SIGIL

Has John Romero forgotten how to put lights into Doom levels? Nobody’s going to hold it against him if he has – it’s been 25 years since Doom 2, after all. Perhaps he could make an anonymous account on the Doomworld forums if he’s embarrassed. It’s just that I’ve spent a sunny afternoon squinting around in the dark of Sigil, Romero’s new fifth episode for Ultimate Doom, feeling out pathways over lava I can’t see.

It feels a little perverse that the only episode Doom’s designer has made in the full-fledged internet age is one where visual information is so hard to come by, and confusion the defining theme. But there’s a lot about Sigil that’s wilfully backward.

Andy dug into in issue 332, a mod which, to the untrained eye, could pass for a contemporary survival horror game. That’s indicative of the transformative engine over two and a half decades. But eschews all that, instead reverting to the game as it was at the close of – as if Romero had simply carried on making levels in ’95. Nonetheless, these are his most visually striking adventures in date. Brightly coloured assets, spotlit by candelabra in the pitch blackness, give aesthetic of theatre. And some of its prop placement has stuck with me – like the Cacodemon hidden through a letterbox in a wooden maze, invisible in the dark until illuminated by its own fireball.