Finally bought Heretic and Hexen package on GOG the other day. Remember playing Hexen with friends when I was a kid, but I never really played Heretic or actually finished any of them.
Started with Heretic and it was the usual Doom like experience. It was pretty straight forward and I actually quite liked it. Now it was time for Hexen. When I first started the game I was amazed by how much graphics have improved. The lighting, shading and little details like leaves falling from trees. Pretty amazing despite all of it being so pixelated for today’s standards…
Until I got slapped in my face with what I’ll probably consider greatest heresy in gaming. The god damn fucking hub design of levels. Maybe it was ground breaking back in the 90’s when everything was linear and this felt almost like open world, but I’m on second hub now and chasing those fucking stupid keys and switches running in circles for hours to spot some tiny gap somewhere, just straight up pisses me off to a point I lost all will to play this stupid game anymore.
Took me hours to find all the stupid keys (I think, have 4 of them) and apparently, I’m missing 2 switches judging by the 2 dark portraits in the temple. Fine, so I will resort to walkthroughs to find those two god damn switches. Just for all of them to be so confusing and non descriptive it’s crazy. “Walk through the path”. There is 15 fucking paths and your “pool of water” in cave tells me fucking nothing. There is also no images of map with big X that would mark the switch location and best effort on Youtube is over 1 hour long video. God damn.
I’ve seen some stupid things in 30+ years of gaming, but this is quite something else… I wonder if people hated it as much back then…
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