Not one of the best retro-style shooters I’ve ever played but certainly a fun ride I didn’t mind sticking through to the end. The weapon toolbox is really sick and it gives you a bunch of options for entering the action sections with fervor. The game on Hardcore provided a pretty sufficient challenge that never forced me into blatant savescumming but still kept me closely monitoring my vitals and ammo. All of the levels are pretty big, reflected in their pretty beefy par times. The 10 maps end up feeling quite lengthy, and my first playthrough on Hardcore took me about 13 hours. It doesn’t string together as much gunplay as a lot of its contemporaries and inspirations, because there’s definitely more of a focus on exploration here, but the combat sections usually work pretty well, even when the game kinda blatantly locks you in a room with 60 enemies with a battle soundtrack. There’s even a pretty passable stealth mechanic that works well, even though I didn’t find myself using it pretty much at all.

The “puzzles” are usually fine; If you find yourself unsure what to do with a quest item you have, the best thing to do is just take it to a place you can’t get through. If you get in a routine of this, you barely have to think about what you’re doing in the first place. There’s only one time in the game I had to find myself looking up a walkthrough to find a what-seems-like invisible book sticking out on a wall revealing a switch for a door, and I’m glad the game never got that stupid about a solution ever again.

I feel like the artstyle and graphics really miss the mark here, it feels like a chaotic mess of the usual GZdoom big-polygon 3D environments which are still nice, and even beautiful at times, mixed with raw and unpixelated art that seems like it’s retrieved from the most mediocre annals of D&D portrait DeviantArt, and I think that dissonance really fucks things up the most for me here. It’s not an ugly game per se, but one that just has me routinely remembering “oh yeah, I’m just looking at stringed-together smoke and mirrors right now, and not having an immersive experience”. The art misses a lot of what makes its influences so timeless, because I can look at the models for enemies from Doom and see the beautiful miniatures that were made for the enemies, but as for this, the art style seems to have some confusion between low effort and low game engine capabilities. A great modern example of the retro look with amazing visuals is Ion Fury, which has some absolutely incredible art direction. The way-too-horny official art I’ve seen for the game’s protagonist Zan (who is an okay protagonist, also) hardly has any connection with her borderline lazy artwork in game when you can see yourself in mirrors.

This is unnaturally lore-heavy for this type of game, and while I thought the story at hand was pretty interesting with its lite-D&D inspiration, the amount of reading the game asks me to do between action sections really gets rough, and when the game actually wants to stop and show me the “story”, the pacing just plummets. I am just really sick and tired of these “trip” sections that Far Cry started to popularize, where the protagonist enters some trippy sequences after coming into contact with drugs, or hitting their head, or whatever, you know what I’m talking about…while this isn’t the 100% entirety of the Errant Signal level, it’s still a majority of it and it just becomes a slog with the kinda unfitting (while still good) music and the megaton of unpaced exposition, even though it’s chased with a pretty fun boss battle.

The music is…interesting. It’s a mix of one part original music created by Akhzul that goes for either a dark ambient route for the quieter-exploration parts of the game or a nu-metal battle triumph, and then one part licensed OST from, among other things, Unreal. Even though I wasn’t initially complaining, it was quite weird to hear those iconic Alexander Brandon/Michiel van den Bos synths here. I’m not fully against this kind of usage, but it is a good bit weird when the context of the music hasn’t really been changed that much at all. It’s like skipping the whole step of wearing your influences on your sleeve, and just being fully clothed in them instead. Besides this, I really don’t think the licensed electronic stuff fits at all, and I think Zan’s revenge story is much better suited to the dark distorted tones that Akhzul brings to the table.

There have been a decent number of "revival" shooters coming out for over half a decade now, but I think what makes Hedon stick out to me more than any of them comes down to its level design. Beyond a gimmick/secret level, a lot of the revival shooters don't really get out of their comfort zone when it comes to non-linear but otherwise fairly straightforward level design/progression and it's understandable they don't as the games they're inspired by most were like too for the sake of pacing out action and enemy encounters.

Hedon doesn't conform to that style of level design and decides to go in a direction more reminiscent of a game like Arx Fatalis (or for that matter, any well known "im-sim") where it gives fully fleshed out fantasy levels that are detailed, unique, fully believable as places that exist in the setting, and most of all, unapologetically large in scale because the places would not work without said scale. The last part in particular is a large point of contention for some people as aside from not being the norm for this style of shooter, it's one that demands the player to pay attention and solve environmental puzzles to continue progression with minimal hand holding in between all the usual fast paced action that comes with a shooting like this.

For some people, they can't jump the barrier ("it's too maze-like", "there's barley any shooting", "what am I supposed to do???") but for me, is the exact sort of level design I wish more games in general tried as not only does it present a unique type of challenge for the player, but it really makes the attention to detail on these levels shine through and gives a level of memorability to them (such as a mansion owned by a demonic family where the player learns of their squabbling and backstabbing between one another, a recently abandoned Dwarven fortress around a frozen hellscape, a succubus' "pleasure domain" with corrupted gardens, courtyards, and some of the trippiest environments I've seen since Constantine's Mansion from Thief: Dark Project).

It is worth mentioning that Hedon is split into two episodes, the first one being similar to what you'd expect from a level by level shooter. However, the second episode, Bloodrite (which was a completely free update for anyone who already owned the game at the time which is amazing when the thing's about twice as big as the first episode) introduces fully interconnected levels between two different hub areas that loop back around to each other in a really satisfying way while only increasing the scale and complexity of the levels by rewarding backtracking greatly (in other words, it's Strife but better).

On top of that, the arsenal of weapons feel great to use, there are unique difficulty modes for replay value such as a mode that replaces the standard ranged weapons with new and unique melee ones, the ost is a cool mix of ambient/psychedelic metal with the occasional licensed Alexander Brandon electronic music, and a decent amount of the secrets contain sexy pin up posters of muscular orcs and demons.

tl;dr I can't believe a solo dev ex-smut artist has better level design sensibilities than most level designers in the industry currently.