When remasters of Heretic and Hexen were surprise-released last week, my interest was piqued despite myself. I played both in the '90s and didn't love either of them. Released in 1994 by Raven Software, Heretic was a fantasy take on Doom and it was OK. The following year Hexen offered an RPG take on Doom—by way of Heretic—and it drove me nuts.
The weapons in Heretic were novel enough. I loved the shotgun-adjacent ethereal crossbow a lot, and punching gargoyles in the face with magic bracers was weirdly funny. It was always kinda cool how you could collect items to use later: spamming a hall with a dozen Time Bombs of the Ancients and watching swathes of golems perish felt pretty clever compared to just pointing and shooting at them. But overall the game wasn't different enough from Doom to excite me. Its approach to fantasy was pretty cartoonish, especially compared to what would come later in the form of Hexen.
