O tempora: Heretic + Hexen

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

Just as it was the case with the original Doom titles, I’ve only played a little of Heretic in the 90s. My proper “formative” FPS experiences, I suppose I can call them that, happened later with Duke Nukem 3D and Half-Life. And for one reason or the other, I never had much desire to revisit the “Doom clones” from Raven Software, even as they became the “reliable mid-budget game developers” during the 2000s and 2010s, before being completely absorbed by Activision and turned into another machine to pump out Call of Duty content. Plus, I’ve heard horror stories about the level design of Hexen, so I wasn’t really keen to experience that either.

But, in what appears to have become a yearly tradition, Nightdive Studios have created yet another remastered release of the classic FPS titles that are running on some version of id Tech – Heretic + Hexen. “As you remember them” collection of both titles, both of their expansions and with two new expansions on top. And I’ve decided that it was finally time to experience what if Doom was fantasy.

As you might’ve gathered already, these titles were originally developed by Raven Software and were technically “Doom clones”. Not just because they were FPS titles, but because they were utilizing the Doom engine that is now commonly referred to as “id Tech 1”. As most engines of the era, and as typical for id Software in general, the engine was purpose built for Doom, hence why the few other projects that ran on it were very similar in structure, main concepts and general flow to what Doom played like. But Raven, seemingly because they found like-minded D&D nerd people at id, decided to push what the engine could do to get across the feeling of a D&D inspired fantasy RPG experience. Which lead to some curious, but overall minor changes for Heretic and then to some wild and genuinely impressive changes in Hexen.

What’s common with these titles that made them different from Doom? Well, for one, they both introduced the idea of an inventory of items you can carry, which turned the typical Doom power ups into usable items you can choose to use at a specific point. Inventory was only semi-persistent in Heretic, motivating you to use items in the same level you got them, but became entirely persistent in Hexen, where hoarding items could become very beneficial at later tougher moments. As far as the setting goes, while the two games were set in different worlds, both were inspired by typical popular fantasy tropes and many of the enemies or weapons have recognizable origins. The music is also really cool and unlike Doom, which emulated popular rock and metal of the time, the soundtrack goes for nice epic sounding RPG tunes that could fit your heroic fantasy adventure.

In both titles you also spend quite a lot of time hunting for switches of some kind. There are additional key items, that are far more varied than your classic coloured card keys, but the games really wanted you to look around and imagine yourself being part of a dungeon crawling party. So traps and hidden passages could be everywhere while the result of flipping the switch could have unintended consequences you need to prepare for. And finally, both games had expansions of some kind. Though, in case of Heretic the additional 3 Episodes were simply included with the retail release of the game (that got the Shadow of the Serpent Riders subtitle), while for Hexen, just as it was the case with Master Levels for Doom II or Final Doom, the Deathkings of the Dark Citadel expansion was released separately and ran as a separate game.

This is where the similarities mostly end since the two games are extremely unlike one another otherwise.

Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders and Faith Renewed

Heretic is very much “fantasy Doom”. The overall episode/map structure was taken completely from the original Doom, the general flow of the game is similar. And even quality-wise I’d say Heretic is quite good in terms of level and encounter design. The weapons aren’t as fun to use and some enemies are more frustrating than one would hope, but things work shockingly well. A unique feature of the game, that was not repeated in Hexen, is a power up item that makes your weapon more powerful, which in turn changes the way it operates, which is very reminiscent of how later FPS titles would introduce the alternate firing modes.

Secrets are often locked behind level progress, to the point where there are instances, where you simply need to unlock or even enter the Exit room to then backtrack to some other part of the level to get the secret, which is quite odd. And another really frustrating thing is that every first level of the episode, apart from the first one and Faith Renewed,  has serious ammo deficit, often being harder to complete than the levels that follow.

There are occasionally poorly designed levels that are frustrating. The 3 expansion episodes are somewhat weaker in general to the original game, while Faith Renewed starts extremely well, but its final levels are absolutely terrible (what’s with modern levels for classic FPS thinking those games were Serious Sam?). But despite being an uneven experience Heretic is extremely solid. And if I had to choose between replaying Doom II levels or Heretic, I’d easily go with Heretic.

Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel and Hexen: Vestiges of Grandeur

Now, Hexen is… Oh boy. Imagine if someone would make a vehicular combat game on RPG Maker – that would be very impressive if it works, right? But also it would probably barely work as a fun game, because RPG Maker wasn’t designed for that. This is how Hexen feels like. It’s as if someone decided to make, say, Ultima Underworld on Doom engine. So you get hubs that link to other levels and each “episode” is one such hub level with some big task you must complete that requires going through all of the other levels and the state of the level is saved when you do that. You have three playable classes, each of whom has a unique set of 4 weapons – starting weapon, blue mana weapon, green mana weapon and combined mana weapon (that you build from parts you find across the game). You have a lot of traps and secrets and necessity to go to one level to find item to then go into another level with that item to do something else and… It doesn’t really work.

When I was a kid and my friends told me that Hexen is too confusing I did not expect it to be this confusing. I thought that going into it now in 2025 would be like getting into a game that was too ahead of its time or maybe all of my gaming experience would make the game click and work as the developers imagined it working. But no – it’s just very poorly designed, intentionally obtuse, has horrendous enemy designs, ammo balancing on top of the fact that it’s running on Doom engine, trying to do things Doom and its basic mechanics were never designed to do. It’s incredible what they have achieved from the technological standpoint. And some of the moments and scenarios in the game or its expansions are occasionally neat. But the issue mostly lies with the fact that I’d really not want to run campaigns with Raven from this time as a DM, because the campaigns are designed to screw players up, not be fun or challenging.

Even with the updates and improvements of the remaster, additional “goal markers” on the map and other helpers, I had to look up walkthrough solutions for a couple of levels because things simply made zero sense. Even when you clearly do something, like placing or taking an item, or flipping a switch, the thing that you have to do to progress might become available in some random part of the level or even a different level with no warning. But at times, even triggering a trap, that is clearly bad, is what’s required to progress. On top of that, every single enemy apart from the most basic one, is annoying to some extent, culminating with a semi-boss enemy type that just chooses to be completely immune for half a minute from time to time, requiring you to wait as there is no other thing you can do. Playing through Hexen and its expansions (even the newest one) was a miserable experience and I would absolutely not recommend it.

But I did mention updates and improvements and this is something that I need to address as well. Unlike the id Software games re-releases that Nightdive did before, Heretic + Hexen includes a lot of rebalancing changes and even level modifications by default. All of them can be turned off, but from what I’ve seen it would make the games worse. For Heretic it seems to mainly focus on making weapons more fun and enemies less annoying, so disabling it is not advisable. For Hexen, though, it does everything in its power to make the game more varied, fair and less confusing. And fails, as I’ve mentioned. But without the changes, the game is even less fun, plus you are stuck with the class you have selected at the start (and the total of 4 weapons) for the entire playthrough, while with the updates you can enable pedestals in hub levels that let you switch between classes on the fly. Of course, the other niceties are also included, like remixed soundtrack that sounds very close to the original, just with more modern synths and neat flourishes. Full support for widescreen, cooperative play in Hexen, built-in mod browser, museum of development things and all of the other nice little things.

I’m glad that I’ve finally experienced Heretic and Hexen, even if I absolutely loathed the latter. Heretic is a very good “Doom clone” and genuinely one of the better classic FPS titles I’ve ever played. And for it alone it could be worth it grabbing the collection. Plus, it is worth to at least try checking out Hexen even if you will bounce off it, as you most likely will, as what has been attempted there is very impressive. Now I can only wonder which classics Nightdive would revive next year.