Enjoying Chex Quest is not a celebration of its design. It’s not a celebration of expertly crafted combat arenas. It’s a piece of pack-in corporate advertisement for some incredibly mid cereal. And yet something about playing it today just feels so incredibly warm and cozy. The earnestness of its specific innocence is bordering on contagious. Health pickups are glasses of water and delicious plates of fruits and vegetables. The core drive of the plot is protecting the galaxy’s crops of fruits and veggies against the flemoids, a boogery slime-guy race that threatens your very way of life - and more importantly, threatens your access to a balanced breakfast.

Chex Quest really is just DOOM. The weapons behave the same and all have ZORCHer analogs (ZORCHing of course referring to teleporting the flemoids back to whence they came – gibbing the snot-dudes would be a no-no for your family-friendly game) - the shotgun teleporter, the minigun teleporter, the plasma gun teleporter, the rocket launcher teleporter (?). All of the weapons behave pretty much in lockstep with their DOOM counterparts, with the downside of having a significantly weaker system of weapon feedback. I guess that’s what happens when you switch out a bitchin’ super shotty for a non-descript teleporter.

Because of this, Chex Quest feels significantly worse than DOOM. I think this is most heavily felt in the third installment of the series, where the level design has had 10 years of DOOM modding to learn from, but it’s only a minor gripe in this first episode. Partly because of the novelty of its DOS-style hyper-saturated color palette and partly because of its runtime. It takes less than 20 minutes to beat this first Episode, and it never really sags from pacing issues.

Chex Quest is not a great game. It’s not a great DOOM wad. It’s not even particularly good. But it is perhaps one of the best examples of a phrase I’ve only ever used mockingly – good, clean fun.

The quintessential FFFPS (Family Friendly First Person Shooter)

OMG, i wasn't expecting having so much fun playing this game. I just tried it as some kind of bizarre experience, like when you play that cursed Simpsons mod on Doom, basically for the lulz.

And damn, this game is great, it surpassed all of my expectations. It's so colorful, weapons are actually good, enemies are fun to fight, even if you're not exactly "fighting" them since, theoretically, you have no weapons. You have zorchs. Imagine how family friendly this was, that designers didn't even dared to put the words "weapon" or "ammo", they just renamed them as "zorchs".

Map design is great. Music really helps the friendly mood, since it vibes kinda like that 80's movie where Eddie Murphy played as a spy/undercover agent/whatever.

This game could have earned 4 stars, but i'm giving it only 3 and a half, because that final level was kinda awful. And yes, it's only 5 levels, you can beat this even faster than Knee Deep in the Dead. In my case, i think it only took me 40 minutes. And i really, really appreciate when games are short.

I think this game should be played by everyone, not just the retro fps die-hards.

A better-than-average Doom clone based on a better-than-average cereal.

Good level design, sound design is on point, all the weapons are just cheeky reskins of the Doom arsenal so no problems there. Dead-ass I think a kid today would probably still have fun with this, though they might be baffled as to why they can’t look up.

It’s a rare example of a kid-ified, colorful shooter that was actually decent— a genre that sat weirdly empty until Splatoon and Overwatch came along decades later, and that Fortnite eventually turned into the mother of all cash cows.