I took on the forces of hell and won.

No, I didn’t appear on the Jeremy Kyle show, I’m talking of course, about Doom 3. Recently I decided I would play through it again along with its expansion ‘Resurrection of evil’.  Doom 3 is a remake of the 1993 first person shooter game ‘Doom’ and was released in 2004. I played it then and enjoyed it a lot even though it nearly induced real panic on several occasions as it genuinely is pant shittingly frightening most of the way through, in fact its relentless and that’s what I want to talk about. Doom 3 is an exercise in fear and dread.

Three, two, one, shit yourself.

You go into the game like Dirty Harry, ready to open a ‘can of whoop ass’ on those demon bastards but gradually the game wears you down until you cant actually play it alone, you constantly look over your shoulder to see if there is anything there but its just your cat looking at you with disdain and you struggle to open tins of beans(In real life of course, unless I missed the secret ‘beans on toast’ level) due to shaking hands and crushed nerves. But you struggle on. The evil must be defeated and defeat it you will…but not before being shat out the other side a quivering disturbed mess.

Fucking terrifying

At its heart the game is an old school shooter, there is a lot of guns and a lot of action. Once you are actually in a firefight then the action movie game play takes over with shotguns going off and fireballs being thrown at you and an absolutely delightful selection of horrors trying their best to kill you in really awful ways. The real scares are in the build up, you walk down a gloomy Gothic/industrial corridor, you can hear babies screaming in the walls, a vent of steam suddenly shoots out in front of you from a broken pipe and you scream profanities such as ‘Fuckingtwatbastard!’ at the monitor, suddenly all the lights flicker out and you hear the power generator go down, now you are in pitch black, you have to put your gun away to use the flashlight, you can hear something coming in your direction, its getting closer, you frantically sweep the torch around to try and see what it is and…

ARGGHHH!

Note the above screenshot is using a mod to add the flashlight to the pistol. This is cheating. When it happens to me I have no gun out just my flashlight, think I can club it to death with the flashlight? This is where panic sets in fully as you have to decide how to deal with this situation before you die horribly, usually this is to either run away or to try and hit the number key for your most powerful weapon and hope you are on target and don’t miss instead, giving you the pistol with one bullet in it.

He's a lumberjack and he's ok!

You get everything with this game, fear, panic, dread, terror, despair…I could go on. I’d say it very similar to when you watch the film ‘Aliens’, in fact the game is very similar to ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ in design like the techno-Gothic Mars base, the lighting and the feeling of being surrounded by monsters without number. Naturally a game about the forces of hell will contain satanic imagery and Doom 3 almost burns your retinas out with it especially when you actually take a trip to hell itself which if you are sensitive to that sort of thing or are a Christian then I would possibly avoid this game its going to be very funny. Really.  Burning upside down crosses with disemboweled humans nailed to them, rivers of fire, hovering human heads on fire and screaming, the works! Four years on and it still looks very good as you can see from the screen shots, but this only matters because it makes the fear seem more real.

An example of the many environments you will be scared shit less in.

Yes that's right! Upside down human heads with spider legs! They even hiss at you.

Doom 3 is massive, epic even. On hard difficulty(Which is how it should be played) you will get well over 16 hours from it if you went from start to finish and then you have ‘Resurrection of evil’ to look forward to, which probably adds another 9 or 10 hours to that, you will be shitting bricks for weeks, mark my words. I highly recommend playing this if you never have or playing it again if you enjoyed it the first time. Below is a screen grab from the end of the game of the character you play after you have done the job, it could pretty much be a photo of you in real life, drained, worn out, ready to sign up with the next Jehovah’s Witnesses that turn up to your door.

You, after you finish the game.

Its almost like the video game version of self harming or kinky S&M sex games that go wrong. Well they do say there’s a masochist in all of us, don’t they?