Back by (un)popular demand, here's a short review of Doom: the Dark Ages (2025); i.e., from a trans woman's perspective, but also that of a Gothic ludologist, sex worker/pornographic historian, art director, author and activist: someone raised on Doom (1993) who grew to increasingly dislike Doom Eternal (2020) as and after she came out of the closet (re: "No Girls or Trans People Allowed"). In short, "fuck id, free Palestine." But if you need more information than that, please keep reading!
Note: This piece explores bigotry in games, which I've gotten back into researching now that my book series is completed. For a current example of said research, read "Karl Jobst: Still Racist (and Fash), in 2025"; the same arguments therein also apply to id Studios and Hugo Martin, et al. Also, I recorded myself reading this review and giving additional context ahead of time; click here to see that.
The shooter as we know it is tied to Capitalism and computers. Computers can be powerful tools; id treats them as tickets to Plato's cave—a bread-and-circus, thoroughly blind refrain of escape abused by Manosphere types: to dick-measure according to Moore and Clarke's laws. To it, we're currently in the middle of a genocide, which id doesn't challenge; they sedate their audience with the usual monomyth fare, lacking any irony or critique of the present world under attack by state-corporate powers (Capitalism, in other words). Their franchise, then, feels more toy-like, fake and money-hungry than ever! We live in Gothic times.
Ignoring the politics for two seconds, here's a few things I immediately noticed about the game's nuts and bolts: One, the devs insert a variety of non-FPS genres into Doom: the Dark Ages, doing so even more than Doom Eternal. The former game's experiments with platforming didn't really work, and here the results are equally muddled but more extensive. In short, it kills the pacing (though the cutscenes are skippable, versus Hayden's canned voice in Eternal). Beyond that, while the game's story is standard comic-book-style slop, its opening dares to abandon "rip and tear" altogether. It's like Star Wars without the fanfare, which can work if you do it right—e.g., Rogue One or Andor—but The Dark Ages falls flat (all style, no substance).
Furthermore, id shamelessly outsourced the game's music after Hugo Martin completely fucked over Mick Gordon (Mild Conviction's "The Mistreatment of Mick Gordon – A Freelancer's Worst Nightmare," 2023) and, while admittedly serviceable, nothing stands out at first glance (and this is coming from someone who didn't really enjoy Gordon's work in Eternal; re: "Spectating FPS Speedruns: Potential Pitfalls Exemplified by Doom Eternal," 2021). Corpo pigs gonna corpo pig: smirking as they usher in America's well-deserved (and overdue) imperial decline! Fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.
In short, in-game or out, none of my praise from Doom 2016's story remains (re: the minimal dialog and postcolonial elements; see: "Postcolonialism in Doom"). Instead, the obtrusive and garish, regressive elements from Eternal have recolonized the proceedings even further (re: exhibit 43e2a, "Of Darkness and the Forbidden," 2024). Likewise, the parry system with the slow-moving projectiles—far from being attached merely to the boss encounters in the first two games (or Doom 3, for that matter) have injected the same obtrusive gimmick into the gameplay loop at large. Frankly it just feels a bit oil-to-water, here—akin to asking the player to breakdance enemies instead of shooting them or ripping them apart (whose own novelty is largely gone, by now). As a consequence, the mix-and-match approach in The Dark Ages leaves id's franchise feeling less like a shooter under present circumstances, and more and more like a strange hybrid (an effect not helped by the Kaiju and Pilotwings-style sections, which also have the parry and dodge sections built into them). But I digress: hybrids aren't the issue, here (re: my Metroidvania research); id's shameless pandering is.
With Eternal, Martin and company force-fed the intrusive, incongruous elements despite criticism. Now, they've only doubled down, Dark Ages expanding on these inclusions in ways that seem to divide players, onstage and off. And frankly I wouldn't care if the Israelis hadn't just decided to accelerate their ongoing genocide of the Palestinians; i.e., to first totally depopulate Gaza by making it entirely uninhabitable, before repopulating it for their settler colonists—all while the usual state-corporate defenders (read: gamer bros) act like this is all somehow news to them (Bad Empanada 2's "Liberals SHOCKED to Find Israel is Genociding Gaza," 2025). To it, while the Nakba happened over seventy years ago, the current genocide campaign (a stage in the larger saga of abuse by the US and its pet ethnostate) have been ongoing since October 7th, 2023 (re: "Justice for Palestine").
Furthermore, these world events make id's current Rambo-style power fantasies ring incredibly hollow. Doom's graphical bells and whistles/muscle are merely coats of paint designed to repeatedly whitewash genocide and pacify American workers, as usual—to "render [them] the dupe," as Joyce Gloggin puts it (source: "Play and Games in Fiction and Theory," 2020). In short, Gamergate was victorious and now the sedatives are in full effect, the state-corporate hallucinations working overtime: consume, sleep, betray per Mussolini's fascist model (the merger of state and corporation to defend capital through popular media, on and offstage). Said model extends to workers endorsing Force of Will arguments during might-makes-right posturing. Fascism is the product being sold: white supremacy dressed up as "mere play," which players perform beyond the usual avatars "grown for the cyborgs." They're straight-up dorks, but still want to kill people like me and my friends.
Last time, I complained about girls and trans people; re: how they were strangely missing from the equation (re: "No Girls or Trans People Allowed"). While those complaints remain largely unaddressed (insofar as The Dark Ages, like Eternal, is a straight white male power fantasy built to uphold Capitalist Realism), I now want id to address genocide without contributing to it. To that, I don't want a white savior/white Indian narrative, routinely playing out the Bay of Pigs on the homefront (which Rambo is/does); I want a story that critiques extermination versus aiding in the usual replacement arguments: through settler-colonial force dressed up and acted out with a white/token center.
Fat chance, I know, but them's the breaks: id's Doom: the Dark Ages is little more than rape apologia calling itself "escape" and "rescue."
While less diverse, gameplay-wise, Doom 2016 had better music and flirted with postcolonialism and Gothic surrealism—all to camp its own tired franchise; Eternal canonized the colorfully dumb side of things to pander to Gamergate (which led me away from the franchise, in 2021; re "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning"); and Dark Ages represents Malcom X's proverbial chickens, having well-and-truly come home to roost (fascism is Imperialism come home to empire). Sure, it has a girl in it (as a radio operator), and a few slightly queer-coded demon baddies on the Hero's Journey. Big whoop!
The problem is, representation is pointless if it just contributes to genocide; i.e., by functioning as a cop. And despite the rebel/retro-future punk aesthetic, Doomguy is 100% a cop and always has been (specifically a CIA operative modeled after Ellen Ripley's "advisor" in Aliens, though that idea actually comes from Rambo, Beowulf and Ancient Greek heroes and Amazons before that; re: "Military Optimism" from my larger work not just on Metroidvania, but Amazonomachia). And cops are pimps, Andrew Tate's War Room™ merely a MLM scam informed by homegrown corporations like Blizzard, Microsoft and id Studios; i.e., Doomguy (and those who unironically imitate him or sell him to audiences) are Andrew Tate and vice versa: rapists-by-proxy and witch hunters acting in bad faith, mid-moral-panic (which they contribute towards, one way or another). The hero is always a Spartan clone; i.e., punching anything "degenerate" in defense of the realm, the state, and capital (from ethnocentrism in its earliest forms to ethno-nationalism).
But racism, pedophilia and rape are historically conducted by the in-group foisting their own crimes onto their out-group victims; e.g., Bill Gates (see: Behind the Bastards' 2023 reupload, "Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates"). DARVO and obscurantism; gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss! Behind every muscular Doomguy is a scared (and angry) white/token nerd who pimps women and minorities:
Keeping all of this in mind, The Dark Ages feels automated, mid-genocide: a patrol machine, built in automated factories while the survivors are rounded into camps for orderly disposal. The demons of Doom are id's counterfeit, doubling genocide as haunted by its own ghosts, and whose abjection process the company facilitates through its own giant consumer base resurrecting war and rape through a Christ simulacrum (vis-à-vis the Protestant ethic). In other words, silence is genocide, and for all its bluster and noise, The Dark Ages stays oddly (or not-so-oddly) silent on genocide; it's complicit—a poisoned apple giving its consumers withdrawal and brain worms.
So fuck id and its neoliberal power trip, masquerading monomyth as "liberation" (the War on Terror dressed up for the millionth time); Doomguy's an exterminator, an oppressor, a pimp! Free Palestine and all oppressed peoples and lands from the shackles of Capitalism, pimping them mid-liminal-expression and in duality out of revenge (re: nature as monstrous-feminine; see: "Nature Is Food" and "Rape Reprise")! Cops closet what they hate, and what they hate is anything "of nature" per Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism (re: "Paratextual Documents"). To show that hatred, pimps like id (and their rabid consumer base) prove their loyalty time and time again—deferring to profit by routinely trotting their victims out and policing them, thus recolonizing the same-old tired lands they treat like brothels (re: "Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang")!
To conclude (and reiterate), everything is political and human rights aren't up for debate/shouldn't be debated through obfuscation and force, the way id does. Capital assigns criminality and rapes by design, which Doom: the Dark Ages only embraces; we need to hug the alien to have the whore's revenge, not police nature and labor as whore by Nazi goons LARPing as usual—to walk away from Omelas (which Doomguy personifies) by breaking the usual monopolies on violence, terror and monstrous expression in duality (which Doomguy also personifies)! Cops and corporations won't do this (they're pro-privatization, as are their fans; e.g., Under the Mayo, above), so do it, yourselves; i.e., copulate however strange the pairings might seem; e.g., Hasan Piker debating Bad Empanada while catboy Noah Samsen cutely moderates (Bad Empanada 2's "Bad Empanada vs Hasan Piker Debate," 2025). Capital is built on intersectional persecution, which requires intersectional solidarity to combat capital over time! Kill your darlings, and fast! The demons in Doom are the heroes!
Your Commie Mommy,
—Persephone "I totally called it, years ago" van der Waard
P.S., Intersectional solidarity fighting for universal liberation is a topic I've written about extensively in my book series, but also explored with people (read: other sex workers) who made said series possible; i.e., the very kinds of people id's target audience (and titular egregore) police ad nauseam. We must free the whore to let them speak (regardless of race, gender or sex) despite "Doomguy" pimping us. Silence and segregation are no defense; survive, solidarize and speak out!
To that, I'll add an short excerpt from an interview with Delilah Gallo—a sex educator, coach and worker I interviewed for my book series (which just finished recently; re: "My Sixth Book Is Out!"), who concluded their interview with these proclamations:
Land back. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, Lebanon, and all occupied, oppressed, embargoed land. Give to mutual aid. Learn about the indigenous nation whose land you are on. Lead with kindness but don't shy away from conflict. Always ask yourself who is being left out and why (it is almost always going to be disabled people, indigenous people, trans people, children). Start a garden. Make some art. Stay curious. Don't obey rules that don't make sense. Be loud about injustice. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police. Abolish the government. All power to the people. And wear a mask and test for Covid! (source: "An Interview with Delilah Gallo").
Note: My book series Sex Positivity is all about challenging the problems that Doom: the Dark Ages encapsulates. I recently released my fourth volume/sixth book on May 9th (re: "My Sixth Book Is Out!"), and will be celebrating the entire series on June 1st (my birthday). When I do, I will link that celebration, here!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!
Israel should bomb your house so you have no choice but to touch grass.
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