“The Devil is real” – Doom 3

One of my favourite musical tricks is the prominent absence, with my favourite demonstration in the song “One More Night” by Canadian indie band Stars. It starts with splashes of drums and a driving string arrangement, grandiose beauty bursting forward. And then that all stops, and the song’s tale of a less-than-satisfying final encounter progresses over rumbling bass. The string loop appears just once more, for mere seconds between verses. Instead, the whole song is defined and powered by the lack of it, its brief appearance leaving a gaping hole to match the narrative of withdrawal.

I kept thinking about that as I played Doom 3. Its drawn out intro has you moving through a base on Mars, learning about your PDA, operating air locks, getting complicated instructions, following orders. It’s a long way from how the original Doom started. It can feel odd and ungainly (your gun sights turning into a cursor on screens never stops being weird) but it is something that Id commit to very fully. This is a functioning organisation with people who you can learn a bit about, and levels of bureaucracy behind it. And then all hell breaks loose. Literally. It’s a Doom game after all.

What follows is remarkably close to the original Doom updated for 2004, with a few extra ideas picked up from the world of Resident Evil and survival horror. Zombies and demons hide in the darkness, and you get moments of panic as they come towards you and you have to focus and pull off the correct shot to bring them down before they get to you. There’s a bit more to it than that, of course — when you get demons throwing fireballs at you and zombies with guns you need to do a bit more to get out the way — but it is a game which is energising in its straightforwardness. You can skip even most of the limited contact with intact civilisation, and won’t miss anything more than some emails about Chekhov’s chainsaws.

The terror is therefore much more effective for having had that intro and then having had most elements of it ripped away. The sound design is great, but the contrast elevates it further. As you face total chaos and go long stretches just hearing screams and horrendous noises on your radio, having set up that radio and its ordinary function makes it’s absence stand out more. It works wonders for pacing too, making chances to relax hard-won and never quite complete. A world of chaos imposed on a world of order hits harder.

I am not an expert in the FPS genre. I have played just enough Half-Life to recognise that there is an influence, and can have only suspicions about Halo. My lack of experience may, in fact, be why seeing it torn back to basics in this way works so well for me. But I get a strong sense of Doom 3’s contrast not just as an example of the power of absence but of a way of showing that they could do what their successors were doing but were choosing not to. It’s a sideways kind of move that wouldn’t need repeating, with future Doom revivals working in a different way, but I really enjoy it.