Crank your damage to 1000 percent and Doom: The Dark Ages becomes a surprisingly good vacuuming simulator

The best thing I ever read about Jack Reacher – and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before – is that the hero of Lee Child’s books doesn’t solve crimes or right wrongs. What he does is kill the plot. The plot comes at him in the form of baddies and deadly set-pieces and locked doors, and he just punches and shoots a way through it until there’s nothing left.

I got that from Andy Martin’s book, Reacher Said Nothing, about a year the academic spent watching Lee Child as he wrote. Warning: it’s a book that really ruined Jack Reacher for me. Not least because since then, I’ve seen the wandering hero as a kind of vacuum cleaner for crime. He moves back and forth over the carpet of the text, vacuuming up bad people. And when there are no bad people left, he’s presumably unplugged and stacked politely in the utility room.

Now. Just typing that I realise afresh that there are lots of similarities between Reacher and the main character from the Doom games. When I read the Reacher books for the first time I think I even pictured Reacher looking a bit like that health portrait of the Doom Guy, as we called him, from the really early games: the thick neck, the massive jaw, the no-nonsense hair, so sculpted and unyielding that it can probably deflect bullets. The deepest similarity is that the Doom Slayer, as we now call him, kills everything in the game. A new level arrives. It’s full of stuff. By the end of it, it’s empty of stuff. You’re killing stuff, but step back and you’re also kind of tidying. It’s odd to frame it this way. I don’t often think of Jack Reacher and Doom as being fictional implementations of Marie Kondo’s work – but they sort of are?

The vacuum looms large in all this. Playing through Doom: The Dark Ages again yesterday on a fresh runthrough and with some adjusted settings, I was surprised by how similar it felt to tidying up. It feels more like tidying up than something like A Little to the Left, which is explicitly about tidying up. But those adjusted settings are important here: to get the most out of a tidy, you don’t just bust out the vacuum cleaner. You want to clean out the nozzles and remove any stuff that’s wrapped itself around the cylinder. Equally, if you want Doom: The Dark Ages not at its best, but at its closest to the act of vacuuming – I appreciate that is a weird thing to think/type/construct an article around – you want to go into the menus and tweak a bit.

Namely, for any second playthrough vacuuming pass, you want to go into Difficulty Modifiers and lower “Damage to Player” to 50 percent. Then you want to boost “Damage to Demons” to – um, I think it goes up to 1000 percent. That’ll do.

A lot of things that are already in the game prior to tweaking help with the whole vacuuming thing. The Dark Ages is a slower take on Doom than previous entries, but you still fairly glide over the ground, like a vacuum moving over parquet flooring. And a lot of the new levels are really huge and wide open. It’s like being let loose on a dusty apartment that’s open-plan and doesn’t feature many stairs.

Yes, there is lots of stuff The Dark Ages does if you’re playing it in the traditional way to encourage you to slow down and read the vast new battlefields you’re faced with. Incoming attacks that need to be deflected, metal that needs to be heated before you can rupture it, different kinds of baddies with a range of strengths and weaknesses. This makes for a surprisingly cerebral challenge in places, or at least a challenge where you have to think about who to kill first and how. (Forget vacuuming for a sec and we’re immediately back to Reacher with that set-up.) But here’s the thing: all that clever stuff is still there at 1000 percent damage, it’s just transformed. It’s transformed into pure spectacle. All of that design brilliance basically fills the air with different fireworks and different showers of candy.

Should you play the game like this, encounter-breakingly overpowered, able to vacuum even the toughest boss into oblivion in a matter of seconds? It certainly misses a lot of what makes Doom great. And you’re definitely not getting the core The Dark Ages experience. Even so, it still feels like Doom in a very specific way. When you’re playing Doom like this, it feels to me like you’re playing the game that people who don’t play Doom might think Doom is.

So no, I’m not for a moment arguing that this is the best way to play Doom. In fact, like vacuuming, I tire of it relatively quickly. But I do think it’s fascinating that this option is included in the design, and presented to players via menus. It makes me think of an old friend who used to argue that Diablo was Blizzard’s casual game. Casual game? Look at the stats and build wikis and you might wonder what he was talking about. But that casual way of playing was in there, on low difficulties, when you just hit stuff and hit stuff and watched what kind of magical trousers spilled out of them. It was in there, it was supported, and if people have fun that way who am I to question it?

But there’s something more here. Doom isn’t a game about vacuuming, but if you can make the new one feel like it is, that’s all down to the glory of settings menus. We cover them a lot these days on Eurogamer because of all the great progress being made with accessibility. As a person with MS, for example, I’m always grateful for any option that counters my right hand’s tendency to twitch unexpectedly. So many accidental gunshots!

Looking through settings menus for that stuff is how I find things like the 1000 percent damage meter. It’s a reminder that games are variables to a certain extent, and screwing around with variables can be a game in itself. I love XCOM games more than ever when I dig into the menus and find all the Second Wave stuff. That makes it harder, sure, but it also makes it more interesting. 1000 percent damage doesn’t make Doom more interesting necessarily, but it makes it into something a bit different.

Another friend of mine, back from university days, was a house-mate who absolutely loved vacuuming. He loved it because he found his life incredibly frustrating and vacuuming was loud and relatively consequential and allowed him to work through his frustration in a helpful way. Thank you, old friend, for all the times you vacuumed my room. And as a reward, maybe sink a few hours into Doom: The Dark Ages. After you’ve tweaked the settings a bit, obv.