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But the famed monster closet contrivance, whereby a section of a wall slides away to suddenly reveal an enemy hiding within, feels incredibly lazy in DOOM 3. It takes a special type of joyless windbag to complain about games “not making sense,” or to point out plot holes and illogicalities - if you play a game like DOOM, and whinge about enemies jumping out at you, implausibly, from all directions, you’re likely missing the point. You have to be entirely soulless not to let videogames effectuate and perform. I t tries to be an expressionistic Hellscape, like DOOM II, but also a working military base, like Half-Life, and between those two aesthetics, gets completely lost. Not just physically but conceptually its level design is a mess. I enjoy the game a lot, but at no point do I feel like I’m experiencing the work of a master craftsman. This idea that DOOM is deliberately and forensically mapped out to ease comprehension and create a sense of “flow” (to use awful, pseudo-game design jargon) baffles me. I find myself trawling impossible corridors and ludicrously-sized rooms, looking for a keycard, mechanism, or some kind of lateral floor or ceiling device that will move things forward, bored out of my skull. But where we differ is when they describe the original DOOM as “carefully laid out to encourage progression.” I find it just as vague, convoluted, and impenetrable as DOOM II. “ DOOM II ‘s design compliments its minimalist plot in a fairly profound way, reflecting the influence of the underworld as a disordering of all logic.” In DOOM II, Romero’s chaotic level design finds a context - I agree entirely with McCarter and Lindsey that it suits the “Hell on Earth” narrative set-up. “If god is order and the influence of Heaven one of words and law, then the antithesis of this is a Hell devoid of reason,” they write. Reid McCarter and Patrick Lindsey co-authored a fantastic essay for this website about DOOM II, and how its level design echoes the Hell imagery of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a very smart game, years ahead of its time, and I love it to bits, but to approach it like some do, as if trying to decode the intricacies of a classical piano concerto, feels to me ignorant of one truth, absolutely undeniable: the levels in DOOM are a nightmare. But it’s never seemed to me that intelligent. In the wider sense of gaming history, I know, of course, what it represents. I know that, for some, a single room in id’s 1993 shooter can warrant microscopic inspection, lest the mathematical precision with which John Romero laid the game out go under-appreciated. I know DOOM has a contingent of fans and critics who enjoy discussing it - its level structure, its weapon layouts, its enemy design - in excruciating detail. In this edition, he looks at the most recent addition to the legendary first-person-shooter series, DOOM.
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This article is part of a series called Shut Up, Videogames, in which critic Ed Smith invites games old and new to pipe down, or otherwise.