The day I saw the introductory trailer for New Blood Interactive’s new Heretic-inspired shooter Amid Evil, I felt a call to action. I felt a call not to “reclaim our weapons,” or “save our lands,” as the narrator begged, but rather to explore the bizarre purple hallways and massive temples of whatever land this may be. I’ll get around to saving it later, I promise. 

Like a kid trying to make sense of a Dungeons and Dragons ad in a 1980’s comic book, I had seen only the tiniest slice of this world, but instantly I wanted to know everything about it. I wanted to buy the tie-in novels for this game. I wanted there to be a Magic: The Gathering expansion set for Amid Evil just to read the flavor text on the cards. I entered Amid Evil with questions about the whos, whats, and whys. Now, having taken the plunge and examined every low-res inch of the pre-alpha, I can provide only the faintest whiff of an answer:

I do not belong here.

They did not want to be friends. 

The first clue was that I got my ass kicked by the first guy. As I approach the first level’s moon temple entrance I'm greeted by pair of goons, as one might expect. Unlike standard-issue level one goons, however, these guys are not at all interested in serving as target practice. They're fast, aggressive, and out for blood because they do not want me in their moon temple. They rush with axes, dead set on keeping me out. Armed with an axe of my own, I swing and pray, leaving behind some disembodied heads and a lot of my HP.

At half health now, I poke around for some health orbs, since I apparently need them. I'm embarrassed for even considering the “hard” difficulty portal before deciding to choose the medium setting. I love a challenge, but really, I'm here to explore. I can test my mechanical skill later on the included horde mode, but for now I want to see how deep this temple was built into the surrounding cavern, and what lunar god it serves. While the fight was good fun, I'm more interested in the cryptic messages etched into the temple walls. “Our Leader, guardian of the moon, he now dreams of death and pain,” reads on. Tough times at the moon temple, I reckon. 

Unfortunately, the goons (and later advanced goons and mega-goons) are having none of it. I can outrun them but only for so long, as they have a nasty habit of leaping through the vertical spaces in the level to catch up with me. I quickly shift my mindset—I'm no Doomslayer here. My faceless character is not an unstoppable force, but a mortal in way over his head. Even the tools at my disposal are unfamiliar: mana-powered swords and sticks that fire off projectiles like green arcs of energy and homing blue bolts, and a staff that shoots explosive planets. Tight.

Use your Soul Power with the planet-shooting staff and it'll start shooting stars. 

Fortunately, the soul meter system does provide moments of pure fragging catharsis at regular intervals. Killed enemies drop souls and if you collect enough of them to fill the meter, your weapons become greatly empowered for a short time. Naturally, you are encouraged to use your empowered weapons to take down as many goons as possible, which in turn drops more souls, keeping the party rolling until you run out of goons. As enjoyable as it is to take down a clump of helpless monsters in a typical shooter, it is doubly gratifying to erase a room full of bastards who had legitimately been kicking my ass for the last 10 minutes.

Soul Power turns every weapon into a legit goon-deleter.

The levels do a great job of re-using space periodically to provide anchor points. You dive deeper and deeper into unfamiliar territory, looping back to a central area after making significant progress, like obtaining a key or triggering a button. I feel like I am always seeing something new, slightly disoriented at times, but rarely lost. 

Near the end of the second level I wrap up a big soul power fight staged in a large open arena. I'm starting to get a grip on things, falling into a familiar rhythm of combat, exploration, and more combat. I'm beginning to feel comfortable, having won enough big fights to regain the pride I had lost when I nearly died to the first enemy in the game. I scan the walls and floor of the ruined celestial cathedral for the button that would open a door to the next room, or perhaps produce an elevator to the arena’s second floor. When I find it and step on it, this weird thing happens:

Is that an arcane ramp or are you just happy to see me? 

Look at that thing. What even is it? Who made it, and why? It leads to the second floor, but I slip off of it the first time I try to ascend, shattering my brief sense of confidence. It is too narrow and oddly curved to climb it comfortably, cementing the feeling I had throughout the playthrough: this place wasn't meant for me. The beings of Amid Evil’s world aren’t like us. Their too-tall, too-narrow doorways weren’t constructed with clumsy humans in mind. The gods they serve aren’t interested in my mission to cleanse their realm of evil. All of the levels hold bizarre, illogical surprises like this.

While I only played through 12 of the 28 levels that will be available in the final release, the dark, opaque world makes Amid Evil one of the least predictable shooters I’ve played in recent memory, proof that simple graphics can be as powerful and mystifying as anything your 1080 Ti can render. The maps, small bits of lore, enemies and environments flawlessly ride the line of being weird, but clearly purposeful. Nothing here is weird for weird’s sake, which makes it all the more compelling when it doesn’t make much sense at first.  

Compared to other retro FPS games, there hasn't been anything like it for some time. In DOOM, I’m very aware of my destination: I’m going to Hell and I’m going to frag some demons when I get there. The world is telling me a story, just not a very fresh one. In Serious Sam, I don’t know where I’m going but I’m very aware that it doesn’t matter. Desert level, jungle level, and so on. Sam's world isn’t telling me a story at all. 

Amid Evil sits in the middle of this spectrum with a story to tell, but not one where I can guess the ending. Somebody built these uncomfortable platforms. Something stalked these tombs long before I got here. There’s a war here between astral and lunar cultists and humanity’s last hope thrust in-between, fighting for a world where he does not belong. Every space is imbued with a sense of history and purpose that makes Amid Evil's arcane fantasy feel grounded, as eccentric as it is. It's not just a string of big shooting arenas for the sake of it (but that stuff is good fun too).

And even though I don't belong there, I can’t wait to dig even deeper into the weird, pretty world of Amid Evil.

Amid Evil is a retro-FPS homage to Heretic and Hexen, Raven's Doom-powered fantasy-shooters from the mid-'90s. Nearly everything about it is ripped from a different era, including its blistering speed—"like a 1980s straight-to-VHS horror with fast forward locked on," as we said in our PAX Australia chat with the developers last year. Today, publisher New Blood Interactive revealed more gameplay in a new trailer showing off the "Hordes of Evil" endless mode, and more importantly announced an Early Access launch date of March 12, less than a week away. 

The Early Access release will include three episodes taken from the campaign, as well as the Hordes of Evil mode shown in the trailer. The full game will feature seven episodes, each distinct and non-linear, with unique settings, enemies, secrets, and lore. Cheat codes will help deliver "a truly golden PC age experience," while the soundtrack comes courtesy of Andrew Hulshult, the composer behind Brutal Doom and, more recently, Dusk. 

The great thing about a game like Amid Evil is that you know pretty much immediately if you want to play it. There's room for discussion about the quality of the experience, how it remains true to its roots versus how it's been modernized to appeal to contemporary gamers, but the bottom line is that you likely don't have to be sold on the idea: "A new Heretic in Unreal Engine 4" either brings all your boys to the yard, or it doesn't. 

Amid Evil will go for $20 in Early Access. The full release will take place later this year. 

Amid Evil is ostensibly a first-person shooter but it feels more like a racing game. Most modern shooters with a fondness for old school values are fast, but everything about Amid Evil, from the level design to the head bob to the tenacity of its foes, feels like a 1980s straight-to-VHS horror with fast forward locked on.

It’s also, as you’ll quickly cotton on when watching the trailer, hugely indebted to Heretic – the Raven-developed fantasy FPS developed in Doom’s engine. I never played Heretic 2, but Amid Evil feels like how Heretic would play in Quake’s engine, developed by someone with… maybe an unhealthy guarana habit. Or something much worse.

Developers Leon Zawada and Simon Rance – both involved with the 2013 Rise of the Triad reboot, among other things – have been tinkering with FPS engines since they were young. “We started out when we were 7 years old making mods for Doom and things like that,” Rance said. “We’ve been doing this our whole life, now we’re making an actual game, which is wild.”

Amid Evil’s most striking quality is its presentation. It definitely looks “retro” but not in a laboured, overly-referential way. While the team has worked on some neat visual tricks involving 2D sprites for both weapons and their projectiles (you’ll quickly notice that all collectibles are 2D sprites, too), the game doesn’t feel too anchored to the past. The lighting, in particular, is gorgeous and very much a 21st century phenomenon. 

No, Amid Evil is more concerned with the “spirit” of early true 3D FPS level design, and the most obvious marker of this spirit is the structure of the levels themselves. Environments often shirked any pretense towards realism in favour of what felt good. And this (as well as technical limitations) resulted in levels that were strange and illogical, weird even, which dovetailed nicely with how bracing it was experiencing them in the ‘90s for the first time. Playing Amid Evil, with its speed, its bullet hell pace and sharp-edged hell-inspired worlds, feels like a fever dream.

“We wanted to up to abstractness of it,” Rance said of the hand crafted levels, which are spread across seven episodes, each with three levels and one “boss” level. “Old levels prized fun gameplay areas over the way they looked. Who cares if it doesn’t make sense if it looks cool? A part of the feel of those games were the otherworldly spaces. The fact that they didn’t make sense made them feel more unreal.”

Still, Amid Evil won’t be a bunch of shooting intercut with a key hunt – Rance was careful to emphasize that the level design wouldn’t be as blandly labyrinthine as some early FPS levels could sometimes be. “It’s not like you’re going through a maze to get to them. And once you have it, you know that the door is right there.” There will also be set pieces – which won’t simply be based around ambushes, a common trope in the first Doom and Quake games. 

Developed in Unreal Engine 4, the game feels similar to its publisher stablemate Dusk, but while that game looks like a gritty reboot of Redneck Rampage, Amid Dawn is dark fantasy through and through. The seven weapons (which you can carry all at once) range Heretic-esque crossbows through to battle axes through to precision-oriented magic staffs.  Enemies will chase the player throughout levels and can even jump and vault in pursuit of you, which has taken new players aback, according to Rance. Add to that a lack of fall damage and hugely vertical worlds, and it feels unlikely that anyone who played an FPS in 1996 couldn’t find something to love in this. 

While it all sounds quite orthodox, Amid Evil does a few tiny things to elevate it above the iconic games it apes. It looks better, of course (I can’t emphasis that enough) but each weapon also has a soul mode. When enemies are felled they drop souls, and once you’ve filled the relevant meter the equipped weapon will go into carnage mode. For example, the battleaxe rotates like a jackhammer, tearing through foes with ease.

Published by New Blood Interactive, Amid Evil is due “soon”. Check out a gameplay walkthrough recorded during PAX below.

If you miss the days of first-person shooters that gave you magic staffs and axes then let you loose in spooky cathedrals to carve monsters into gibs, then indie studio Indefatigable is working on just the game for you. 

Amid Evil's reveal trailer shows magical lightning, fireballs, black holes and more being used to demolish both bad guys and the blocky level geometry around them. It looks like a lost third game in the lineage of Heretic and Hexen, which is very much by design.

Indefatigable is based in Australia and New Zealand and are made up of "The producers of DUSK and the creators of Return of the Triad." Here's what they've said we'll be looking forward to in Amid Evil:

• SEVEN distinct episodes each featuring a completely different setting and enemies 
• LUDICROUS magical weaponry that can be overcharged with the souls of the dead 
• BRUTAL and adaptive enemy AI that will hunt you down over land, sea and air 
• SPRAWLING non-linear levels filled with secrets and ancient lore 
• MULTITUDES of in-game options and cheat codes for a truly "Golden PC Age" experience 
• BUILT in Unreal Engine 4 for cutting edge visuals (even if they are a bit retro) 
• OPTIMIZED to run on a toaster (a pretty nice toaster) 
• EPIC original and dynamic soundtrack composed by Andrew Hulshult 

Amid Evil's release date on Steam is simply "SOON™". We'll have more info for you once we've had a closer look at how it plays.