Important notes:

Axe Zombies

Zombies are only really dangerous if they corner you, and even then you can usually just jump over them in response. They're slow, they only have a melee attack and they're also light enough that you can knock them out of their attack range just by hitting them directly with the pitchfork. If you have the time to spare you can take them out with the pitchfork no problem. If you're in a rush because they're backed up by more dangerous enemies, then a point blank double-barrelled shotgun blast is preferable to get them out of the way instantaneously. Dynamite works well on them in hordes, try to throw the explosive into the middle of the horde as opposed to just hitting them front-on, it'll help you take out more zombies at once.

There's a couple of odd quirks with zombies. First off, they for whatever reason move much faster underwater. Their underwater behavior is weird as they don't really swim in it, as much as they just run through it real fast while very slowly sinking. Still not much of a threat in spite of that, but you're slightly more likely to be caught off guard by them underwater. The less obscure second quirk about the zombies is that they often play dead. If heavy damage is dealt to a zombie with certain weapons, but not enough to actually kill it, the zombie will fall over with a low grunt, only to get back up a few seconds later. Zombies make a different sound when they die for real, a louder yell as opposed to a growl. The shotgun, dynamite and napalm are all capable of triggering this play dead state, as is the physical damage dealt by the flare gun at point blank range on the lower difficulty levels, but those attacks are also all powerful enough to one-shot zombies, so you'll only see that happen if your attacks graze them (or if you use the single barrel primary shot of the shotgun). The pitchfork and Tommy gun meanwhile never make the zombies play dead.

Cultists

This is the most common enemy in the game, and it's also by far the most dangerous. I love them and I hate them in equal measures. Blood would absolutely be a lesser game without them, but when people say Blood is unreasonably hard, these dickheads are the entire reason why. What I like about the cultists and the other enemies based on them however is that there isn't one single weapon that is just always the best choice for them, in the same way that other dangerous enemies like Phantasms and Hell Hounds are always best dealt with via the shotgun and Tesla Cannon respectively. Cultists are much more dynamic than your more monstrous foes, and which weapon is the best choice will be dependent on the level design, the placement of cultists, the formations they're in, how many of them they are, how much cover you have, whether or not they've detected you or not and how much you're trying to conserve ammo. With the exception of the aerosol can, every weapon in your arsenal has situational usages where it's the best choice for taking out cultists.

Cultists have shotguns which deal Hitscan damage to you. They're quick on the draw, the damage is dealt instantaneously and they reload fast too. How fast their reaction time is depends on your difficulty level; the higher the difficulty the faster their trigger finger gets. That's already rough as is, but on higher difficulties the cultists also throw dynamite in addition to the shotgun fire. In addition to direct hits from dynamite being enough to take out most of your health, if not all of it, your attempts to escape the blast radius may lead to you fleeing out into the open and then getting hitscanned to death instead. The cultists aren't particularly smart, but with a dangerous one-two punch like that, it hardly matters.

The simplest advice on cultists is simply to just kill them fast. You're a glass cannon in Blood. Enemies can kill you fast, but you can kill them faster. Cultists have low HP and as a result can be one-shotted by half of your weapons (Flare gun (except on Extra Crispy difficulty), Shotgun, Napalm, Dynamite, Life Leech), while a few of the ones that can't do that are instead capable of stunlocking them (Pitchfork, Tommy gun and Tesla Cannon). If there is one close by or waiting to ambush you around a corner, quickly double-barrel shotgun blast him, or throw dynamite around the corner. If there's a cultist too far away to be one-shotted by the shotgun, stunlock them with the Tommy gun or Tesla Cannon instead. Dealing with a large group of them? Fire a napalm bomb to take as many of them out at once as possible. Cultists haven’t detected you yet? Stay out of sight and throw dynamite at them, or if you have a clear shot, flare gun them. See one far off in the distance, far enough away that you're out of range of their attacks? Your range is better, so snipe them with the voodoo doll. Ambush at the top of an elevator shaft? Load the elevator with remote dynamite or the life leech in alt-fire mode. Oh, and if there happens to be just a single cultist, all alone in a corner, facing away from you? Pitchfork him to death. For all the hell they give you, they deserve the humiliation once in a while.

There's quite a few quirks with the cultists. The most important thing of note is that their hitscan attacks are less accurate when you're crouching. They're still Blood cultists, so they will still hit you, but it will be a graze as opposed to being shredded by a full blast. Cultists themselves sometimes make use of this tactic as well and will try crawling. They're not very good at it. They didn't seem to master the whole “shoot while crouching” advanced technique so their shots are slow and inaccurate when crouching. What they lack in crawling skills they make up for in swimming skills. Whenever you can, do not let cultists fall into water. Their aim underwater remains as perfect as ever, while Caleb really struggles with hitting submerged targets by contrast. In addition to that, they also can't be stunlocked underwater. A single cultist underwater can be enough to kill you if they catch you off guard or if Caleb’s auto aim screws him over.

Fanatics

The first cultist variant, and the closest to the standard cultist. Fanatics use Tommy guns instead of shotguns and don't throw dynamite. Since they can hitscan you faster and they only hitscan you, they can kill you even faster. Second verse, same as the first; just kill them fast. Their behaviour and low HP are otherwise near identical to the cultists. Crouching still makes them less accurate. Do not let them get into water, they’re even worse to deal with underwater than the cultists.

Rats

Unlike the cultists, which are annoying but I respect, I have zero respect for the rats, they're just annoying as hell. They're small targets that are hard to hit with lots of your weapons, move surprisingly fast and have ridiculous range on their “melee” attack. Their bite can reach you even when you're standing on a ledge above them. It has more range than the pitchfork somehow, in spite of being a tiny rat. I can only imagine that the rats have some kind of freakishly long xenomorph-esque second extendable mouth that they can chomp you with, I have no other explanation how they can bite further than the length of a pitchfork. Fortunately their damage output is low, but if you’re swarmed by them, that can add up.

As long as you have the shotgun ammo, they're not too bad to deal with. They suck more when they appear in the first level of an episode since at that point you really don't have ammo to spare, and in the case of E1M1, don't even have access to any suitable weapons to use on them.

(Disclaimer: I love rats IRL)

Bats

D’aaawwww, this is the complete opposite of the rats, these guys are too cute and too adorably inept at doing anything aggressive. The only real danger here is that sometimes, very very rarely, they may fly into your line of sight at close range and block your napalm shot, resulting in it blowing up in your face. They can sometimes bite you, but in the last two playthroughs of this game I did while getting information for this shrine, I never saw them bite me once. No, this isn’t a brag, it’s actually more impressive if you can get them to bite you due to how rarely they do it. They don’t try to chase you down and are typically flying far out of melee reach. Even when deliberately jumping into the bats to try and get them to bite you, it’s still hard to get them to ever attack you. If you somehow manage to chase a bat into a corner and then block their way out they might bite you if they feel like it. Even then, it’s probably more likely that you’ll just jump on them by accident and deal damage to the bat instead.

Best weapon to use on a bat? No. Don’t kill the bats, they’re too cute and unlike the rats they’re not war criminals. The squeaky noises they make when they die make me sad. They don’t count towards your total kill count either, so the only reason to kill them is if you’re worried about them blocking your napalm shots.

Bone Eels

A fast and aggressive but nonetheless thoroughly unthreatening aquatic foe. When bone eels see you, they’ll immediately rush you and try to bite you. However, their attack range is trash, their damage output is weak and their HP is low. You can easily pitchfork them if you want to conserve ammo, or just use whatever physical weapon you have the most ammo for.

Funnily enough, the way they aggressively gun for you the second they see you ends up being another weakness of theirs. If you alert the bone eels and then immediately swim up to a shore, the bone eels will beach themselves trying to chase you down and immediately die on the spot.

Flesh Gargoyles

Technically these enemies are just called Gargoyles, but in the fandom they're commonly referred to as flesh gargoyles to differentiate them from the stone gargoyles you fight later. The flesh gargoyles are the first flying enemies you'll encounter, unless you count the bats, and they're also the most common. They fly around drunkenly in a way where I can't tell if they're deliberately trying to disorient me or if they’re just uncoordinated messes, and will eventually swoop in and try clawing at you at close range, dealing heavy melee damage. In addition, they can also throw bones at you, which are weak and inaccurate and barely worth acknowledging, except for the fact that the bones thrown are a rare example of a non-elemental attack, meaning that it will always deal full damage to Caleb and no armour will soften that blow. Would be scary if not for the fact that, again, it's such a weak attack that it doesn't even matter.

Gargoyles kind of orbit around you as if Caleb has a gravitational pull, gradually getting closer and closer to your level before swooping in for attacks. Their high speed can make it easy to lose track of them, and their drunken flight can be deceptive in making you think they're no threat. Don't be surprised if you see a gargoyle flying laps around absolutely nothing, and then the second you look away figuring that it's just going to be stuck there for the rest of the level, then it somehow breaks free of that loop and immediately backstabs you. The voodoo doll’s high accuracy, infinite range and auto aiming makes it an excellent choice against those stubborn gargoyles that keep flying out of reach of your more conventional weaponry. If they get closer to you however, back up a bit (or jump over them if they have you backed up against a wall) and fire the napalm cannon at them if you have the ammo for it. A direct napalm shot will one-hit kill them on Well Done. Dynamite can do that too, but it's significantly harder to hit gargoyles with dynamite due to their high speed. Damn satisfying if you do manage it however.

Gargoyles will instantly die if they're submerged in water. Sometimes you don't even need to bait them into water, they'll just fly straight into it on their own because they're klutzes that don't know how to fly.

Stone Gargoyles

These guys could have been among the most dangerous enemies in the game, if not for their hilarious weakness. The Episode 1 boss, Cheogh, is a stone gargoyle, and from Episode 2 onwards stone gargoyles appear as regular enemies. Cheogh isn’t any stronger than the other stone gargoyles, but due to you not having any spirit weapons for the entirety of Episode 1, he’s tanky as hell. Stone gargoyles can attack you at close range with their claws much like their fleshy counterparts, but their ranged attack is much more dangerous. They can fire volleys of magic orbs out of their eyes, which do heavy spirit damage. The tesla orbs aren’t hitscan weapons, so circle strafing and jumping will work out fine for dodging their attacks, though it can be trickier in cramped environments, in which more carefully timed sidestepping left and right is required.

… at least, that would be the case if not for the fact that you can instead avoid all of their attacks by simply crouching. See, the stone gargoyle only attacks when it’s at eye-level with you, but due to their big, bulky sprite that’s incapable of crouching, if you crouch, then they can’t get low enough to reach your eye-level. If you are crouching on top of an elevated ledge, the stone gargoyle can sometimes attack you, but they still struggle with it. I’ll leave whether or not you want to exploit that oversight up to you.

Anyway, stone gargoyles are weak to spirit weapons. The voodoo doll can take down a stone gargoyle in about the same amount of time it takes to kill a flesh gargoyle with the voodoo doll. Tesla cannon also works excellently. Using physical or fire-based attacks is not only going to take ages but is also going to burn through a lot of your ammo, which makes it even less worth it.

Hey, want a challenge? Kill the stone gargoyle without crouching and with only the pitchfork. It’s the least efficient way of fighting the stone gargoyle ever, but actually easier than you might expect. If you stick close to the stone gargoyle, it will only ever use the melee claw attack on you, so if you just stay close up in their face and step backwards any time you see them start their clawing animation, you will eventually be able to kill it. I did it myself just to confirm it was possible.

Gill Beasts

Essentially the actually dangerous upgraded version of the bone eel. Gill beasts are fast aggressive melee attackers underwater that move twice as fast as Caleb and will rapidly chomp you if you’re in melee range, with very little cooldown between their attacks. They have a harder time keeping up with you if you circle strafe around them, but they are likely to catch up with you eventually. The shotgun helps here since the double-barrelled shot knocks them back. Things get trickier when you’re fighting large swarms of gill beasts, which becomes more and more common as you progress further through the game, though their bulky bodies tend to get in the way of one another which generally prevents them from all bodying you at once. Just make sure to surface for air every once in a while.

The safest ways to fight gill beasts involve staying on land. It’s possible for instance to throw dynamite into the water to bomb gill beasts, though this tends to only work in particularly small pools of water where the gill beasts don’t have much room to swim around, otherwise it’s hard to keep track of where they are as the water surface is opaque. Alternatively, if there’s a shore you can lure the gill beasts to, you can get them to surface out of the water and fight them on land. They are much slower on land and can be more easily killed with explosive weapons without fear of them getting too close and killing you with your own weapon’s splash damage.

Red Spider

There’s not a whole lot to say about spiders. They’re small, they’re weak and they do low damage. They’re small targets which can make them tricky to hit, but they’re not as small as the rats or choking hands so it’s not much of an issue, nor do they have the ridiculous melee range of the rats. There’s two types of common spiders and they generally exist more to try and swarm you with strength in numbers. As usual with small enemies, the aerosol can is viable.

The main difference between the two spiders aside from differences in HP is that there’s different deliberating ailments that their attacks have a chance of inflicting on you. In the case of the red spiders, their bites can make Caleb drunk, causing the camera to sway and tilt, disorienting the player. Caleb still shoots straight even when the camera is swaying in directions other than ‘straight’, so it doesn’t impact your aim.

Green Spider

More health than red spiders, but a significantly less dangerous ailment. Green spider venom just darkens the screen for a fraction of a second. It’s not very disorienting, given that it doesn’t make the screen dark enough to obscure your view much and also doesn’t last nearly as long as the red spider venom. No problem at all.

Bloated Butchers

In spite of their tankiness, Bloated Butchers are barely any more dangerous than regular zombies, honestly. Possibly even less so, since they tend to come in smaller numbers and are slower. Don't bother with physical or magical weapons, that will just waste ammo. No sense in spending ten shotgun shells on this guy when you can instead just shoot him twice with the flare gun and be done with it. The bloated butcher is very weak to fire based weapons. Napalm and dynamite can both one-shot them with a direct hit on Well Done. Even the aerosol can is decent on them. Stick to fire based weapons and they'll go down fast.

Their ranged attacks aren't hitscans and have slow wind-ups that makes them easy to dodge. I swear I've even seen Caleb automatically duck under the vomit attack a few times. That's the other thing about the bloated butcher, you can actually duck under their vomit to avoid it completely, even if it's fired directly at you. Neither of their ranged attacks are particularly strong either.

If you get close to a bloated butcher, he will swing his cleaver at you for a melee attack. This melee attack doesn’t deal any more damage than his ranged attacks, and also allows for you to bait them into attacking with a slow and easy to avoid melee attack that you can simply backstep away from.

Choking Hands

How dangerous the choking Hands are depends on a couple of factors; whether or not you're playing the original DOS version and how fast your computer is if you are. The way the choking hands work is that if you get within their grabbing range, they'll grip onto your throat and squeeze the life out of you surprisingly fast. In order to get them to stop strangling you, you need to mash the use key as quickly as possible to shake them off. Here's the catch; in the DOS version, how fast you need to mash the use key to shake them off varies depending on how fast your CPU is. The faster the computer, the faster you need to mash. If you're playing on modern computers, the choking hands are thus impossible to shake off, leaving you with no choice but to die. The choking hands are one of the best reasons to play Blood via a source port, as this oversight is patched out of every modern version of the game, so that the mashing speed required is consistent across all computers.

While playing in DOSBox for this shrine, I did find a very funny workaround. So, DOSBox has a built-in screenshot key which I have been using for all of the images in this shrine. It's quick and easy to use, but it does also cause the emulator to stutter a bit every time I press it. If I mash the screenshot key in rapid succession, it causes the game to hang for a second or two before returning to full speed. Hilariously, the lag caused by the screenshot key is actually powerful enough to slow the emulation down to a level where you can easily shake off the choking hands. You could alternatively lower the emulator’s cycles any time a choking hand grabs you and then turn it back up to full speed once you've dealt with them, but the screenshot key ends up being less cumbersome.

Other than that, the choking hands are fine. Their melee range is super short so you can even pitchfork them to death comfortably, unlike the rats. They exist more to disorientate and fluster you than anything else, when the game is working as intended that is.

Phantasm

The final flying enemy in the game, and quite a unique one at that. Phantasms can not be damaged by anything but physical attacks, and they can only be damaged specifically when they are attacking. When not attacking, Phantasms are transparent and have no collision, so they can potentially even fly straight through you. They usually circle around you, gradually lowering themselves to ground level before using one of their two attacks. Their primary attack has them rush straight towards you and attempt a melee attack with their scythe. They seem to default to using this attack the most, but they have another attack where they shoot skulls at you from a distance as well.

As Phantasms are only vulnerable for those short moments where they physically manifest to attack you, the shotgun is easily the best option available. The double-barreled shot is quick and powerful, in addition to being even more effective at point blank range, which works out since the phantasm’s scythe attack already has them moving right up in your face. Even better, the knock back inflicted on the phantasm from the shotgun’s alt fire is strong enough to send them flying backwards, thus preventing their scythe swing from hitting you. Phantasms usually respond to this by immediately rushing you again for another melee attack, allowing you to essentially juggle them by repeatedly blasting them with knockback every time they rush you.

Phantasms are usually pretty easy to deal with, but there are situations that can make them much more dangerous. In general, any encounter where you need to fight a phantasm that has other monsters backing them up can be potentially overwhelming. Take out the backup monsters first, as they'll just interrupt that juggling rhythm you'd normally have with Phantasms. As long as you keep moving and jumping out of the way of their attacks, Phantasms are going to have a hard time hitting you. They may be fast, but ultimately you are more mobile. The other thing that makes Phantasms harder to deal with is fighting them with no shotgun ammo. The tommy gun can still damage them, but it doesn't inflict knockback like the shotgun, so you need to be more active about jumping out of the way of attacks while opening fire. If things get really dire, then you can use the flare gun, since it actually deals physical damage in addition to the fire damage. It's slow and tedious but also kinda funny. At that point you’re probably better off just using the pitchfork though.

Mother Spider

Much like the stone gargoyles, the mother spider is introduced as a boss, in the form of Shial, the boss of episode 2. Mother spiders are more annoying than dangerous. They don’t have any direct attacks. Instead they rapidly birth green and red spiders to protect them and fight for them. These fodder spiders aren’t dangerous, but they serve the mother spider as meat shields that block your attacks, and the mother spiders can birth them fast.

There might be a trick to fighting mother spiders I’m missing, to be honest. They seem overly tanky for their supposed listed HP value on the Blood wiki (which it admits may be inaccurate due to how hard it is to measure the HP value of the mother spider when she keeps spawning small spiders), and there doesn’t seem to be any significant weakness to speed up the process the same way there is with the stone gargoyles. There’s two ways of dealing with them that I have; the stupid, wasteful but safe and easy way, and the chaotic but more frugal way. The stupid way is to just immediately empty your entire tommy gun ammo capacity into the mother spider. This stunlocks the mother spider’s movement, preventing her from moving out of the way, and her only method of self-defence is nullified by your constant tommy gun fire instantly killing any smaller spiders the second they’re spawned. The downside is, well, you use all of your tommy gun ammo.

The less stupid way to fight them is to use explosives. Napalm and dynamite deal a good amount of damage, in addition to dealing splash damage that helps them take out the smaller spiders too. This can still take a while and it can be clumsy because mother spiders are very light, resulting in them getting knocked into the sky and flung around the room any time you hit them with an explosive. On the whole though, this is the most ammo-efficient way of dealing with them.

Mother spiders can technically survive underwater, but they’re kind of screwed if they do. They don’t know what to do except for just spinning around on the spot while birthing more small spiders that are also only capable of spinning around on the spot. It basically renders them immobile.

Hellhound

For ages, no enemy in this game made me panic every time they showed up quite like the hellhound. The second you see them, they're immediately sprinting straight towards you at full speed, and the second they're in attack range, they're lighting you on fire. Their fire breath has an accumulative effect where the longer you stay in the flames the longer it takes for yourself to be extinguished, and it doesn't take much exposure to the hellhound's flame breath to get you covered in flames persistent enough to kill you from max health.

In my first few playthroughs, my reaction to the hellhound was always to fumble, run away as fast as possible and switch to the Tesla Cannon to take them out quickly from a safe distance. The Tesla Cannon still remains the best weapon for hellhounds, but running away from them isn't actually necessarily the best strategy. Since hellhounds run so fast and carry so much inertia, they actually struggle with quick u-turns. As a result, simply jumping over a hellhound is a pretty effective way to essentially bait them into leaving themselves open, giving you a chance to get some shots in before they rush at you again and you jump over them once again. Repeat until dead. You can even pretty safely kill hellhounds with the shotgun this way. Their flames seem to struggle to hit airborne targets.

Although hellhounds are immune to being lit on fire, they can be killed by explosions, even if they’re less effective on them. Also, as you likely expected, hellhounds die if they're submerged in water, and thanks to that previously mentioned inertia they have, it's very easy to bait them into diving into the nearest pool of water if there is one.

Cerberus

The boss of Episode 3, and unlike the previous two, he doesn’t continue to show up as a common enemy following his fight. Like the hellhounds, he's immune to being lit on fire, but explosions and fire+physical type weapons. Instead of the fire breath of the hellhounds, Cerberus can instead spit napalm shots at you from his two heads. A direct hit from one of these projectiles will come close to one-shotting you, in addition to also temporarily obscuring your screen with a red filter, making it easy to get hit by another projectile while you're disoriented. Once Cerberus has taken enough damage, one of his heads will die, at which point his damage output is effectively halved as he can no longer fire two napalm shots at once.

Cerberus is incapable of hitting you if you're far enough away from him, as he doesn't start shooting napalm until you're within mid-range of him. In the first encounter with him he also has a tendency to get stuck on the terrain of his own arena that makes it even easier to get some free hits in from a distance. Much like the hellhounds, Tesla works best. You can circle strafe around him to avoid the napalm shots when fighting him at close range, just watch out for the splash damage. Even if the shot misses, the napalm hitting a wall close to you and catching you in the explosion can be deadly. The only other time you fight Cerberus is in the boss rush before the final boss, but the arena there is more open and less cramped, so he's not too threatening if you just keep your distance. Cerberus is dangerous and needs to be taken seriously, but isn't too tough if you know what you're doing.

Tchernobog

As seems to be frustratingly standard for 90s first-person shooters, Blood’s final boss is terrible. On paper, Tchernobog sounds like a tough final fight. He's got a hitscan attack which can light you on fire, in addition to fireballs which deal heavier damage. In reality however, there's a good chance the poor sap will die before he even gets a chance to fire a single attack.

Tchernobog first appears in a little monster closet that opens up to reveal him. In his arena is a Life Seed out in the open, in addition to an akimbo powerup obtainable via a secret switch on the ceiling. Take the guns akimbo power-up and immediately open fire on Tchernobog with napalm the second the closet opens up. Congrats, you have won. Tchernobog’s HP is low, and he struggles to get out of the monster closet when the napalm blasts are constantly knocking him around, so there’s a good chance that by doing this you’ll kill him before he even has a chance to attack you once.

If you don’t have napalm ammo and Tchernobog actually manages to escape the closet, he has the same weakness that Cerberus has: none of his attacks can hit you if you keep your distance. You have a ton of room to backpedal in this arena, so again he remains a non-threat.