ZDoom is dead. Lilith.pk3 is alive.

Lilith.pk3 (simply lilith from here) embodies a very important but often overlooked tenet of horror: the concept of wrongness. Cheap horror is easy to make, easy to consume, and easy to identify; all it needs to do is startle you. It needs to make you jump, it needs to make you shout, it needs to stimulate your fight-or-flight response. Cheap horror is often conflated as being “bad” horror, which I think is unfair. There’s always going to be a place for cheap horror, whether it be because we’re looking to be startled or because we’re looking to deride something that thought it could startle us, but the underlying idea of cheap horror is that it’s always kind of fun. We get a thrill at either our own expense or at the expense of the work; we laugh as we come down from the scare because they got us good, or we laugh at the creator who thought their screaming Jeff the Killer picture was going to get us. Cheap horror is fun.

I won’t dare call lilith “elevated horror”, largely because I think that’s a term reserved for exclusive use by Letterboxd users who believe themselves to be above shit like Paranormal Activity. But lilith is a very different kind of horror than we usually see in video games, especially those made by independent creators, and even moreso from those creators who are making DOOM wads. lilith doesn’t try to startle; it tries to fuck with you. It worms its way around the corners of your brain and makes you question everything, knowing that something is wrong but not being able to tell what that something is. The clown-vomit graphics that make it impossible to tell what’s a wall, what’s a door, what’s an enemy — they make you paranoid. You start tilting at windmills. You whip around and blast two shells into a skewered UAC soldier because you thought he was an enemy. An ammo box gets recolored and you have to spend precious time figuring out whether or not it’s safe to touch. Your gun disappears while you’re fighting Revenants. You get teleported into a hall of mirrors and unload minigun fire in all directions in the hopes that you hit something. Nothing works the way it’s supposed to. lilith preys on you, like a malevolent spirit. It drains you. lilith is not fun.

As much love as I have for the original two DOOM games, I never got too deep into the fan scene. I played the official episodes, and I messed around with Russian Overkill a few times, but most of my experience with wads was pretty tertiary. With that in mind, I don’t know if lilith was more or less effective on me than it would have been if I was a DOOM veteran. There’s a lot here that’s clearly broken, that clearly doesn’t work the way that it should, but I’m left wondering if there are even more subtle changes that a layman like myself missed out on. Lost Souls felt like they were taking more damage than they otherwise would have, but I’m not sure; Archviles seemed like they had fast monsters enabled just for themselves, but I’m not sure; certain sound effects like screams would play over the music that didn’t sound like they were in the base game, but I’m not sure. This uncertainty, I think, probably adds a lot more than it takes away. Fear of the unknown is a common element of horror, after all. Is it better that I don’t know?

This might be me editorializing a bit, but I started to get the feeling while I was playing that it was leaning into the idea of the body breaking down; of getting old, of falling apart. You’ll walk up a flight of stairs just fine, only to start getting stuck on the exact same set of stairs the next time you try to climb them. You can make out flashes of Doomguy’s face through the garbled mess that is his sprite every now and then, and it sometimes seems like he’s grimacing in pain even when he’s not taking damage. Splash screens between levels warn you that your files are corrupted, that the emergency help commands aren’t working. Text becomes increasingly illegible the further you get. Textures become even more unreadable than they already were. The game ends with text asking “WHO AM I WHO AM I” over and over again with no explanation for whether those are Doomguy’s thoughts, or if it’s lilith speaking directly to the player. Fans who try to make a “lilith explained” are going to wind up short, largely because lilith is playing its cards close to the chest; again, in an era where indie horror seems almost desperate to have MatPat make a video for them, lilith defies explanation. The closest thing we have to any out-of-universe explanation is a note from the author about how they used to keep magnets on top of their DOOM floppies. There’s something to understand here, something that exists, but it’s unknowable. We can guess, but we can’t know. Nothing is explained. Nothing can be understood.

A lot of rules are being broken, here. One level starts you off in a maze, and as you walk around it, you start being bitten by a Pinky. You look around and you don't see shit. Your immediate assumption is that there's a Specter, so you back up and shoot, and you hit nothing. You step forward again and get bitten again. You look around a second time and notice a Pinky at the far end of the hall biting you from all the way down there because it has hitscan. Imp fireballs will linger in the air where they're thrown, and walking into a stationary one will deal full damage. Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds shoot massive barrages of rockets and laser blasts, but they travel in slow motion; if you don't keep moving, you'll get rocked by a wall of heavy ordinance. I was going to take a minute to talk about how the maps are laid out, but then I realized that the automaps have been published online and I can just show you some pictures, instead. What is this? What the fuck is this?

It shouldn’t go unsaid that this mod made people fucking mad. While I think a lot of people largely just didn’t get it — it’s equally likely that an artsy wad was hardly the thing that some were booting up 1994’s best shooter to play — the most notable person that it pissed off was Graf Zahl. So-named after the localized German title for the Count of Counting, Graf Zahl shit his fucking ass over lilith taking home a Cacoaward. His shitfit was unique, however, because he had skin in the game; lilith relies wholly on exploiting bugs found exclusively in ZDoom, and the mod refuses to run if you play it in any of the significantly more popular and not-deprecated source ports such as GZDoom. Graf Zahl contributed quite a bit to ZDoom, and GZDoom was a fork that he originally made (if you’ve ever wondered why it’s called “GZDoom”, it’s because those are his initials). Seeing someone exploit his old, bad code and get celebrated for it while some of his favorite GZDoom-exclusive wads got snubbed made him so mad that he threatened to quit developing GZDoom entirely. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such threats. The last time he’d done it, he purged his project pages; still, though, mirrors of GZDoom were back up and running within a few days at most, and his absence was barely even felt by the larger community until he returned four years later. Him getting mad again meant that everyone openly mocked him for a bit and moved on, certain that he’d never follow through on quitting or purging his uploads. Some of the co-developers of GZDoom took his threats seriously, but they were entirely hot air, and he went back to continuing his work like nothing ever happened. It’s a strange and funny footnote to a DOOM mod that’s otherwise pretty harrowing.

Far from just being a novelty made to stoke some flames, however, lilith is clearly as remarkable as it is painful to look at. Predating so many of the works that others will inevitably draw comparisons to — MyHouse, Cruelty Squad — this feels foundational. Those knee-deep in the DOOM modding community might get even more out of it than I did. The more that you know, the easier it is to circumvent your expectations. What's here is confusing, frustrating, and a visual feast; lilith is something that you'll never be able to forget.

But something is wrong. But something is wrong. But something is wrong.