“If only you could talk to these creatures,” ended the much-maligned Edge review of Doom, “then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances... Now that would be interesting."
Although this review seemed to completely miss the point of First Person Shooter games back in 1994, the gaming sphere has since exploded with visual novels (A sort of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story in digital form, for the uninitiated.), ranging from settling legal dramas to unraveling global conspiracies to witnessing intense psychological horror Just Monica, there are now all kinds of games where you can have a natter instead of giving everyone you meet a third nostril.
It’s with this infamous quote in mind that I downloaded David Cooper’s (creator of the darkly amusing Lenny comic) Doomed Love, the latest in a long line of dating simulators, but this time you get to romance some of Doom’s many monsters.
Recasting four of the game’s most iconic monsters (along with a few other surprises depending on what path you take) as insecure and often vulnerable creatures splitting hairs over the upcoming Icon of Sin festival, Doomed Love is a hilarious experience.
You play as a Zombieman, a green-haired undead soldier at the heart of a tight-knit friendship group of demons eager to impress the rest of Hell. Tensions being high, the bulk of the gameplay here involves you choosing whether to talk to and ask out the perfectionist Cacodemon, the anxious Demon, the musically-gifted Revenant or the insecure Mancubus.
Each pathway gives you five choices to mull over, digging into different aspects of each monster and leading to one of five possible endings - one for winning the heart of each monster and one Friends ending.
Getting any of these is not difficult, with each choice having a clear ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ option, but it is fun to play around with these either on replays or with the help of the robust save system (The game uses the Renpy engine, which will be familiar to members of a certain Literature Club.) to unearth as much as you can about the secret lives of Doom’s rank and file.
Not that you’ll be seeing the same lines over and over for too long : with each playthrough taking no more than 15 minutes, depending on your reading speed, you can see all that Doomed Love has to offer within an hour.
Of course, its brevity is hardly a bad thing - paired with Cooper’s affable renderings of familiar foes, Doomed Love is a perfect point of entry into the visual novel genre for fans of Doom.
Conclusion
Putting the monsters from Doom into a dating simulator is as hilarious as it sounds. Rest assured, I’ll never look at an Imp or Cyberdemon the same way again.
84%
+Cute art and hilarious scenario
+Substantial replay value
+Excellent gateway game for visual novels as a whole
-Sweet but way too short
-Couple of typos
