This horror-RPG-FPS built in the Doom engine is terrifying
I knew I was in for a stomach-churning time with Divine Frequency’s demo after I finally acquired my first weapon. I came up to a hallway in the game’s vast industrial underbelly and spied an ominous figure looming way down the hall. The light above it cut out, I turned around, and there it was: a horrible faceless mannequin an eyelash’s length away.
I panicked, started blasting, and swore so loud my girlfriend heard from down the hall. The mannequin is actually completely harmless, and I just wasted precious ammo and weapon durability on a prank. DivineFrequencypunked me.
This horror-FPS-RPG launched its first Steam demo during 2023’s Realms Deep event, a former mod project now getting reworked into a full game. It’s built on GZDoom, the ubiquitous source port of id Software’s classic, and it’s one of those Doom-based games that makes you say, “Wait, you can do this in the Doomengine?”
It’s looking like agame with some capital-L Lore, casting you as some kind of agent plumbing the depths of a vast and terrible nightmare realm. There were peeks at some distinctly SCPflavoured background text here, giving that delicious contrast of banal agencyspeak trying to wrangle the unknowable horrors around you. It never felt like I was getting beaten over the head with all that Lore, but instead it gave me the great feeling of witnessing the tip of a storytelling iceberg.
IT NEVER FELT LIKE I WAS GETTING BEAT OVER THE HEAD WITH ALL THAT LORE
The shooting and exploration reminds me most of SystemShock 2, of all things. You creep along these utterly vile, rusted underhalls ready for freakish creatures to jump out at you from any corner –these things always seem to be positioned right in your blind spot on entering a room. They go down with just one or two hits from the satisfyingly beefy basic pistol, but you’re also pretty fragile and these things move fast. I particularly hated (read: loved) one enemy type that both looks and moves like a centipede –awful guys rushing around faster than it feels like anything should.
IMMERSIVE SCARES
Ammo is scarce, and DivineFrequency also cribs SystemShock 2’s weapo
