Disdain demo (and Elder Jam) playthroughs (announced at Realms Deep 2022)
3NOTE: if you want to see a version of this in sharper quality, watch the twitch highlight: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1624660414 - I can't help that YouTube butchers my uploads by needlessly re-encoding them at the exact same resolution and framerate I uploaded.
When I had first played Nash Muhandes' Elder Jam demo (AKA "build a Quake clone in Doom in 10 days"), I wasn't expecting it to evolve into a full-blown game, but here we are with a demo of exactly that.
This demo claims it's extremely early alpha and doesn't represent the final product, yet it clearly already has done a ton of work on top of Elder Jam's base - not least of which is in the menus, which notoriously require a lot of effort to make significant changes to in GZDoom. In this video I play through both the Disdain demo and the original Elder Jam release to demonstrate just how far it has come.
New in the Disdain demo is a whole lot of lighting detail, a much stronger focus on blood/gore (if you're not into this, the "retro blood" option tones it down in some respects), and an immediately-conveyed lifesteal mechanic on your melee weapon - which combined with unique enemy death animations, makes it feel extremely worth using. I thought the demo was pretty fun, and I'm not the type who's sold purely on blood/gore, so don't let that put you off - there's decent gameplay at Disdain's core, and I'm certainly looking forward to the finished product.
There's already quite a lot of customizability in terms of visuals and visual accessibility, including various toggles/sliders for screen/weapon shake, and plenty of video effect settings to toggle (including a potato mode setting if your computer can't seem to handle the game).
I was rather surprised to find that the various difficulty settings seem to have the same number of enemies, as that seems atypical for a Doom-based game. I definitely noticed taking significantly less damage when I briefly tested easy, but I'd have to pay more attention to studying the differences between normal and hard (I played through the full demo on both).
There's definitely some room for improvement, which is understandable given the early stage this game is at (especially given it says so itself). Most importantly, as with many Doom-based games I've played, enemies become damn-near fully camouflaged when they happen to fall into a dark pocket, or in cases where their color blends them into the background. There are also a few places where you'll find yourself getting sniped at from unreasonably long range, where you can't possibly take out what's sniping at you until you get closer.
A couple of secret switches also have the camouflage problem, where there really needs to be some lighting applied to make them at all noticeable even up-close (yeah sure they're secrets, but they're a little too secret if I barely even see them when I've practically bonked into them, and other secret switches don't have this problem).
I appreciate that the gameplay and display options screens have explanatory text at the top, but I'd love for there to be a better way to display longer explanations than on an extremely slow ticker (whose speed you can't control, therefore it has to be set at a low common denominator). I also kept getting confused as to what was in each of those menus, as it feels like half of the stuff in the game options is also related to visuals. It was also surprising to me that weapon screen shake was tied to the "view tilt" option, and that weapon bobbing was actually controlled by "view bobbing" rather than "weapon sway" (which seems to only apply to turning animations). I'm not sure how deep-down in GZDoom these things are tied together, but maybe there's a way to make the options' names clearer?
At any rate, this game's definitely staying on my wishlist, and it sounds like there may even be plans to update the demo over time. Wishlist it and download the demo yourself on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2113270/DISDAIN/