DOOM is a science-fiction first-person shooter developed by id Software on the id Tech 1 engine, and re-released by Nerve Software via the Unity engine. Alone and outnumbered on the distant moon Phobos, the player-controlled Doom Marine must push their way through labyrinthine outposts and hoards of demons to make their escape back to Earth.

The stages of id Software's Wolfenstein 3D resembled an abstract imprint more than any kind of real-life spaces. Certainly, a lot of assets in that game evoked its theme well. But while the artwork conveyed a Nazi prison castle decently fine, the architecture itself held no real regard for the forms or functions of actual castles. The levels of Wolfenstein 3D were arcane and intricate mazes of convolution and deadly endlessness. But id didn't really have a choice. The technical limitations of the time wouldn't have allowed for anything more lifelike, with the level designers having to contend with flat colors for their ceilings and floors, flatter layouts without any height variation of any kind, chunky grid-based architecture, and a serious pixel-budget.

All of this makes it ever more curious that, even after doing away with those limitations in this first-person shooter followup, DOOM—the culmination of unbelievable technical and aesthetic innovation, with textured floors and ceilings, complex, varied height differentials, higher resolution textures, a revolutionary new audio system, and more—the level designers chose to use all of this higher fidelity to depict this game's chief settings (corporate labs, military research bases, and, indeed, castles, among others) with the exact same degree of totally abstract, dreamlike impressionism that Wolfenstein 3D had employed. The architecture on display is more complex and finely sculpted, but no closer to resembling anything that actually exists in real life. Free from the constraints that forced Wolfenstein 3D to be so abstract, DOOM gets to deliberately choose to be abstract in a way more rigorous and artistically bold. It's a style now. The tech bases and hellish chapels of DOOM are as undefined and esoteric as any Nazi castles that came before. But now, they impart their lo-fi dreamscapes upon the player in maddening high definition.

Why the non-representational level-design? Exploring DOOM's levels takes the player on a coherent emotional journey across three episodes (with a fourth added post-release), beginning with mundane military bases and technological facilities and distorting and unfolding further with every map until the player is exploring the trenches of a pulsating, glowing vision of Hell. This abstraction would be pushed even further in DOOM's eventual sequel, but here, there is still a kind of intuitive artistic sense to the environments. Nonsensical pillars are comprised of computer terminals or gothic marble, the texture-work on repeated mechanical fixtures like switches and doors change with each episode's theme, and most maps have distinct indoor and outdoor regions with their own aesthetics to differentiate them. The only story really being told is that of the player and their hunt for secrets and blood, but the texture-work sells the environments in the moment. The impressionistic visuals instill a hazy reactivity in the player, a permanent present-tense awareness that heightens the combat's punch.

It really is impressive how punchy that combat is. The core combat design of DOOM is fluid and hard-hitting, with movement that just feels right even at its absurd speed. Everything, from the rate of fire of each gun in the player's arsenal, to the chance of interrupting enemy animations with gunfire, to even the different ammo capacity for different guns, clicks into place. The roster of demons the player will be put up against all provide differing and intense forms or pressure, allowing varied mobs to push the player around the play space until, like untying a monstrous knot, the player takes out each of their foes. But the gameplay fails at times to fully express itself with the relatively limited variety in its third and fourth episodes. DOOM lacks meaningful damage sinks, with the two toughest foes having a 66.6% difference in health. This means that, excluding boss monsters, the heavier firepower in the player's arsenal rarely has moments to really punch in its own weight class.

The maps themselves are their own kind of enemy. Riddling and confounding mazes are filled with traps and secrets. The first episode, largely the work of legendary designer John Romero, has its finger on the player's pulse more than any other episode, guiding them through an increasingly complex series of mazes, no two alike. But as the game gets less refined in its later episodes, it also grows more alive, almost in tandem with the hellish corruption overtaking the visuals. The player explores eerie, liminal hallways that stretch too far, find vast fields of crucifixes, and find themselves solving more and more opaque navigational puzzles and contending with exhilarating ambushes. Perhaps the most surprising thing about DOOM is how legitimately unsettling it is, employing its newfound capacity for immersion to draw the player into a dynamic and bloodthirsty world. But ultimately, this world is theirs for the taking, and that back and forth of fear and superiority is at the heart of DOOM.

Ultimately, DOOM is a deathless testament to its era. Bold and provocative in both its themes and its technical wizardry. Everything from the music to the attitude speaks to a transgressive cultural moment long past us today. But the best parts of DOOM will never age. Its consistent emotional arc tells a story all its own, one whose scenes are born not of dialogue but of innately dramatic and satisfying gameplay. DOOM is a rollicking search-and-destroy-a-thon that drives its players past futuristic science into an immortal, sinister dimension of pure adversity, with beckoning secrets and thrilling combat punctuating every bloody moment.

Doom II: Hell on Earth is a science-fiction first-person shooter developed by id Software on the id Tech 1 engine, and re-released by Nerve Software via the Unity engine. Taking place after the events of Doom, the player-controlled Doom Marine is let loose across a sinister and devilish network of Earthen and demonic cities alike to secure mankind's survival in the face of a full-frontal invasion from Hell.

There's no one quite so persistently unlucky as the Doom Marine. No one, except possibly Ashley Williams of The Evil Dead fame. At the end of his sophomoric misadventure, Ash was transported back in time to the medieval era against his will, a twisting of the blade only marginally less bleak than the burning Texan cities and beloved pet rabbit on a stake waiting to greet the Doom Marine after his maiden voyage through space and Hell. There's never been an Ash Williams simulator quite like Doom 1 and 2, channeling the ludicrous violence, grim horror and crass charm of the films in a way even the official Evil Dead: The Game couldn't quite pull off. There's just no rest for the wicked, boom-stick and chainsaw notwithstanding. But after the nihilistically mean cliffhanger concluding the first Doom game, so evocative of The Evil Dead as it was, Doom II asks its players an interesting question: "Do you think you could do better than he did? Will you fight for your happy ending, tooth and nail, blood and guts spilled loose from your enemies, cutting through the ferocious tides of their ilk, and ultimately come out on top, triumphant over a job well done?" Ultimately, if you'll pardon my language, Doom II asks its player, "Can you Army of Darkness this !@#%*?"

They'll have to pay to express their answer either way. Doom's first episode, released as free "shareware" online, pulled a similar trick, ending its eight maps with an equally nasty cliffhanger. The player would have to order a copy over the mail for the full, "registered" version of the game to see what came next. Tying the progressive cruelty of the Doom Marine's dwindling circumstances to the tantalizing promise of further outrageous empowerment was the name of the game, a strong sales pitch for the kind of experience Doom was providing. Here in Doom II, id was ready to move on to something bigger, and so set the stage for a more concrete resolution. The only proviso being that the player fights hard enough to see it through to the end.

It's good that the thematic hook is so strong, because on a software level, Doom II represents far less of a technological leap forward than its predecessor did. The capabilities of the engine aren't substantially different (if you play the fully patched versions of both games, they aren't different whatsoever), and the designers seem to be pushing up against these limitations at every turn, from certain inelegantly coded new enemy attacks, to representative spaces that completely fail to resemble their inspirations. In that way, Doom II represents nothing so much as another commercial upgrade of Doom Episode 1, featuring more of what the later episodes of that game did: new weapons, new enemies, and new environments. Doom II has twice as many enemies in its bestiary, one new weapon to balance the scales, and a whole host of perplexingly unique set dressings for its violence. The enemies and weapons add a much needed variety and breathing room into the design without nearing a point of bloat or exhausting the player. These expanded elements tune Doom's immortal gameplay loop to the sharpest peak the series would ever reach, a dynamic roster of obstacles and scenarios which are enviable in their elegance, creativity and precision. The new environments, on the other hand, are a whole other story.

Doom II's levels are odder than anything in the first game; more abstract, more sprawling, more experimental with their layouts and gameplay progressions. The only thing they're less of is "comprehensible". Doom's level themes were razor-sharp, even with the impressionistic, gameplay-first level design. Military research bases were filled with machine doors, barrels and rivers of radioactive byproducts, and tinkering computer consoles. Hellish chapels heralded sigils of Baphomet, lakes of blood, and red marble pedestals carrying still-beating hearts. Here in Doom II, it's often impossible to guess what type of environment you're supposed to be in in the first place; bizarre chambers are filled with strobing lights and an array of pillars, or a field of monolithic structures separated by a chasm of lava.

The abstruse impressions of nowhere-places give off a clumsy "dungeon master drawing on a sheet of grid-paper" impression, one that is charming in how much experienced Doom-mappers can see the seams. But the weirdly desolate tone of the new spaces carries its own dreary potency, in a way. Doom II feels more like a dream than the first game, a hazy nightmare-memory of cities, libraries, governmental centers and research installations, the only real rhyme, reason or direction being the spare ammo lying on the floor, the crowds of bloodthirsty enemies, and the allure of forward progress. That said, the actual narrative of Doom II struggles to match itself to the level theming quite as effectively as its predecessor. The story itself, starting off with a mission to shuttle the last remaining survivors off-world via a great spaceship, feels too high concept for the anonymously gloomy environments, and as you progress into Hell for the third act, much of it lacks the bite that Hell had in the original game. Here, Hell is more of a subterranean dungeon of strange rock formations and lava. There is very little of the flesh and torment that so enriched the third act of Doom.

Ultimately, Doom II feels less like a true sequel to Doom and more like a gift to the fans. With it, id perfected Doom's design, providing a bedrock for modders and amateur level designers to test the software's limits for decades to come. The world of Doom modding has proved to be as immortal as the games themselves, breathlessly innovating and reimagining Doom for nearly thirty years at the time of writing, with no signs of dying out on the horizon. The vast majority of these mods use Doom II as a base. When the source code for id Tech 1 was made public domain in 1999, fans broke off those limits, paving the way for further transformation and revitalization for these classic games, while also providing, in return, the bedrock of code that id and Nerve Software themselves would pull on when creating their official modern ports of the Doom duology. It all began, really, with Doom II. Doom II was where the sandbox expanded. But, perhaps more crucially, the levels of Sandy Petersen, American McGee and John Romero, with all their seamful creativity and inviting playfulness, asked the player another question, as the text of the happy ending rolled out its final character: "Do you think you can do better then we did?"

"Can you Quake this !@#%*?"