Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

MachineGames

screenshots c/o Mobygames

It’s the old familiar nightmare. You wake up in a cold sweat; somewhere deep in the bowels of a Nazi castle, you’re trapped within four walls. You can hear footsteps, and you know your turn is coming up. You’ve got a knife, and after some muffled violence, you’ve got a gun. Now, how are you gonna get out of here, and how many Nazi scumbags are you gonna take out on the way?

You wake up. It’s 1981. You’ve been playing Castle Wolfenstein, the ground-breaking stealth game by Silas Warner.

You wake up. It’s 1992. You’ve been playing Wolfenstein 3D, the fast-paced shooter from id Software.

You wake up. It’s 2001. You’ve been playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Gray Matter Studios’ long-awaited {remake?} {reboot?} {retelling?} of Wolf 3D.

You wake up. It’s 2015. You’ve been playing Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, MachineGames’ viciously schlocky prequel to their dark Wolfenstein reboot, The New Order.

It wasn’t clear, initially, where The New Order sat in the overall Wolfenstein canon. While the earlier games could easily be waved off as being self-contained, Return to Castle Wolfenstein seemed to be building a new continuity with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and later the 2009 game, titled just Wolfenstein. The New Order made reference to past games, with the events of the 2009 game’s finale being a big part of one of the characters’ backstories. But then along came The Old Blood; in short, it’s a speedrun through the basic plotline of Return to Castle Wolfenstein — something hinky is going on up by Castle Wolfenstein, and B.J. Blazkowicz and his pal Agent One (here known to B.J. as Wesley) are sent to infiltrate and find out what’s what. It obviously doesn’t go well, and B.J. has to fight his way out of the dungeons, kill every last Nazi in the place and meet his contact in the nearby village, because something is going on in the old ruins outside of town and ain’t none of it good.

The Old Blood takes this basic storyline and makes a whole game out of it, excising all the stuff about secret super-soldier labs and whatnot to instead tell a cosmic horror story about an ancient evil sealed beneath the earth by King Otto I back in the 10th century. Fully 2/3rds of the game is occupied by escaping the castle; the rest has you working your way through the nearby village — both before and after it catches fire — in pursuit of a folder that has important information.

If you’ve played Wolfenstein: The New Order, and you should, you already know what to expect. In general, Old Blood is an expandalone; it changes little of the base gameplay, save that you’ll get to spend a lot more time with the 1946 arsenal showcased in the main game’s prologue. You also get access to a piece of broken pipe, which can be used separately or screwed together, and navigating certain environmental gates — such as climbing certain rock walls, or prying open doors — will require one or the other (the game automatically has you switching to them as needed.) Other than this, it plays exactly like the nu-Wolf you know: you can use stealth, or go in guns blazing, with the option to go guns-akimbo for that ultimate action movie mayhem. There’s an added wrinkle in that towards the end, zombies overrun the town; these are generally slow-moving, but hit hard and have a tendency to rush you when they get close; some of them are armed and remember enough to try shooting you. Headshots are the best way of taking them down, but the bad news is that a lot of times, living Nazi mooks will become zombies the instant you kill them — though that sometimes has its advantages.

Story-wise, The Old Blood leans heavily on the franchise’s schlock roots to set the tone. While the ultimate fate of the Allied war effort is acknowledged — the game is set in 1946, shortly before the beginning of The New Order, so it’s already obvious that things have gone horribly awry — there’s much more focus on the classic Nazi occultism theme the franchise has leaned into going back to Spear of Destiny than The New Order had. The final leg of the game gets especially schlocky as a zombie outbreak rampages across the town; B.J. Blazkowicz is at his best when he waxes poetic, but even here he’s got jokes — seeing Nazi zombies falling from the airships in the sky has him quip “Would you look at that — it’s rainin’ Nazis.” MachineGames even leaned into the schlock in their marketing — aside from the game logo being straight from a million B-movies from the 1950s through the 70s, the trailer leans into the monster movie vibe and even has a well-placed Wilhelm scream.

The Old Blood is much more combat oriented than the base game — there’s no hub, little downtime — just a few moments of safety in Resistance hideouts, and late in the game a choice of characters to save, but it’s not treated with the same gravitas as the brutal choice you’re faced with in The New Order. The game also offers challenge maps, allowing you to relive the various combat zones you worked your way through. Nazis will swarm and attack, making for some pretty heavy firefights.

If you like The New Order’s gameplay but wanted something a little more old-school in aesthetic, The Old Blood is a pretty good throwback to the war era despite its relative shortness.

-june❤

something strange has been resurrected
ancient evil