Content warning: Pixelated blood and gore within! All screenshots are from the DOS version of Blood, using DOSBox's built-in screenshot function. Shrine is currently a work in progress, expect more pages and updates in the future!
Table of contents:
Weapons
What is Blood?
Blood is a 1997 first-person shooter for MS-DOS developed by Monolith Productions in the Build Engine, the same engine used in Duke Nukem 3D. Inspired by horror and action movies of the 80s and 90s, the game depicts the story of Caleb, an undead wild west gunslinger, who after being betrayed by the cult he was once a high-ranking follower of, sets out on a violent rampage of revenge.
Blood is by far my favourite first-person shooter, and a strong contender for my favourite game of all time. Doom II may be more polished, balanced and stable, with an unparalleled modding community, but in terms of the base game and campaign, Blood is something special. It's also somewhat infamous for being pretty brutally difficult. The purpose of this shrine, aside from giving me a chance to gush about a game I love, is to hopefully help to better explain the difficulty of Blood with more strategies and documentation. Blood is definitely tough, but on the whole I find it fairer than Duke Nukem 3D.
What makes it special?
- Excellent dark, gothic and horrific atmosphere.
- Perfectly complementary soundtracks that fully sells that atmosphere (includes two soundtracks, a CD one and a midi one)
- Dorky humour and one-liners for some levity in the midst of it all.
- A delightfully twisted and sadistic protagonist with superb voice acting, coming close to being a villain protagonist if not for the fact that there's someone worse than him he's fighting.
- He's also funny and sings show tunes and laughs at explosions.
- Violence that balances on a thin line between disturbing and cartoonishly goofy. Yeah, you'll see a lot of mutilated corpses, but you'll also see people explode so hard that their skeleton rockets out of their body like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
- Extremely unique and unconventional weapons that remain versatile and useful throughout the whole game.
- Nearly every weapon has an alt-fire, effectively doubling the amount of unique attacks available to you to utilise.
- Combat and pacing with more tactical elements than the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, while also retaining the fast pacing and action of those games as well.
- A unique element system; your weapons have elements and enemies have elemental weakness to exploit, while you can resist different elemental attacks from enemies with elemental armours.
- Wonderfully varied level designs with thoughtful geometry and enemy placements taking full advantage of your arsenal.
- Excellent aesthetics, great pixel art and visual design with superb attention to detail that still holds up today. (Okay, except the CG cutscenes, but they're at least funny)
- You eat the still breathing hearts of your enemies to regain your health and I just think that's cool.
- It's generally less embarrassing to talk about Blood in public than Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior.
My experience with Blood
I wasn't a DOS kid, and also I was one year old when Blood came out, so I didn't play it until years later, once the game was released on GOG and I was discovering DOSBox as a teenager. I struggled with it immensely, but that didn't stop me appreciating the wonderful level design and satisfying weapons and combat, even if I had to heavily savescum to get anywhere. Once source ports started rolling out (or reverse engineered ports perhaps more accurately, Blood's source code hasn't been released yet) and I had more experience in the FPS genre, I revisited Blood and ended up loving it far, far more. Then my girlfriend tried and loved it too, so it became another game we bonded over and have continued to play and enjoy to this day.
My preference for playing first-person shooters is to play them without saving mid-level, so if I die at any point then I have to start the whole level over again. This play style is not for everyone, needless to say, especially given how massive a lot of levels in 90s first-person shooters generally are, but I personally enjoy the high stakes, challenge and resource management that it results in. When I first revisited Blood, I beat the game on Lightly Broiled (the medium difficulty option) without mid-level saving, but now I can comfortably beat the game on Well Done (the second hardest difficulty option) with the same restrictions in play. I wouldn't call myself a master at Blood by any means, but I have played through it enough to not be nearly as intimidated by the infamous difficulty level of this game anymore. Between Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood, I actually find Blood to be the easiest of those three games now, thanks to it being the one I've played the most.
I hope you enjoy this shrine as much as I did making it. Any excuse to play Blood more is a good time!
Special thanks:
- Monolith Productions, RIP, for making an absolute banger of a game with Blood, in addition to other classics such as Claw.
- My girlfriend for encouraging this shrine, discussing the mechanics and characters with me and helping with much of the analysis.
- The Blood Wiki, for being one of the most charming wikis out there filled with an infectious amount of love and passion for this game, in addition to plentiful amounts of fan-art, fan fiction and mods, and helping immensely in research thanks to their extensive documentation of Blood's lore.
