Agony
News

Help fund your own terrible death in Agony’s bloody vision of hell

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a warning label at the beginning of a videogame trailer. “WARNING: This trailer contains violent footage and flashing images that some may find disturbing.” That’s how the Kickstarter trailers for Agony open up, before each of them start smashing heads open with fists—one is two minutes long, the other 16 minutes long, select your poison. That’s the kind of warning I mostly associate with Resident Evil 2 (1998). That game came out a tender age for me, eight years old, when I wasn’t allowed to play horror games and therefore grew an obsession…

Agony
News

Get ready to suffer in Agony’s depraved vision of hell

Who do you think was the first person to start wrecking shit in Hell? It couldn’t have always been a nightmare ditch fraught with furious anger and the scabbed lamentations of sinners. Someone must have made like Saturn in Goya’s famous oil painting and started to devour all their children or something. Once you’ve gone that far you may as well start stuffing people in stone holes and, heck, why not, let’s get some others to start punching each other’s teeth out in the River Styx. Go on, we’ll have a swell time. What’s that? The perfumed scent of decay…

News

DOOM’s soundtrack has hellish secrets of its own

DOOM is a game of many secrets. The fast-paced shooter is filled to the brim with nostalgia-laden easter eggs to discover, catering well to its demographic. It’s no surprise that its soundtrack is bursting with secrets as well, this time of the spectrogram variety, according to eagle-eyed fan TomButcher. It’s no surprise that its soundtrack is bursting with secrets as well A spectrogram is the visualization of the frequencies of sound. While usually acting as most visualizers do—giving the listener some pretty colors to look at while enjoying a song or album—some musicians, like Aphex Twin, have slipped in eerie…

DOOM
Review

DOOM is another act of rebellion

In the Abrahamic religions—and the texts that have grown out of them—Satan is a fallen angel, cast out of heaven for daring to rebel against God. Though his name is synonymous with fear and evil, it’s Satan’s tireless, implacable need to oppose everything God wills that truly characterizes him. He’s a catch-all for the misfortune of heroes and nations. He’s a scoundrel who’s always up to overturn the plans of the master of the universe.   Back in 1993, id Software’s DOOM was another act of rebellion. Created by a small team of industry upstarts, DOOM (like many contemporary metal…