Thoughts on playing Doom: The Dark Ages
I’m not even sure why I thought it would be a good idea because I had a completely miserable time with Doom (2016) and found myself avoiding Eternal like the plague. Curiosity? Boredom? Self hatred? No idea. I gave Doom: The Dark Ages a go and nope. Still nope.
Nothing about the game works for me. I do not enjoy moving around in it, I don’t enjoy exploring it, I don’t care for how many buttons it wants me to press or how many different ways it wants me to play with the mechanics because I don’t enjoy engaging with any of them anyway and, the worst of it for me personally, I don’t enjoy looking at it. After the scrappiness of the first reboot, it’s nice to see they have clearly found The Aesthetic they want to run with, it is terminally boring to me. It sounds stupid to criticise a game about demons and hell, things notorious for their lack of living things, for feeling lifeless. And yet, it’s my blog so I can if I want whilst fully appreciating the silliness of it.
Perhaps I have spent too much time with my head in Mignola art which is so very everything to me, perhaps it’s appreciating a whole bunch of different 2000ad and (sometimes vaguely) related takes on vampires, demons, hellscapes and all the rest from so many different artists. Perhaps I am just very weird about these things. I can never rule that one out.
Either way, the only thing I can truly say I appreciated about the game is that the crashing waves were fucking phenomenal. I adored them. The rest bores me on every sensory level possible.
It’s tempting to reach for “it’s not what I want from Doom” and rationalise things through that particular lens but I can’t, in good conscience, say I’m that precious about Doom. I am not. It already is so many things, having been rejigged, reworked, every single aspect treated to a thousand and one variations or more. That’s part of the beauty of Doom. It is legion.
They could call this Doom anything and I would still get no joy from it. They could call it Hellfucker 2000 and I would still struggle to find even the smallest of pleasures. It’s not the name, it’s everything it is, everything it aims to be and that it clearly achieves those aims rather majestically.
It is, in its own ways, an absolute triumph. I watch the eldest play it, whooping away to themselves, giggling, grinning, wanting to show me parts of it in action, revelling in the chaos that fails to work on me. The joy they get from it is infectious. They are having such a grand time with it, it doesn’t matter to me that the game fails to appeal to my taste at every single junction, I have plenty of videogames. I guess the eldest has plenty too but you know, they’re not me, they want different things. They want pretty much everything this new Doom is. Everything I find borderline painful, they do not. Every aesthetic choice that loses me entirely, excites them.
I never want to play Doom: The Dark Ages again. I could watch the eldest play Doom: The Dark Ages again and again and again and alway love seeing it work for them.
What a terrible game. That’s also obviously brilliant.
Damn.