A sadistic Doom modder has created an “impossible” mode for the game

Doom is just one of those games that feels like it’s always been there. Indeed, some of you reading this weren’t even born when id Software dropped its now legendary FPS onto our collective faces. It’s still hanging around today, and one of those reasons is because people keep modding the OG releases.

Some of these people are figurative monsters, however. If you’ve played the older Doom games on Nightmare difficulty, you know what a challenge it can be. Well, ModDB user immistyer decided that wasn’t enough, so has given us a new “Impossible” skill to select.

One of the key things that makes the original Nightmare mode so hard is the fact that enemies keep respawning, so you can never truly get rid of them. Kind of like flies in the summer; they just always seem to be around!

A buzzin’ nuisance

However, with this impossible skill level, the ante has been upped by making it so the monster respawn time has been halved. They come back twice as fast this time round. Here’s everything immistyer’s mod (which is currently available in Early Access) does for the original Doom:

• Increases monster “Aggressiveness” to 0.95 (ZDoom default is just 0).
• Makes it so you only get 75% ammo without a backpack, and also so that you only get 1.5x ammo with a backpack.
• Increases ALL damage by 2x.
• Increases monster health by 2.5x.
• Makes it so you only get 0.65% of the armor and health.
• Makes ALL knockback 2.5x stronger.
• Replaces all medkits with stimpacks.
• Enables fast monsters.
• Disables infighting!!!
• Makes monsters respawn twice as fast as in Nightmare!!!
• Sets the spawn preset difficulty to “Hard”

Note that even monster infighting has been disabled. Now all the hellish creatures have nothing to focus on except the most efficient way to turn your meaty body into a fine paste.

I haven’t tried the mod myself, but I bet it’s a doozy. I’ve only ever really dabbled with the game’s official Nightmare difficulty a few times over the years, so a setting that labels itself as “Impossible” does not sound like a particularly chill time for me.

Of course, as well as tinkering with the classics, Doom, as a series, keeps moving forward. We already had the 2016 reboot and the equally well-received Eternal. Now we’re getting a new one: Doom: The Dark Ages, which takes us back to a medieval period. I don’t particularly care where we go, so long as the killing is brutal and the monsters’ insides go well with the décor.