dead; pick whichever gun you want to solve this problem. Doom Eternal gives players similar problems, but asks different questions: what enemies are you up against? What are their weaknesses? Do you have the resources necessary to defeat these enemies? How many fodder enemies are nearby to aid you in such an encounter?
That’s just one example. There are a lot of questions Doom Eternal asks. Although it may not seem like it, Doom Eternal is asking you hundreds of questions every minute. Every combat encounter is a test, an appraisal of the player’s ability as well as their decision-making in a stressful environment; as in any test, it always feels like there’s a few questions I haven’t seen before. I’m thinking usually, “Crap, we were supposed to study for this?” Doom Eternal captures that same feeling of, “I didn’t know this was going to be on the test.” And really, that might’ve been why I was so rattled when I’d first played it. It was too much at the time.
The original Doom is a pretty spooky game. Although it’s easy to dismiss its dated visuals nowadays (for posers and criminals), back then it’s obvious there was almost nothing else like it. Even nowadays I still tense up during sections where visible light dips to levels of near-blackness in combat encounters, or the many mazes in the first episode where the lights only come up intermittently, seldom revealing the monsters stalking the myriad narrow hallways.
A lot of people have reassessed Doom 3’s action-horror direction as the wrong choice; essentially, NOT Doom. Personally, I think it was an understandable decision. Although the game does take some cues from Half-Life (as did every FPS at the time), it was still nothing if not an admirable reinterpretation of Doom for a modern audience.
Doom 2016’s horror is understated, really only tactile in its art, its lore, its atmosphere… the game moves at 100mph almost every level though, so it’s difficult to feel “scared” at any point. As Steam User BACONGUDEN puts it, the game is a “reverse survival horror game, where the demons are trying to survive”.
Doom Eternal’s horror is the awful, icy dread of hopeless unpreparedness. Even so, the game offers players a generous amount of 1ups – like, ACTUAL 1ups, extra lives that let you respawn mid-combat with full health, zero downtime. I thought this was a weird decision but on my second playthrough I really started to understand and appreciate them; then, I went right back to thinking they were a weird decision…
On my first playthrough I died plenty of times, burned through all of my lives early on, and only considered these 1ups “get-out-of-jail-free cards” (Gmanlives). Although they were useful sometimes, I was always frustrated when I died – typically because of something stupid – knowing I’d wasted an extra life instead of just being able to respawn always felt like being kicked while I was down.
On my second playthrough, I kept a surplus of extra lives – around ten or fifteen – and rarely died. 1ups kept me in the action. Death was a momentary lapse in combat, a slap on the wrist, and then I was right back to gore-soaked ultraviolence.
I had to wonder, was this too easy? 1ups started to feel like a crutch. In a lot of ways, they were and are. Some tools seem to offer almost too MUCH leniency; thus, the prospect of a self-imposed challenge becomes a worthwhile consideration. I’m sure many players choose to ignore 1ups as they choose to ignore the BFG-9000, or the Unmakyr, or the Crucible. Personally, as I neared completion on my second playthrough, I fought the urge to use many of these “crutches,” and would rarely default to them. These were still good and, in my opinion, necessary additions to the player’s arsenal if only because they DO lower the bar to entry for some players. Even if a player has to scrape and claw their way to a victory, that’s still one more player able to roll credits due in large part to the game’s concessions.
Doom Eternal is not the Dark Souls of FPS games, although it can certainly feel that way on harder difficulties. Much more comparable would be the frenzied, fast-paced encounters of Bloodborne with its phrenetic combat, weapon “modes”, and health regen mechanics, although to anybody that’s actually played these games, the comparison would be superficial at best and tenuous at worst. I would argue that Doom Eternal is much easier if only because of its traditional difficulty options. Self-imposed rules and challenges seem only secondary to the developer’s actual intended experience. Although we may consider them “crutches,” these additions are here because developers intend for us to use them.
I understand that “crutches” does have something of an ableist connotation here, but I think it may be appropriate. Some people need crutches to walk. Some people who need crutches don’t get them. In some cases, people only need crutches until they can learn to move without them. Ease of access is a type of accessibility all on its own. I could’ve turned down the difficulty at any moment but that wasn’t how I played Doom. Then again, I never really learned the lessons I needed to learn that first playthrough. I scraped and clawed my way to victory over and over, but it’d never felt earned.
I wasted so many lives on the first Marauder that I felt embarrassed finally tearing him down for the first time. At the end of that first encounter, I realized how big of a disadvantage I was at, really, because of how many lives I’d wasted. So, imagine my reaction to finding another Marauder only two levels later.
But it wasn’t like the game hadn’t been preparing me for this scenario. The first encounter with the Doom Hunter is bookended by the game throwing an additional pair of Doom Hunters at the player which, on my first playthrough, did feel like a cruel joke. The original Doom kept players on their toes with a variety of “Gotcha!” encounters, that is, the now-often frowned-upon “monster closets,” ambushes where enemies would descend upon the player all at once. Some people still find this trope acceptable or, at the very least, manageable – I can breeze through the original Doom fairly quickly nowadays, but that’s only because I’ve had well over a decade to acclimate myself to the map layout and enemy variety of that game.
The first time I rolled credits on Doom Eternal, I felt like I’d missed something. Every review heralded the entry as the Second Coming of Boomer Shooter Christ, but Doom Eternal felt distinctly un-Boomer Shooter to me. Doom Eternal’s breakneck pace left me reeling between combat encounters. All its shiny new mechanics and gameplay elements were sharp, polished, serrated spikes of a suffocating Iron Maiden of player expectations.
I realize now that my aversion towards the game in the subsequent months and years later (2020 and 2021) were almost entirely personal. I’d’ve given Doom Eternal a 6 or 7/10 and resigned, “Good, but not for me”; I’d’ve imagined myself too stubborn, my playstyle too ingrained, an old dog with no new tricks.
But my friend Nikko, bless his heart, would not stop talking about Doom Eternal after he’d finished it. He’d played Doom 2016 and enjoyed it, but he was head over heels for Doom Eternal, which surprised me. I watched him devour the Master Levels like they were nothing. He swore that the Ancient Gods Part 1 DLC turned him into a war-hardened Doom Eternal veteran. He asked me when I would play the DLC, and I told him, “I don’t know”. I always want to play new games, broaden my horizons, expose myself to unique experiences – very rarely do I return to games within a year or two’s time.
Eventually, however, after Nikko bought me the Ancient Gods DLCs, I decided to prioritize playing through Doom Eternal again (it took me a year to put aside this time, for an idea of how congested my backlog currently is).
When I finally returned to Doom Eternal, I decided to play again on Ultraviolence. Although I would usually return to play most games on harder, higher difficulties, I thought, “No, let’s pick up where we left off and go from there”.
My experience with Doom Eternal in 2023 was like riding a bike. Not only did I remember how to play, but my time spent away from the game almost seemed to heighten my experience in regards to the austere, rigorous playstyle required to conquer Doom Eternal’s toughest challenges.
Areas that once seemed utterly impenetrable were suddenly picturesque playgrounds, perfect plateaus, peaks of videogame virtuosity – an interpretive ultraviolence cascade of blood and gore, every keystroke another headshot, or glory kill, or vivisection; horrendous mutilation turned mundane over time, the moment-to-moment was murderous frenzy, the results immediate, mere moments of mastery compounded into countless hours of adrenaline-fueled, demon-shredding Zen.
I remembered that original experience of playing Doom Eternal on a GTX 970, on a 1080p monitor, barely hitting 60 frames, in a half-empty bedroom in a dead apartment; then, there I was, snapped into blistering, death-defying speeds, well over 100 frames on an RTX 3080 Ti at 4K, in the bedroom I grew up in, California.
To be honest, coming back home was my only failure state when I moved to Portland five, almost six years ago, now. And I failed. Really, I fucked up plenty of times. Made enough to pay rent on temp jobs and gigs alone until the lockdown, and then everything went to fresh hell and nothing made sense during a critical time in my life, which was the worst possible time for everything to capsize, but shit. There I was. End of my rope. Playing Doom Eternal and trying to ignore that I was already game over.
I’m not someone who believes in living without regrets. I’m positive nobody does everything they set out to achieve. There’s always should and shouldn’t-haves, moments I wish I could redo, but yeah, I know it doesn’t work like that. Doom Eternal is a hyper-literalization of the countless conflicts we often confront, as in every opponent regards the player with contempt – and although some problems exist to empower us (fodder), others appear to ruin our lives, forever.
The problems don’t change, but we adapt and overcome. Of course, this is a video game with upgrade systems, and secrets, and get-out-of-jail-free cards, but nonetheless, we adapt and we overcome.
So, it didn’t kill me, but what doesn’t kill us doesn’t always make us stronger, though sometimes it may invigorate us, or inconvenience us, or ingrain us to expect one thing or another, although the main thing is that we never stop learning. We never stop developing strategies. We never stop improving, building on the foundation beneath us. Doom Eternal is not 1993’s Doom, neither is it 2016’s Doom and, in some ways, it’s hardly even Doom – Eternal claims its stake as a monstrously original and unparalleled shooter experience, transcending FPS hallmarks and boomer shooter staples, and carving its methodology into the unsuspecting psyches of players daring enough to meet its hellish difficulty head-on.
My first time was a nightmare. The mistakes piled up over time. I was already living neck deep in them. I even remember the level where I could physically feel myself lagging behind, unable to keep cadence with my demonic dance partners. I died again, and again, and again. Slow. Sloppy. Mediocre. I still hadn’t seen my first Marauder at that point.
I returned to that same room with dread in my heart two years later, but it was different this time. It was cold, calculated murder, but I was lightning, ripping through unending hellspawn like giftwrap.
I remembered that cold, empty apartment, and it’s a lifetime away now. I rolled credits again. I can hardly remember that first playthrough anymore. The hopelessness, the frustration, none of that registers now.
I returned to Doom Eternal and saw what I wish I’d seen when I’d first played it. If only I’d seen it then.
“You remain... unbroken... for your fight... is eternal.”