Mini Review: Heretic + Hexen (PS5)

Originally unleashed in 1994, Heretic borrowed DOOM’s blueprint and cloaked it in a brooding, medieval spell. Twelve months on, Hexen pushed that reimagining even deeper, trading straightforward corridors for sprawling, less-linear mazes and layering in some RPG seasoning by letting you pick between warrior, cleric, or mage — each role armed with distinctive strengths, vulnerabilities, and arsenals.

True to its on-the-nose title, Heretic + Hexen corrals the duo into one package, tosses in all their expansions, multiplayer modes, and a pair of freshly forged episodes — lovingly scraped together so they slide seamlessly into the vintage framework.

The bundle further piles on a smorgasbord of graphics, sound, control, and accessibility tweaks, and even dangles an alternate score for anyone who fancies modern beats over the sizzling incantations and shrieking Hell-spawn.

All kidding aside, once you peel back the thunderous chaos, the audio lands with a tactile, old-school crunch — mirroring the enduringly crisp sprites, which still impress three decades later — and actually aids gameplay, helping you stalk foes through echoing stone halls and occasionally revealing walls that weren’t there a second ago (and, boy, there are a lot of those).

In both campaigns you stomp across claustrophobic, monster-choked labyrinths hunting keys, pull-switches, transporters, or enigmatic puzzle trinkets, and it’s here that refinement is most evident, especially in Hexen.

Stages have been massaged for clarity, the map now flags your current goal, and certain arms and adversaries have been retuned. Classicists can exhale, though — every tweak arrives toggled off by default, so the purist experience remains untouched.

Even saddled with shiny new upgrades, Heretic + Hexen refuses to apologize for what it is: a bare-bones, sometimes repetitive, oft-brutally unforgiving relic of another era. That style won’t win every twenty-first-century heart, yet anyone nursing — or merely awakening — nostalgia for the days when you scrawled cheat codes from a magazine onto scrap paper will walk away stuffed to the gills. A tidy gallery stuffed with sprites and conceptual sketches is merely the cherry on top.