One of the things that I think computer games accomplish unique to any other form of creative media is its means of "infusing" a language of interactivity into a visual scene. Super Mario Bros uses our intuition of motion and gravity to allow us to see basic geometric objects as platforms to run and jump across. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater replicates the phenomenological experience of the skateboarding scene by transforming an outdoor environment into a makeshift skate park that players can trick across. What this sets out to do is to essentially transform the way the player looks at a given game scene, to pass down a sort of "game sense" into the player, allowing them to take an otherwise mundane scene and experience it in a more kinesthetically driven way. THPS, like mentioned above, teaches the player to see normal objects like handrails and power lines as grindable objects, and to see those objects as set pieces in a yet larger trick line. The noun becomes a verb, so to speak.

So what makes HYPER DEMON so monumental is its means of accomplishing this same feat, but on a visual scene that is completely foreign to the player's world. HYPER DEMON is awash in cascading kaleidoscopes of color, prismatic beams of light that blur around the player's vision. And the amazing thing is...it all makes sense. It works. Nearly every weird visual and auditory artifact in the game that seems only to disorient the player is, in fact, guiding the player in some way. That strange red afterglow of enemies that flashes on screen? It's meant to show the player that an enemy is approaching them from behind. That bassy low pass filter in the audio that seems intent on mimicking the player's adrenaline? It activates when the player is leaving the playable game arena. In other words, HYPER DEMON's high profile avant-garde aesthetic actually earns its right to be experimental, on the count that it's so seamlessly fused with the game's core arena shooter mechanics. The disorienting has become orienting.

The result is utterly electrifying. Playing this game today is what I imagine kids back in the 70s and 80s felt like playing the early arcade games for the first time, that wide-eyed glimpse into a strange new world, a strange new language hidden beneath the glareglow of the cabinet screen; a language we learn not by being taught, but by the simple act of speaking it.

Perplexes me how this game came to be seen as the hallmark of a revitalization of classic 90s FPSs/"boomer shooters" when it lacks any of the cadence, creativity, or just straight vibes of the game it's rebooting. I'm lacking the cognizance at the moment to condense my criticism of this game into a single thesis, so I'll just go haywire and split into a few sections:

1: Doomguy's slow as shit in this game. Mans has fuckin atrophied!! His running speed in Doom '16 is slower than his walking speed in Doom 1/2, for Christs sake. To compensate for this, the aggression of enemies has been completely toned down and it throws everything out of wack. One such critical downgrade to Doom '16 as a result of the player's slowness is the complete exclusion of hitscan enemies. Hitscan enemies are the bread and butter of Doom 1/2 and 90s FPSs in general. Many levels and playermade WADs for 1/2 are entirely predicated on hitscan enemies synergizing with projectile enemies, dictating flow and influencing player movement. A few well-placed chaingunners in 2, for example, can dominate a sightline, forcing a palpable pressure on the player as they navigate the rest of the level. None of that appears in Doom '16 because Mr. DoomMan is too gotdamned slow to dodge enemy fire; no enemy has any sense of area enforcement, and enemy encounters as a result lack the same teeth and overall direction that the older games had, even on Ultra-Violence.

Another issue with Doomguy's slowness: navigating levels is a pain in the ass. Doom '93 gets criticized for its mazey levels, but the great thing is that if you get lost in them, you can easily run your ass out. Exploring in Doom '16 feels almost attritional on my sanity; every slow, plodding step through the game's Unreal Engine 4 prefab hallways in search of Bethesda's Mandated RPG Subsystem Upgrades is a slow, plodding step back to the main path. I think the developers themselves noticed this, as they literally just straight-up plot the secrets and collectibles in your automap in the game so you don't bother with the exploration.

2. Doom '16's aesthetically lame as hell. Doom 1/2 have a certain je ne sais quoi to them that I'd like to formally call Blunt Smokability(TM). Doom 1/2 can be hard as heck, especially in more slaughterWAD-ey type maps, but there's a certain chillness, a certain swagger that it exudes. The music can get pretty thrashing but not too wild: remember that tracks such as E1M2 and Doom 2's intermission exist. There's blood and guts and it gets kind of funky but it's not in your face. In other words, Doom 1/2 are games you can smoke a blunt to: they don't assert their brutality onto you but instead exist as spaces that allow you to project as much aggressiveness as you want into them. I'm failing to find the nuance to precisely point out what it is that I love so much about 1/2's aesthetic, but I hope I'm making enough sense here: they're low-key, understated; brutal enough to provoke, but restrained enough to not annoy.

Doom '16 doesn't get it. Gone are 1/2's cool thrash metal and instead comes this just, fuckin, lame-o djent metalcore brometalstepcorecorecore-ass music. I get that preference for metal subgenres are as subjective as picking a favorite color, but man I'm sorry, Doom 16's music just sucks to me. It's mid 2010s Battlefield 4 killcomp adderall shit. In other words, Doom '16 maintains a suboptimal Blunt Smokability(TM) score: it is not the kind of game you can effectively smoke a blunt to. It really, really wants you to know how Brutal and Extreme it is.

Speaking of aesthetics, Doomguy's arsenal's taken a hit too, and has undergone the dreaded Half-Life 2 Syndrome: the rough and ragged look of the weapons in the first game(s) have been sanded over with a new coat of metallic, techno paint. I don't like it, man. Part of what I like about Doomguy's weaponry in 1/2 is that marks a sort of symbolic approach to the game's plot as a whole. Doomguy is just a regular little dude, a simple guy, taking his earthly nature into an unholy realm. The weapons in 1/2 serve to anchor the player in Doomguy's sense of worldly familiarity, as a symbol of Man against the Demons. Doom '16's insistence on stripping this out and giving Doomguy shiny, techno laser beepbeepbeeb weapons severs this dichotomy, and squanders a lot of the game's likability (to me at least). There's a sort of limp resistance to the techno shit that Doomguy exudes in '16 (his interaction with anything technology-related is pretty much him just smashing it) and I kind of appreciate that, but it's a sort of cynicism that's self-imposed by the game, like a "yeah we know how lame this shit is but see! doomguy doesn't like it either!!".

There's other stuff in this game that I really don't like: the way combat's been sequestered into little arenas instead of organically spread throughout the level, the obnoxious little callbacks to 1/2 that border on insecurity, the literal Funko Pops, etc. I get that maybe I'm relying too much on Doom 1/2 as a sort of blueprint for how this game should be, but even on its own, I just don't think it's a good game. It's turgid, it's limp, it's just kind of lame!