Despite having no experience or interest in fraternities or the navy, I’ve always had an affinity for the term Hell Week. So when I was thinking about replaying the original Diablo (PC / Blizzard Entertainment / 1997 – GOG version), I decided to make it a week of posts. I figured that I’d easily be able to wrap up a standard playthrough in a chill seven days- this was a game I’d beat in a weekend as a teenager! Turns out my confidence was misplaced and using the term Hell Week was prescient, because after eight hours or so, I’ve only made it a little more than halfway through the dungeon, but what an eight hours it has been.
Diablo was obviously a hugely influential game, with a Pavlovian loot system that paved the way for everything from Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance to Borderlands. There are now hundreds of ARPGs and looter shooters out there, but none of them- not even subsequent entries in the Diablo series- manage to capture the feeling of this original game.
Diablo is, at its core, a dungeon crawler, a genre as old as computer gaming itself. But even beyond the loot system, Diablo differentiates itself from DND, Gauntlet, and countless other predecessors in key ways. The aesthetic is essentially an isometric D&D campaign run by the biggest early-Slayer fan you know. Aside from the requisite pentagrams, the dungeon in Diablo is littered with gruesome demons, torture devices, and impaled bodies.
Thinking of Diablo’s music, the first thing that will likely come to mind is the iconic guitar theme of Tristam. The song is an ominous, haunting melody, but equally important are composer Matt Uelman’s dungeon tracks. Ranging from eerie minimalism to unsettling industrial rock, the music adds so much to the oppressive feeling of navigating the descent beneath the church.
Like the tank controls in early survival horror games, the mouse movement and static isometric viewing angle in Diablo creates a feeling of unrelenting tension. This is a game where death comes ripping, and if you enter a room throwing caution to the wind you can be swarmed and slaughtered in seconds.
In practice, this creates an awkward and oppressive experience that can quickly turn frustrating. I started by playing a ranged rogue, but switched to a warrior after struggling to aim my bow shots properly. I’ve been swapping back and forth between the two characters and neither has quite felt right. This has led to changing difficulty levels and restarting runs (money / items / level / stats all carry over into a new game). Despite the constant roadblocks and bottlenecks I’m compelled to push forward.
This Diablo playthrough has exceeded the time I expected to spend on it, but it’s also exceeded my memories in terms of its quality and pure addictiveness.
And so Hell Week will continue past its arbitrary seven day period, potentially into a Hell Month. But as Bruce Dickinson once sang: “Hell ain’t a bad place, Hell is from here to eternity.”
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