The Infinite Sadness of Doom II
0[This is my first feeble attempt at audio commentary, but don't panic; the video includes subtitles and the full text is available below for sensitive souls who are understandably shocked by my horrible butchering of the English language, as well as the subpar technical quality of the recording. For those of you put off by my laughable pretentiousness, well, there's unfortunalety not much I can do about *that*...]
It’s hard to deny that the visual style of id Software’s seminal first-person shooter series Doom is defined by grisly demons, blood-soaked altars, disembodied goat heads and all the rest of its (in)famously pseudo-Satanist imagery. However, I tend to associate these games (and in particular the second entry) with a highly distinctive mood comprised in equal parts of dread and despair, and powerfully underscored by Bobby Prince’s simultaneously catchy and oppressive soundtrack.
In many ways, Doom II is gaming’s foremost post-apocalyptic masterpiece. It’s abundantly clear from the very first level that the invasion of Earth by creatures from an alien (or perhaps all too familiar) dimension has already reduced our beloved home to a haunting shadow of its former self. Languishing in the dismal afterglow of the Fall and enclosed by the single most demoralizing skybox in all of video gaming, Doom II’s appropriately hellish vistas are far more depressing than even the blown-out nuclear wasteland of Fallout 3 (which, at the very least, had a quiet serenity going for it). From the desolate husks of major population hubs (levels like “Downtown” or “Suburbs”) to the most mundane of human infrastructures (“The Waste Tunnels”, “The Factory”), everything that once signified civilized life on this planet is now crawling with supernatural horrors. All of this is unnerving and scary, to be sure, but most of all it is downright sad, in that distinctly post-apocalyptic sense of being stuck between a memory of what once was and the desire for a new beginning which will surely never come.
It’s important to remember that Doom II is not subtitled Monsters on Earth or Demons on Earth; it is called Hell on Earth. Despite the exuberant creativity inherent in the game’s memorable enemy design, the fiery fiends consuming your flesh are not the main attraction here; they are rather like pentagrams signifying our unforgivable transgressions and fall from grace. Indeed, as any diehard fan of Event Horizon (or The Divine Comedy, for that matter) will tell us, hell is only a word. As if it wasn’t obvious enough from its title, Doom is about judgement; about being in a state of total despondency trapped in a world gone utterly mad. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here...
Now, my biggest complaint with what I’ve seen so far of the much-discussed next installment in the series would be that there doesn’t seem to have been any attempt whatsoever to reclaim that tragic quality of Doom II. With its nu metal-infused trailers and gleeful melee kills, Doom 2016 somehow comes off as more rather than less juvenile than what a bunch of twentysomething male geeks brainstormed together in the early days of FPS design. That, if anything, is rather sad...