If you’ve seen my Doom or Quake episodes you know that I’m fond of framing id’s early games as experiences in exploring an emotional tone more than about the mechanics or narrative. But after Quake III that tradition began to fall apart. The collage of ideas that somehow formed a cohesive “id” aesthetic fell away, and games like Doom 3 and Rage felt far more conventional in structure, tone, and narrative focus. A lot of this stems from the loss of abstraction – DOOM 3’s base had break rooms and laboratories and air locks and soda machines. DOOM just has you standing in what could only be described as a space that hinted at industrial machinery, tortured organic surfaces, and scifi future equipment. Older id shooters didn’t have characters or story arcs; there was only a low-level texture that kicked at certain gut emotions with iconography signposting a loose sense of context and reason for those emotions. And eventually we took those pixelated corridors and cast HD light upon them, replacing a vague sense of tone with a high fidelity replica that no longer asked us to fill the blanks in ourselves.
But that sort of low-fi aesthetic lives on in smaller games, like In the Kingdom. Released earlier this year as a vertical slice demo of what the developers hope to turn into a larger project, In the Kingdom is a first person shooter that feels like it follows very much in the footsteps of those retroware titles.
Its origins as a first pass at an idea are apparent. It’s a little buggy – I fell through the floor once when capturing footage – and the last level is confusingly designed in a way that feels like it didn’t get enough playtesting. It’s also only the three levels and two interludes – just enough to convey a sense of itself to the player, but not enough to really feel like it’s complete or like the ideas it present are fully explored. Still, as far as a proof of concept I think it works really well.
And it should come as no surprise given my predilection for this sort of thing, but I kind of love it? It’s a Lovecraftian short story in the guise of Doom, capturing undertones of xenophobic horror, the tale of Ozymandias, and otherworldly nightmares. It’s hard to escape the sense that you are the alien force here; that the world the game presents does not want you there but only because you are not a part of it. This place does not want you here, these creatures do not want you here, and even your violent destruction doesn’t necessarily stick with rules you understand. It’s a vignette about a person invading an unknown land and fated to be consumed by it one way or another.
And despite the obvious influence of early 90’s shooters on the low-fi aesthetic, this doesn’t feel like pixelated rendering for nostalgia’s sake. In the Kingdom uses its low resolution art to emphasize what you don’t see, what isn’t clear. It knows that these graphics leave a lot unknown about what you’re looking at, and that the unknown is scary. What are those things? What does this say? What is this place? If P.T. is successful as pure horror because of its high fidelity graphics, I think In the Kingdom is successful in its ghoulish tone because it refuses to display anything in a high enough resolution to make out the details. Your brain fills in the rest, sparked to create unthinkable scenes in your mind by the few bits you can make out. This isn’t the first game take advantage of this: Lone Survivor is a few years old at this point, and others have documented tons of small experiences. But In the Kingdom is a fantastic example of the approach, nailing the mood and elevating an otherwise passable shooter to a genuinely memorable experience.
If I had one real concern, it’d be that this: where DOOM had a loose tone tied to super tight mechanics, In the Kingdom has super tight atmosphere and theming with comparatively loose mechanics. For example, Doom had a very visceral sense of being hit, with the player’s vision going red, the character’s portrait turning to face the damage source, and even the player being imparted with a bit of momentum in the direction of the hit. In the Kingdom’s combat leaves the player feeling almost ethereal. This causes death to feel sudden and without warning, and constantly obsessing over one’s health takes away from the ability to take in the environments. The combat is at its best early on, when monsters attack and you can just barely make headway with a pistol. It leaves the player feeling capable yet still vulnerable, a human force railing against everything it finds alien but doomed to fail. By the time you get a minigun and fight the bosses at the end of the game, though, begins to feel a little more power-fantasy-ish rather than action horror.
Still, in the game that’s here that happens in the last few minutes of the half-hour experience. And I’m hopeful to see the developers return and flesh out this idea; or at least explore ideas adjacent to it. It’s cool to be see retroaesthetics being applied to enhance a work rather than being used referentially, and this sort of texture driven shooter isn’t something that’s been explored much lately. If they can improve the game feel, get the weapon balance down, and add a dozen or so levels to flesh out the themes and ideas, they’d have a fantastic action-horror game that conveys a wonderful sense of desolation and estrangement using an art style that would have been available in 1996. And that’s cool.
et tu, Campster?
that sounds so wrong.
