Although I’m not a gamer, I’ve long felt a certain affection for the Doom franchise, so even I was interested when the reimagined game, known by fans as Doom 2016 to avoid confusion with the original game, appeared four years ago.
Doom had already seen a reboot with Doom III, which reinvented the game as a survival horror with more-or-less the same concept as the original but considerably more plot. Although generally praised, it was sometimes accused of building too slowly.
Doom 2016 triumphantly returned the franchise to its roots as an all-out blood-and-guts actioner and also created a new story line while keeping the basics of the premise.
Doom Eternal, which will appear in March of 2020 (having been delayed after a planned October release) is a direct sequel to Doom 2016 and is loosely based on Doom II: Hell on Earth, which appeared in 1995 as the sequel to the original game. The developers have promised that this sequel will contain even more lore and backstory as well as some huge areas to explore. Available footage indicates that it will also have a heavier focus on platforming than earlier entries in the franchise, and that the combat will require a lot of quick thinking.
The game is already being praised by those who have had the chance to play it. The only criticism, fairly mild, is that it is more cartoonish than its immediate predecessor: Its levels are no longer logical in layout, featuring instead a lot of floating floors and flaming chains like something out of Super Mario, and the obtainable items such as weapons and armor are brightly colored. The designers have defended this latter choice by arguing that they don’t want players to struggle to find items in the game’s environments.
Easily the most anticipated game of the last couple of years, Doom Eternal has stirred up some controversy (in a franchise familiar with controversy) because the early teasers hinted that the game’s final boss enemy might be God.
What It Is
The basic premise of Doom is, “Demons from hell … in spaaaace!!!” The details vary from one reboot to the next, but the concept remains consistent: A mining facility on or near Mars conducts questionable scientific experiments unleashing a demon horde bent on conquering Earth, and only one man stands between humanity and eternal damnation. The franchise stirred up negative reactions when it first appeared in 1993 because of its combination of graphic violence and Satanic imagery, but it also has Christian fans who like the idea of blowing away demons with a double-barreled duck gun.
For this reason, some fellows in my social-media feeds were miffed at the possibility that you would have to fight heaven as well as hell in the newest game. My own reaction to this revelation was to shrug: I mean, where else are you going to go with this decades-old franchise? Doom was never exactly a pious title to begin with, and having the player fight angels as well as demons seems an almost inevitable next step.
On that score, it is worth noting that Doom 2016 was the first entry in the franchise to suggest that heaven exists as well as hell. While earlier Doom games had cast the player as a marine caught up in supernatural happenings beyond his ken, Doom 2016 stars the player as the “Slayer,” a man blessed by seraphim and tasked with ripping and tearing until it is done.
More Lore
As more information about the game has come out, however, it appears that the folks at id Software have shied away from having you actually fight God. Instead, the big bad, who has a vaguely angel-like appearance, is a being called Khan Maykr.
It’s not clear yet what Khan Maykr is, and she may indeed be the closest thing to God in the Doom universe, but she is apparently an extraterrestrial whom the doomed inhabitants of the world of Argent worshiped as a goddess or prophetess before she did them dirty and hell absorbed their planet.
Khan Maykr’s role is not clear yet, but the most recent trailer suggests she’s in the habit of siccing hell on other worlds as a way of saving her own skin.
It may not be a coincidence that one of the goals in the new game will be to unlock a weapon called the Unmaker, a largely forgotten item that first appeared in Doom 64. If I were to speculate freely, I would guess that the Unmaker is the only weapon that can bring Khan Maykr down.
The details floating around the internet right now are a mixture of actual info and excited speculation, and it’s not always easy to tell which is which, but from what I’ve gathered, it sounds like the final boss of the game will likely be the Icon of Sin, a gigantic demonic head that was final boss in Doom II, and which reappeared in Doom 2016 with a new backstory. The Icon of Sin contains the damned soul of the son of the “Betrayer,” a man who sold out Argent in the hopes of receiving back his son from eternal perdition, but was himself betrayed.
Demonic Corruption
That brings me to one the chief reasons I think Doom has an intriguing concept, even though it is garish and silly on its face. Since its beginnings, Doom has always depicted hell as cyberpunk; originally, there was no explanation for this, but the recent games indicate that the demons received their technology from the UAC, the mining company that ran the facilities on Mars and was overtaken by a demon-worshiping cult. Nonetheless, whatever the explanation is of the demons’ tech, Doom presents us with hellspawn fully equipped to take on the spacefaring humanity of the near future, but humanity is unprepared—psychologically, at least—to take on the demons.
This may be why the “Doomguy,” the unnamed hero of the previous series of games, is sometimes imagined both by fans and by official spinoffs as a moderately devout Catholic. Perhaps there is some inkling that the one man who stands in the gap between hell and the human race should have some spiritual preparation. Such a notion seems to have gone into the new games as well, since the Slayer has a distinguishing “mark” and has been blessed by angels.
The invasion from hell allows the games to play with certain concepts that they couldn’t use, at least not as effectively, with a mere alien invasion. One of the recurring themes in the franchise is “corruption”; even in the original games, the demons could warp and twist any environment they entered, ultimately turning it into an antechamber of hell. The inspiration for this is apparently Aliens, which depicts the aliens producing a “secreted resin” that results in macabre, skeleton-like architecture, but Doom is able to take this concept further, with moon bases and earthly cities developing weird organic growths and flaming pits.
Doom 2016 and Eternal have made demonic corruption into a game mechanic. In 2016, it was necessary to clear demons from areas of the Mars base in order to open other areas, and in Doom Eternal, you get points for weapon upgrades by killing enough demons to reduce the corruption.
Dance with the Devil …
This concept of corruption has also been worked into the story line. Doom has always had a Frankenstein-like moral to it (forbidden technology leads to damnation), but the newest games are able to develop this. The miners on Mars believed they could safely extract “Argent energy” from hell to solve Earth’s power needs, and the demons left the miners unmolested. Over time, however, exposure to hell corrupted the Martian colonists, who formed a demon-worshiping cult complete with human sacrifice. In Doom Eternal, this cult actively assists the demons in their invasion of Earth.
Perhaps even more macabre, Doom 2016 introduced the “gore nest.” These are portals to hell that the demons create with black magic out of the bodies of their victims. Doom 2016 made explicit what was implicit in the earlier games, that hell expands by conquering other worlds. Hell is something like a combination of the Borg from Star Trek and the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings, corrupting everything it touches and growing by absorbing all into itself. Like the diseased-looking flesh that grows in its surreal landscapes, it is a cancer on the universe.
On Guns and Allegories
I’m fond of Doom for this reason. In spite of its silliness and its rip-and-tear ultraviolence, the premise requires the franchise to have a certain moral center. That evil spreads if unchecked and must be resisted, sometimes violently, is a notion any ethicist could get behind. Obviously, nobody who believes in hell believes it can be fought with shotguns and rocket launchers, but the weapons of Doom can be seen as symbolic, sort of.
