8 Smart Video Games With Incredibly Dumb Twists

4. Doom Eternal - Literally Any Storytelling Whatsoever

Doom 2016 shocked the world by slapping the words ‘boomer shooter’ right out of everyone’s cynical mouth holes, and spooning in a decadent ramekin of frenetically-whisked murder soufflé. Doom 2016 was shown a piece of cover, once, and asked which end of it was for hitting demons with.

Doom 2016 also had very little in the way of story interruptions, and displayed a fourth wall breaking, Verhoeven-esque glee in winkingly facilitating the player’s own impatient bloodlust. That’s not to say the game didn’t have lore, or worldbuilding, and interesting lore and worldbuilding at that, but the plot was left refreshingly optional.

Doom Eternal, however, pulled perhaps the biggest storytelling twist of 2020, by assuming that anyone actually cared about the story in a Doom game. A shocker, for sure, although not an especially welcome one. I’ve warmed up considerably to most of the changes that Eternal made. It’s an incredibly confident, smart game, made better by the designers' refusal to sit on their laurels. They had a successful formula already, and they stuffed it to the gills with extras, just because they wanted it to be even better. Any exposition longer than a metal vinyl’s tracklist is painfully superfluous, though.