For Fans of Doom

The argument is not even close. id Software's 2016 revival understood something almost every AAA shooter had forgotten: the player should always feel like the apex predator in the room. No regenerating health that rewards cowering behind cover. No scripted sequences that strip you of control. No ironic detachment. Just a perfectly tuned loop of aggression, resource management via Glory Kills, and a demon population that genuinely feels afraid of you. The combat is a puzzle where all the solutions are violent, and each one feels correct.

Paul W.S. Anderson's 1997 film is one of the few science-fiction movies that takes the concept of a portal to a genuinely malevolent dimension seriously. Where Doom posits that demons are biological organisms from another dimension, Event Horizon posits that the dimension itself is alive and hungry. The film borrows heavily from Hellraiser's cenobite aesthetic and the isolation dread of Alien, but synthesizes them into something that feels like what would happen if the UAC actually opened a gateway and did not send a marine through first.

Bobby Prince's original Doom soundtrack was already remarkable, an early argument that games deserved real music budgets and genre ambition. Mick Gordon's 2016 score made the case again, louder. By processing guitar through industrial machinery, synthesizing metal riffs into electronic noise, and building layers that responded to the combat intensity, Gordon created music that did not just accompany the violence but intensified it physically. The riff from BFG Division is the most kinetically effective piece of game music recorded since the original DOOM E1M1.