When the first two DOOMs, games about killing demons in a Martian space station, released in the 1990s, players had to fill in the narrative blanks using their imaginations. Aside from what’s gleaned from all those inverted crosses, the menagerie of roaring monsters, and the MIDI speed metal soundtrack, the game supplies only a thinly detailed premise through its manual and in-game, episode-ending text crawls. DOOM, we know from these sources, is about a sci-fi marine forced to fight off waves of demons that had slipped through a futuristic teleportation device set up on Mars’ moons. Later, in the sequel, the demons invade Earth and the anonymous marine manages to return to his home planet and defeat them.  

If you were the kind of kid who was fascinated by the games’ horror movie iconography and didn’t have a device good enough to make DOOM and DOOM II: Hell on Earth available to you outside of borrowed hours spent playing it beneath the radioactive glare of friends’ and relatives’ computer monitors, the only way to spend more time in that world was to read a series of novels based on the games. These books, which I owned, were incredible. They began with a novelization named after the original game’s Knee-Deep in the Dead episode which explored the inner workings of the Doom Marine—here named Flynn “Fly” Taggart—through the lens of two writers (Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver) working from a deep fascination with military life, a handful of barely contained sexual hang-ups mostly concerning muscular women, and a creativity that ultimately unfurled into libertarian digs at federal agencies like the IRS or ATF and bargain basement takes on high-concept space opera tropes. By the last book, my young brain was forced to grapple with increasingly un-DOOM-like plot machinations about godlike alien races fighting millennia-spanning wars over competing philosophies, the implications of space travel on time’s passage, the inner workings of the Mormon Church, and plenty of other subjects that lie hazy in the back of my mind like old toys wedged into the corners of a cobwebbed closet.

As the above description hopefully makes clear, these books were not what anyone needed from DOOM. It wasn’t surprising, then, that, when the series’ remake/reboot/sequel was released in 2016, it wisely dispensed with anything as extravagant as the novels’ meandering world-building. Instead, nü-DOOM homed in on the series’ core conceit, ignoring any unnecessary narrative cruft. The player, as the Doom Marine, was given only a scant, mythological backstory that appeared in menu entries toward the end of the game and a largely unobtrusive, wonderfully glib plot about corporate greed told through single sentences and the environments the player moved through. Otherwise, its creators recognized that DOOM is the kind of series that works best when its violent excess is balanced by narrative minimalism. They seemed to know not to give into the desperation that I, as a kid, had for the blood-soaked games I liked to continue endlessly into convoluted fiction. 

And yet, now, DOOM Eternal has come out, informed by a design ethos not out of step with what a DOOM novel-reading child might have hoped for in a sequel before they grew up to know better. Unlike its predecessor, everything about Eternal is overly elaborate. While its shooting and enemy design is still as satisfyingly nasty as before—the best moment of the game, from beginning to end, is shooting a gun-mounted grenade into a floating cacodemon’s big toothy mouth so it burps with indigestion, hangs stupidly in mid-air, and acts as an airborne anchor for the Doom Marine to latch onto, yanking out its single reptilian eyeball with a rubbery cartoon sound effect—most everything else about it sags with overwrought design elements. There are power-up currencies for just about everything. The player can modify each gun and put upgrade points into those modifications; she can stare at a wheel of the Doom Marine’s body suit upgrades before switching over to another menu filled with ability-enhancing items that can be slotted in and out at will. Between levels, the player heads to the Marine’s sci-fi fortress, a Gothic maze of stone stairways and living rooms where collectables are displayed on the walls and laser-gated nooks house further power-ups to be unlocked. There are also crystals to be found that lead to a list of attributes—health, armour, and ammunition—whose capacity can be improved over the course of the game. Everything is bloated to blue-whale-washed-up-on-a-beach-for-weeks proportions with the hot gas of systems upon systems. The menu is a sagging bookshelf filled with eye-watering details on all the stuff your average player sitting down to annihilate roomfuls of demons doesn’t care about. 

The worst of these is the tab dedicated to the paragraphs of text unlocked when the Marine acquires a floating, burning page of unnecessary information hidden throughout Eternal’s levels. In 2016’s DOOM, the player character was characterized only by his two gloved paws, forever clenching the guns he used to destroy demons or smacking around the machinery that got in the way of him accessing new areas filled with creatures to rip apart. That was more than enough to provide him the level of character depth his mission to hell and back required. When, toward the end of the game, the story touched on a self-mythologizing subplot that described the Marine as a godlike object of fear for demonkind—a bit of metacommentary on DOOM’s cultural influence—it was an indulgence just limited (and cheeky) enough to avoid turning into an embarrassment.

In Eternal, whatever governor kept these touches just below the redline has been removed in an apparent effort to, like so many videogame sequels, create a follow-up that’s bigger and more bombastic than what came before. The same design mentality that led to the labyrinth of player upgrades—and that has ballooned the game’s length, crammed it full of new features, and given the Marine a castle base where he can admire metal album covers and paintings of himself like a quieter Duke Nukem—is manifested here in its most intolerable form. There are background details on every demon and weapon, sure, but there are also notes on the newly demon-invaded Earth’s governance (the start of the invasion itself was presumably too exciting to be depicted in present tense during the game), the long, long, long-winded background of two alien races at war with one another, and, most unwelcome of all, a thorough explanation of the Doom Marine’s personal history and how he came to be so good at shooting demons.

The game’s plot has a way of edging itself into conversations it’s not welcome to join. One level later on in Eternal’s series of discrete, arcade-style missions, consists of running through an old fortress, picking up items containing paragraphs of this tedious world-building. Written with the fervour of a 12-year-old obsessing over their favourite videogame by lying in bed dreaming up elaborate backstories, these pick-ups explain everything the DOOM player herself never asked to learn about. Rather than let its demonic imagery, supported already by no less a real-world context than the texts and art of the Abrahamic religions, speak for itself, Eternal attempts to one-up millennia of multi-faith spiritual iconography by situating heaven and hell within the cosmology of a derivative genre novel about aliens.

All of this is part of a larger drive for More Content. The videogame codex, exhausting the patience of even the most willing digital text reader, is a sort of writerly purgatory for all the story that the rest of those making a game really didn’t want to bother contextualizing. In these typically awful console-bound eBooks, we’re given the videogame studio equivalent of 15 minute drum solos, genre fiction appendices, and DVD special features—all the pulp material left behind from a work that doesn’t warrant inclusion on its own. Sometimes they’re easy enough to ignore. In Eternal, these codices are integral if you want to make sense of the laboured main storyline. They are a grandmother chaining you to the couch to watch her vacation slideshow in order to understand any of the conversations she’s willing to have over dinner later. They’re a kind of punishment for being willing to care at all about the in-game locations, characters, and cinematics.

The DOOM novels’ descents into unhinged, pulp sci-fi madness was inevitable. Their writers were given the task of creating a series of books based on a few paragraphs of text surrounding two games about a nameless Marine chainsawing and blowing apart waves of grunting hellbeasts. The nature of sequels, in so many kinds of art and entertainment, is to elaborate—to go bigger and better than what came before. The DOOM books address this problem by constructing an increasingly unhinged trajectory for its monster-killing heroes to follow, escalating a story that starts with hell invading a Martin moon into something Arthur C. Clarke might’ve written while short on cash. Despite having their example as a warning from in-series history, Eternal follows in their ignoble footsteps by hurrying toward a goofily convoluted destination that seems to have no possible endpoint other than a brain-melting assemblage of proper nouns piled atop menus thick with upgrade systems. Already, on part two, the descent into chaos is gunning for complete incoherence.  

The original DOOM and last decade’s nü-metal, nü-DOOM had a spark to them. They were both created by people who had something to prove, either, back in the early ‘90s, that they could make a first-person shooter like DOOM in the first place or, in the ‘10s, that the first game’s design ethos could be reinterpreted for a modern audience. In both cases, the power of a legacy has poisoned these games’ follow-ups. DOOM 3, despite its many merits, is a self-satisfied celebration of the series’ stature that seems to have been made with the belief that players mostly responded to the original games’ technological prowess and not their bratty Satanic Panic aesthetic and puzzle box combat design. DOOM Eternal, failing to learn from the past, falls into a similar trap. It’s a sequel that believes audiences loved the frivolous details—upgrades, world-building—crusted onto the most vital part of the game’s design so much that those details should define its follow-up. As a result, it’s the most disappointing kind of DOOM game that can be made: one that feels safe—like it’s desperate to impress its players by giving them far too much of a bland, crowd-pleasing type of excess we’ve already seen so many times before.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.