The feeling Doom Eternal leaves me with is breathless anxiety, so I find indie developer and horror game auteur Puppet Combo's latest visual experiment extremely on point.
It's the original Doom reimagined as a '90s survival horror game, replete with foggy environments, those high camera angles, extended door-opening animations, and a garish (gorgeous, to the right people) inventory UI.
See it in motion below:
I keep having impure thoughts about survival horror DOOM pic.twitter.com/9ECfzXX7GxMarch 20, 2020
Doom's simple textures and color palette work pretty well in a horror context, but they were already a bit spooky when I was a kid. Those barren, nondescript hallways underscored by some of Doom's slower ambient tunes were unnerving. Getting lost in the more disorienting levels only amplified the stress.
Puppet Combo clearly saw something there and whipped up this neat what-if to exorcise those "impure thoughts." I hope they're not completely gone, honestly.
I doubt this is a tease for a bigger project from Puppet Combo, so don't get your hopes up for a full-blown game recasting Doom as PS1 Resident Evil. It looks like a cute experiment rather than a big project, and their focus tends to be on original horror games. I've reached out to clarify anyway and I'll update this story if I hear back.
