Game Review: Castlevania: Simon's Destiny (Doom mod)

[dorchadas]

Thank you Rock Paper Shotgun for so frequently informing me of the existence of games like this.

It's inarguable that Doom is one of the most important games ever made, up there with Pong or Minecraft. The mark of a device's technical sophistication--or perhaps the technical expertise of their users--is whether Doom will run on it. And I could probably spend the rest of my life playing Doom mods and never have to play the same thing twice. The sheer variety of maps out there is dizzying, and once I make playing Doom my job and somehow finished all the maps, there's plenty of full conversions out there like Chex QuestSimon's Destiny. I could turn these reviews I write into nothing but reviews of Doom mods and maps and still have plenty of material.

Well, and Zelda games. Don't want to completely give everything else up.

I'm mostly kidding. The Doom engine has a lot of limitations like not being able to handle true 3D spaces--areas can have different Z-levels, but it's not really possible for two things to be on top of each other--and clearly being designed for a game where a space marine runs around confronting the forces of Hell with a shotgun. So how well would a game that's based on slow, deliberate movement mixed with melee combat work as source material?

Better than I expected.

What a horrible night to have a curse.

The truth is, I've never played the original Castlevania. I've played Symphony of the Night and Dracula's Curse, of course. I've even played Super Castlevania IV, which started as a remake of the first game. But I've never sat down and played the original game. I've seen speedruns and playthroughs of it, though, and from what I've seen Simon's Destiny is a pretty faithful remake of Castlevania converted into a 3D space. This is especially impressive because almost all of the 3D Castlevanias have been terrible.

There are six levels, mirroring the original six levels of Dracula's castle, though they aren't divided into stages the way they are in the NES game (though see below about keys). The caves were full of demonic fishmen, the clocktower had a collapsing bridge leading to it and the stairway up to Dracula's lair with the moon rising behind it at the end, and the first stage actually looked like a castle without the weirdness that creeps in during the later stages. Each of the stages has appropriate monsters, from the zombies and bone-throwing skeletons that appear everywhere, to the flea-men that show up later and suddenly jump on you, to the ravens that swoop down from high places, to the medusa heads that spawn infinitely and move in predictable wave patterns. Everything was faithfully recreated as much as I could be within the confines of the Doom engine.

I should note that I was playing on crescent moon difficulty--note the screenshot above with the enormous crescent moon in the sky, which changes depending on difficulty level--and on blood moon difficulty there are a lot of extra monsters from Symphony of the Night. I watched part of a blood moon run on YouTube and I spotted Cthulhu, the laser skeletons, the giant ghost, Venus weeds, snipers of Goth, and several other enemies that definitely weren't part of the original Castlevania. It's certainly a good way to provide extra challenge. But the truth is, I had a difficult enough time with the base game.

IT'S OVER FOR YOU, BELMONT.

It's hard to remember now after so many Metroidvania-style Castlevania games based on Symphony of the Night, but the original three Castlevanias were slower-paced, deliberate games. Simon and Trevor had momentum. Their purposeful stride meant that any movement was a commitment. Whipping had a delay, so just mashing B repeatedly in the hopes of catching an enemy off-guard was a good way to die. All of that is the complete opposite of Doom, and especially Doom II, which is known for arenas full of demons in which the marine runs at a full sprint firing rockets like crazy at his enemies. Since this is a game in the Doom engine the gameplay is necessarily more like Doom, but since it's Castlevania, your main weapon is a whip.

It took me a long time to get comfortable with the whip and I still never entirely got used to it. I've never really liked melee combat in first person games, because unlike in real life and unlike (for me) in third-person action games, I can't get a good sense of my weapon's placement or range. Since this is a Castlevania game the whip actually extends out pretty far and most of the enemies in the game, the bats and ghosts and zombies and skeletons, all die in one hit. And a single whip blow can strike multiple enemies. I don't have a problem with the actual whip mechanics, which I thought were implemented very well. My problem was just that I couldn't adapt to melee weapons in a Doom game.

Fortunately, Simon's Destiny also has the subweapon system from Castlevania implemented, and it's extremely generous with hearts. And since it's Doom and you can save and load, I could pick up the cross and use it for most of the game, and thus stay away from any enemy that seemed too threatening. You can bet that I beat Death with crosses, and the same with the Mummies, the Medusa, and Dracula. Frankenstein's Monster I beat with the holy water after I thought that I should try a different subweapon and picked up a dagger. Fortunately I had a save right outside the boss door, and double fortunately I hadn't picked up a holy water that had dropped from a candle elsewhere in the level. I didn't even know about the monster's weakness to holy water, but it was implemented in this mod and so I stunlocked him to death. That's fidelity to the source.

I was wondering why Dracula needs such an accurate clock, and then I remembered sunrise.

The other element of Castlevania is platforming, and Simon's Destiny actually does a pretty good job here at translating a 2D platforming game into the 3D space of Doom.

Now obviously, Doom didn't have jumping, so Simon's Destiny isn't 100% faithful to the limitations of the original Doom engine. I'm playing this in GZDoom, though, and it'd be impossible to have a Castlevania game that was anything close to faithful without jumping, so there are platforms and there is jumping between them. And most of the time it's fine. the platforms are pretty wide and there's no particular urgency. Some of the platforms even allow Simon to just sprint across them and run from platform to platform without ever having to jump. The two places I had a lot of trouble with were the first level, where there wasn't any penalty for failure but it was very easy to run off the narrow bookcases in the library, and the last level. On the other hand, the clock tower being infuriating with medusa heads constantly knocking Simon off turning gears is accurate to the source material, so I can't complain about the experience. Just my ability to do it.

One point in its favor is that there are almost never changes in direction during a sequence of jumps. In a 3D game it would be really easy to try to pack a series of short, multi-directional jumping puzzles into the same small space, and I can only recall a couple times this happens. I had a lot more trouble with mistiming jumps than I did with the actual layout of the jumping puzzles themselves.

Since this is a Doom mod, one element of Doom also creeps into the Castlevania--keys. Doom levels often required finding colored key cards, and Simon's Destiny subdivides its levels by means of locked doors that require red, blue, or yellow keys to pass. Unlike Doom, though, the placement of keys is more a matter of map design and flow of action than a puzzle element. I can only recall a single time I was stuck wondering where to go next, and it only lasted a few seconds. The solution was to look off to the left, where there was a series of jumps leading further into the map and eventually to the yellow key that would open the yellow door I had found myself in front of.

Behold my true form AND DESPAIR.

The same person who made Simon's Destiny also made a set of megaWADs called The Golden Souls, which seems to be Doom II's gameplay with Mario's level design sensibilities. It reminds me a bit of Ken's Labyrinth, the only Build engine game I've played extensively, and if it's done with as much care as Simon's Destiny I'd love to give it a try.

Simon's Destiny is Castlevania-flavored Doom, not the other way around, and anyone who goes in expecting a slower-paced game of deliberate action will come away disappointed. But if you want to whip undead under the moonlight instead of shotgun demons on the red sands of Mars, and if you want to see how far melee combat will take you in the Doom engine, I highly recommend it. It's a few hours' worth of game and I came away wanting more.

I also immediately extracted the soundtrack from the ipk3 file, because it's all remixes of the various Castlevania stage themes and it's amazing. Especially check out the current I Hear, which plays during the Dracula battle.

You can get Simon's Destiny here.