Though I enjoy horror/creepy movies and games, I never touched Doom as it just had a sort of nightmarish bent I stayed far away from. These fears were quickly realized as soon as I entered the game, and the constant sounds of demons and possessed humans moaning and growling through walls everywhere constantly kept me on edge. What surprised me was the difficulty on default setting, “Hurt Me Plenty,” and how instantly immersed I was in the Doom experience despite my constant feeling of being creeped out and pressured, especially in the last few levels where the puzzle and discovery part took a massive upturn.
Mechanically, while I originally expected a very primitive fighting system, I was surprised to find myself eventually taking cover, shooting past walls, switching from shotgun to pistol to conserve shotgun ammo in taking down distant targets, etc., all practices I use in modern day first person shooters. Another large part of my mechanical progress in the game was realizing that moving forward and backward on my mouse were also controls for movement of my character in game; while this definitely helped clear a great deal of confusion about my movement, it was still extremely difficult to not move my mouse in a way that’d affect my movement at all. Even when I discovered that there was a way to strafe (alt/option + arrow key), I’d already habituated myself to turning and backing up to dodge attacks. This was the only way I managed to survive numerous late game encounters, as well as the final boss fight in a peek-behind-cover, shoot, and dodge in an almost Dark Souls-esque pattern.