Gentrified Doom Remake Trades Chainsaw for Cheese Knife
upstart writes:
Just when you thought you had seen every possible Doom mod, two game developers released a free browser game that reimagines the first level of 1993's Doom as an art gallery, replacing demons with paintings and shotguns with wine glasses.
Doom: The Gallery Experience, created by Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone, transforms the iconic E1M1 level into a virtual museum space where players guide a glasses-wearing Doomguy through halls of fine art as classical music plays in the background. The game links each displayed artwork to its corresponding page on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website.
"In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d'oeuvres," write the developers on the game's itch.io page, "in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software's DOOM (1993)."
In the game, players gather money scattered throughout the gallery to purchase items from the gift shop. It also includes a "cheese meter" that fills up as players consume hors d'oeuvres found in the environment, collected as if they were health packs in the original game.
Unlike typical Doom mods, the project uses Construct 3 rather than utilizing the original Doom engine. One of the developers explained in comments on Newgrounds that they spent seven hours studying various versions of Doom to re-create the feel of the original game's movement and interface design.
The project started as a student assignment, but the developers ultimately described their creation as a parody of art gallery culture. In fact, Meozzi drew from his real-world experience in art galleries, as quoted in an interview by VG247: "I work in the art industry as an artist's assistant; I produce sculptures and other things like that. So, I'm fairly familiar with the process of gallery openings and sort of just the nightmare that is going to galleries and experiencing these high-brow, drinking wine, [saying] pompous phrases to each other [kinds of people]."
The game is a fun novelty and feels like a delightful re-imagination of Doom. It's probably due to the unusual juxtaposition of the intellectual art world layered on top of graphics typically associated with brute force and extreme violence. It is its own work of art.
Doom: The Gallery Experience runs in web browsers and can be played for free on the aforementioned itch.io and Newgrounds platforms.
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