One of the best fan projects out there just finished a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Despite the wealth of incredible mods and reimaginings of the Doom franchise out there, DoomRl has managed to attract quite the cult following since it was released in 2013. DRL reimagined the franchise as a roguelike RPG complete with all the permadeath and randomization we've come to expect from that genre. It was so good, in fact, that it even caught the attention of publisher ZeniMax Media who insisted that DRL's developers remove all mentions of the Doom name from the game.
Perhaps encouraged by this legal setback, the DRL development team decided to expand upon the concept of a Doom roguelike and develop a fully-fledged take on the concept. It's called Jupiter Hell, and it's just met its funding goal on Kickstarter.
Jupiter Hell retains many of the aesthetics of the Doom franchise, including the look of its generic space marine protagonist, but is a far different animal compared to the original FPS. For that matter, it's fairly different even when you compare it to DRL.
Whereas DRL was a classic ASCII-style roguelike, Jupiter Hell is a psuedo-3D experience that takes a few cues from titles like the X-Com series with its grid-based combat and strategy systems. Despite these slight modifications, Jupiter Hell is still being touted as a pure roguelike at its core. The project is even set to include an ASCII visual mode for those who prefer symbols over rendered characters.
As the spiritual successor to DRL, there's no reason to believe that Jupiter Hell won't retain the well-preserved gameplay complexity and visual callbacks that made developer ChaosForge's original fan creation such a hit. At the same time, it will be exciting to see what new life the development team will breathe into this concept now that they've got a few extra thousand dollars floating in the budget.
There's no release date available for Jupiter Hell yet, but it will be available for PC, Mac, and Linux when it arrives.
