Those demonic bastards are gonna pay for turning my girl into a texture.

I haven't been having a good October. My tulpa has been out there opening new lines of credit in my name, and the spooky games I picked out have all ranged from middling to bad. I swear the plan wasn't to theme the whole month around mediocre horror. I actually thought I'd like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and I didn't expect to fall off so hard with Fatal Frame's combat. At least I'm finishing the season strong with Blood, which was recommended to me several months ago, around when I was starting to post reviews for the classic Doom games.

I can definitely see why Blood was suggested to me, as it sticks pretty close to the boomer shooter script as laid out by Doom. You have a shotgun that acts as the centerpiece of your arsenal, levels are often maze-like and require the collection of keys to progress in, and you'll need to claw your way through hordes of demons in one perfect run to the exit button - unless you're a save scummer, like me. Some of the weapons aren't quite as good as what you'd find in Doom, but for my money, Blood has the best dynamite in any first person shooter I've played, and the inclusion of alt-fires for almost every weapon adds a lot of versatility. Your normal shotgun can fire off single bursts or you can empty both barrels at once, for example, and I'm not sure any other shooter at the time was playing around with ideas like this.

There's also a lot of Duke Nukem 3D in here, specifically with Blood's protagonist Caleb, who loves to mouth off and amuse himself with corny little one-liners. Caleb is great. He's such a weird little freak. Stephan Weyte's performance is on the same level for me as Jon St. John, and I love the way he holds on certain syllables when growling out his lines. The way he says "Llllocked!" or "I need a keyyy" is tattooed on my brain, and Caleb's "Ohhh myyy, what a WONderful smell I've discovered~" when entering an outhouse (and just before diving into the toilet) is going to stick with me. Caleb may be very Duke-like with his shamelessly sourced movie quotes ("DON'T play it again, Sam..."), but his sense of humor is more off-kilter and suited to his role as an amoral former cult member.

Holding Blood back from being as great as Doom, however, is the whole of Episode 3, "A Farewell to Arms," which drills into Sandy Petersen territory with how labyrinthine and confounding many of its levels are. I got stuck for an unreasonable amount of time in the level "Spare Parts" because a grey elevator door blended in with the rest of the scenery, looking indistinguishable from a non-interactive wall. "Raw Sewage" and "Monster Bait" are dull levels that overstay their welcome and contribute their fair share to Episode 3 being a drag, with the highest point probably being "The Sick Ward" which is mostly just fine. 

Episode 4 brings things back around with shorter, more focused levels, and though the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage expansions included in Fresh Supply do have some levels that are a bit too meandering, they are mostly solid, so Fresh Supply does recover from that mid-game slump. It is a shame that the expansions lack the same janky CG 3D cutscenes as the core game, though. There were better looking real-time graphics in 1997, I love it and can't imagine Blood any other way. The real-time shadows and lighting in the game itself do look great, though, so at least Blood looks good where it counts.

I have no idea how to tie all these thoughts together and wrap up this review, so I'm gonna hit this exit switch, listen to a bunch of dudes go "ohhhh owwwww!" and just reflect on how Blood saved my October.