Believe it or not, when Doom first came out it was actually pretty scary. A genuine 3D space seen in first-person? Just you and the nightmares lurking all around; roars and snarling in the distance. Enemies attacking from the darkness, from behind, opening doors and riding lifts in order to chase you down. Nowhere was safe.
In 2022, it’s hard to even convey what that experience was like. There’s simply no way to recreate the revelatory, revolutionary way Doom felt. No way to impart the context in which it appeared, the blissful ignorance we had back then… of what all this would become. The closest I have ever come to recapturing a sliver of that combined wonder and terror has been in playing a little WAD called Nihility: Infinite Teeth by a mapper known only as “years.”
Nihility conjures up the spectre of a Doom that is still eldritch and unknowable. It pares the game down to its most basic and unsettling, like the Platonic ideal of Doom — somehow more authentic to the experience of playing Doom in 1993 than Doom itself is now. Am I making any sense here? Nihility is Doom as I remember it in my child’s heart perhaps, not as it actually is or was.
At first the lack of music may seem a strange decision, but it’s a choice that serves Nihility’s elegant simplicity. I’ve always felt music to be an integral part of Doom, and at different times it’s made me feel anything from empowered to tense to melancholic to scared. I could come up with a list of creepy, tone-setting midis to fill out Nihility’s 9 maps in no time… but instead years does away with midis altogether. A bold creative decision, but one that allows Doom to speak in a way I’ve never really heard it before. Now the soundtrack is timed to the blast and pump of your shotgun. Projectiles hiss through the air all the closer, and the wheezing of a zombie is that much more vivid on the back of your neck.
Instead of the sound of a traditional midi to accompany your journey into Hell, a different kind of music fills these haunted spaces. Here years has taken a page out of the Heretic playbook, using ambient sounds to add both some realism as well as a kind of naturalistic backing track. Humming computer terminals, bubbling vats of blood, and the whisper of alien winds all overlap to create the most atmospheric soundscape in any Doom WAD I’ve played.
For even greater horror, this time of the “survival” sort, the screws have been drastically tightened on ammo balance. There’s a strong sense of being under-supplied throughout, especially when playing from pistol starts, as years can be extremely stingy about providing the bigger guns. At times, even the SMG (the chaingun replacement) can be difficult to locate until you’re well into a map.
The flipside to feeling like you’re not armed properly for these fights is that the new enemies are armed to the teeth. Lost souls have a more dangerous attack, and there are bigger, nastier versions of both the imp and the baron of Hell. My favorite is the new melee enemy, faster than a demon and with next to no window in which to react once their attack windup begins. Nihility is also the only mapset I’ve yet encountered where that overused suicide bomb zombie can be justified as anything more than an enjoyment-annihilating nuisance. A more survival horror-ish bent means that getting explosively one-shotted by a non-boss enemy at least feels appropriate to the tone of the WAD, and the threat of them means you can never let your guard down. Play these maps saveless if you really want to shit your pants.
years has said that Nihility was inspired by STRAIN, and I believe that. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but both WADs are absolutely of a kind. They tap into something beautiful and strange about Doom, the kind of mapsets that can still poke at the wonder and terror deep inside me. Of the two, Nihility is certainly the more polished and the more like the Doom you know. Even going by the few screenshots you’ve seen so far, if you can’t see the Shores of Hell influence, you need your eyes checked. Much of the map design on display would be quite at home in a Doom the Way id Did project, and there are callbacks to just about every map in the original Episode 2. On top of that, years piles a healthy helping of the Doom alpha resources we’ve all come to love. But there’s just enough new to surprise and startle, plenty of twisting and subversion, to make Nihility: Infinite Teeth a gloriously unpleasant world to dig into. Even so, I can’t think of many others I would rather dig into again and again.
Nihility: Infinite Teeth requires DOOM.WAD and runs on any sourceport out there. If you’re not sure how to get it running, this may help. And for more awesome WADs, be sure to check these out!
Note: The current version of Nihility as of writing has a major oversight in E2M6 which makes it impossible to complete (unless you’re playing in a ZDoom-based sourceport). If you encounter a switch that can’t be activated, noclip directly through it to the other side of the wall in order to continue the level.