This Week In Retro: Painkiller (Patreon)

April 12, 2004: Pain don't hurt

by Diamond Feit

DOOM changed video games; even if you never played the 1993 original, its arrival shifted the orbit of the rest of the medium. Within a few years so-called "DOOM clones" proliferated on both computers and consoles to the point that even family-friendly publishers like Nintendo could no longer ignore the demand.

By the dawn of the 21st century, we put an end to describing every first-person shooter in degrees of DOOM-ness as the genre had advanced sufficiently to warrant an independent nomenclature. However, just because developers proved they could adapt the genre to tell other stories besides tough guys loaded with guns marching their way into Hell, that's no reason to stop making video games about tough guys loaded with guns marching their way into Hell.

20 years ago, Polish studio People Can Fly released a first-person shooter that, like DOOM, pits a lone human being against the demonic hordes of the underworld. Unlike DOOM, this time the hero is no space marine and no one sets foot on the planet Mars. Instead, Painkiller presents an terrestrial tale of one man who suffers a terrible accident which leaves him with but one recourse: Do Heaven's dirty work and destroy the forces of Hell.

The game begins with an ordinary couple, Daniel and Catherine, leaving the comfort of their home to hop into a sports car and head out into a storm. Catherine laments the weather for threatening to wash out her birthday dinner but Daniel remains cheerful as he doesn't mind a little rain. He's clearly transfixed by his wife's company, so much so that he takes his eyes off the road for a moment to hold her hand and see her smile. Unfortunately, his timing proves disastrous as they collide head-on with a larger vehicle.

After a literal title drop that forms from the blood dripping from Daniel's corpse, Painkiller leaps ahead an unspecified amount of time to lay down its central premise. We see Daniel in a misty cathedral meeting with Samael, a much taller figure who looks vaguely human but whose appearance and tone of voice suggests this rendezvous takes place beyond Earth. Samael hands Daniel a scroll and tells him matter-of-factly "This is who you have to kill." Daniel offers no objection; on the contrary, he scoffs at the simplicity of the offer. Apparently he's been stuck in Purgatory waiting to reunite with Catherine so the prospect of eliminating four guys to escape strikes him as a bargain.

Samael tells Daniel—and the player—that this undertaking is no trivial task. His targets all serve as generals to Lucifer and control their own personal armies which Daniel will have to overcome before he even gets a chance to fulfill his mission. Again, Daniel has zero qualms with fighting literal demons. He's far more concerned with why he's in Purgatory in the first place. "Why has it taken this long? What did I do wrong?" he asks Samael, adding "Ask Him what I did." No one specifies the third party Daniel wants to question but given the setting, we can assume he's talking about the Lord our God.

This opening paints Daniel as an unusual protagonist for a video game in that we learn next to nothing about him. His self-confidence and selection for this assignment suggest that he has a history of violence, yet his clothes, home, and personal life offer no hints about what he did for a living before his demise. He fails to understand why he would be denied entrance to Heaven or Hell, but his overall demeanor displays a penchant for death-dealing.

Whatever Daniel's backstory, Painkiller puts us in his shoes and sets us loose against waves and waves of monsters. Visually, these creatures come in a welcome variety of designs, including humanoid warriors from different cultures and distinctly non-human creatures as well. In combat, however, they all tend to rush Daniel head-on and attack as soon as they get within range. The best strategy, in nearly all cases, is to just keep moving and keep shooting. 

The action plays out across five chapters, each of which contain strictly segmented levels. While Daniel and other on-screen characters imply they have a map guiding them from one location to the next, as players we get no geography or connective tissue between battlefields. Painkiller's version of Purgatory smashes together disparate eras and areas of human history without order; the very first level has skull-faced knights roaming a graveyard, but later stages run the gamut from ornate opera houses to a distinctly modern cargo port.

With no objectives other than killing everything that moves and simple enemies who charge Daniel on sight, moment to moment gameplay in Painkiller is frantic. Hell's minions can materialize without warning and easily surround Daniel should he try to stand his ground. The heavy metal soundtrack doubles as a barometer, roaring at full intensity when danger threatens and subsiding when Daniel splatters the final foe. A floating arrow at the top of the screen perpetually points players towards the next checkpoint; Painkiller never challenges you to find the next hazard, it just dares you to prepare yourself.

DOOM's influences upon Painkiller are too numerous to mention, although I would hesitate to actually call this 2004 video game a "DOOM clone" because it plays nothing like id Software's 1993 masterpiece. Both games move at a blistering pace but Painkiller requires players to mow down enough hellspawn before advancing. In contrast, DOOM's speed lies in Doomguy's feet, allowing players to run past almost every peril en route to clearing levels in a matter of seconds.

The tone of the two games also strikes me as radically different. DOOM's story of a marine exploring Martian lunar bases in order to infiltrate Hell only sounds sinister on paper, as playing the game feels more like a lost chapter of The Evil Dead series (see also the darkly comic Blood). Painkiller treats Daniel's quest to exterminate demons and reunite with his wife as deadly serious, particularly during cutscenes where Cam Clarke and other professional actors deliver dialogue completely straight-faced.

Painkiller's in-game action has its share of absurdity, especially as enemies ragdoll or even explode when impacted by high-velocity firepower, but none of that levity comes across on a narrative level. Many years later, after Epic Games acquired a majority stake in People Can Fly, the studio would produce a much more light-hearted shooter called Bulletstorm by pairing over-the-top action with profane one-liners. If only Daniel had threatened to "kill Lucifer's dick," I might have warmed up to him.

As-is, Painkiller comes across as quite an oddity in 2024. The game's menagerie of beasts convey an abundance of character, even as their one-note behavior doesn't allow for any personality. Every level includes multiple checkpoints which completely refill Daniel's health, a very generous feature. Aesthetically, Painkiller's jumble of unremarkably random locales fails to communicate any sense of characters on a journey, least of all one into literal Hell, yet I respect the ambition of offering such a wide array of venues.

I don't think Painkiller suits my particular needs for a first-person shooter. Its rock-solid gunplay more than holds up 20 years later, but I can't see that fun lasting enough hours to actually complete the game when other shooters both old and new successfully meld their mechanics, setting, and story into a compelling experience. In a 2003 interview, Adrian Chmielarz from People Can Fly said their game was not in "direct competition" with Half-Life 2—which ended up releasing just months after Painkiller—because he felt it had more in common with DOOM than any Half-Life game. He can compare his work to anything he wants but if I try it and don't immediately find it appealing, then I'd just as soon move on to another shooter like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 (both 2004).

On the other hand, the purity of Painkiller deserves praise. Given its grab-bag approach to creature and level design, People Can Fly could have chosen any number of plotlines to give Daniel his motivation, yet they settled on "go to Hell and kill 'em all." It's the video game equivalent of a heavy metal album cover, undeniably lowbrow but unabashedly awesome.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.