Cold as Hell

Cold as Hell Special Edition | CAH_SE.PK3

Jonaya Riley

2004 was an odd year. The US presidential election was one of the biggest circuses American politics had seen up to that point, multiple classic Nickelodeon shows ended production (thereby ending one of the last bastions of 90s pop culture,) and video games were entering a rough transition period with the release of World of Warcraft. For the Doom community, Doom 3 was something of a disappointment, a strange action-horror corridor shooter that took ideas from System Shock 2 but lacked the open-ended design that people had come to expect from Doom. 2004 was also the year that saw the launch of the Cacowards, an annual celebration of the community and its creations. That the ZDoom source port was ascendant can be seen in the over-representation of ZDoom-based wads in the Cacowards that year: Action Doom, Decade, RTC-3057, Super Sonic Doom, Tremor, Chosen, ZDoom Community Map, Massmouth Christmas, 8-Bit Deathmatch, Daedalus: Alien Defense (the last complete project from TeamTNT) and even the infamous Doom: Rampage Edition and Doomworld Forums 3. Lost in the shuffle was Cold as Hell, which even compared to these ambitious releases promised a very different experience from traditional Doom, being one of the first (if not the first) to feature a reloading system and a bleeding system, in which you must apply bandages to patch yourself up. There was also objectives and notes systems as well, to help you stay on track and follow the story. It also, notoriously, used a weather system that dragged most peoples' PCs to a halt. I remember playing it back in the day and the reload system wound up breaking, so I was shooting enemies with a steady stream of buckshot from a double-barreled shotgun that needed no reloading. All in all, ambitious, sometimes spooky, but plagued with technical issues. Everyone was too busy playing Hell Revealed II anyway.

Then came 2008. Another world-shaking election happened, the video game industry was coming out of its doldrums, and Breaking Bad was redefining "prestige television." The Doom community too was having an interesting year: Doom 4 was announced (later to be quietly thrown out in favor of what would eventually become the 2016 Doom game), Action Doom 2 came out, Plutonia 2 dropped as a surprise last-minute release on New Year's Eve, and GZDoom, at the time still Graf Zahl's GL-based fork of ZDoom and a long way from being the juggernaut game engine it is now, nevertheless offered a lot of improvements over the stock ZDoom experience. Jonaya Riley, at the time still operating under her deadname, released an updated version of Cold as Hell, nearly four years to the day. Now subtitled Special Edition, it converts the whole thing to GZDoom, redoes the weather system, fixes tons of bugs, and ultimately would be the product that finally realized the original vision for the game. So let's get into it.

Cold as Hell might also have been titled The Doom From Another World. The premise is that you're a decorated Marine veteran who has been assigned head of security for a remote weapons research base in Greenland. (Why a Marine is put in charge of an Army outfit is beyond me, but that's the story.) The plane transporting you suddenly crashes amidst a snowstorm; the nearby airstrip is deserted and half in ruins. Soon you realize that the entire base has been overrun by hordes of strange monsters, and their presence has something to do with a pilot whose B-17 crashed under mysterious circumstances and whose comatose body has since become the source of strange phenomena. If you've seen The Thing From Another World, the 1951 sci-horror classic (which the John Carpenter film is indirectly a remake of) this is thematically similar, only instead of one monster it's hundreds.

Gameplay-wise it's actually very ambitious for a mod originally released in 2004. It's more or less structured like a survival horror game, and the level design is geared around that fact. Rather than sprawling semi-abstract mazes, or even a Build-style approach to quasi-realistic design, the maps in Cold as Hell are all very small, collections of buildings that serve as various parts of the research complex, all connected by a series of underground tunnels to protect against the bitter Greenland weather. What this means is that the hordes of monsters that populate these levels are generally either out in the open, or bottlenecked by the spaces between buildings. You'll still be playing the game a lot like regular Doom, but the level design and the way the game world is structured is far from typical, more akin to, perhaps, Half-Life or a mod for it. Or maybe a better comparison might be The Thing, the cult classic PlayStation 2 game adapting the Carpenter film. 

It's important to emphasize that, like most any game mod, Cold as Hell is a labor of love. I say this because while I can't really fault Jonaya's vertex work — simple, but clean, with plenty of Doomcute — aesthetically speaking the game is all over the place. Most of the texturing is stock Doom II or edits thereof; sometimes I spot something from Half-Life that sticks out like sore thumbs. Sometimes she makes odd texturing choices, like her decision to use a single plain metal texture for her elevators and some underground tunnels. Weapon choices are even stranger: the player's fists, shotguns and flamethrower are all edits from stock sprites. The rest are sprite-ified versions of a bevy of World War II weaponry that I suspect comes from the original Call of Duty or possibly Call of Duty 2. It's very jarring and clashes with the Doom-style weaponry, but that's apparently the nature of the game. The monster roster is mostly either completely unedited creatures from Doom II with new behavior or kitbashed from same. I don't know how I personally feel about the monsters being mostly stock; it doesn't seem to fit the game, but then again, very little in this game fits well with each other. We also get the odd 3D model, mostly decorative things like chairs or lamps but also working tape recorders, which you can use to listen to (thankfully subtitled) audiologs on.

Cold as Hell's weather system notoriously brought PCs to their knees in 2004. It wasn't that much better in 2008, though GZDoom was more suited to it. These days implementing a weather system is pretty easy, to the point that there's mods out there that let you add them to any wad you like. I personally had no issue with it, but that's because I'm writing this in 2026, nearly 18 years removed from Special Edition's release. (Speaking of mods, as usual I did have a small loadout, namely Flashlight++, and MFG38's Cold War palette. Nothing else, though.) At this point, Cold as Hell runs perfectly fine on UZDoom, with its years of optimizations.

I liked Cold as Hell. I find it to be a supremely ambitious, creative work at time when the community was in a bit of a transition phase. There are not very many survival horror-style mods out there even now (though arguably Aliens TC counts as an early attempt.) I think I would have preferred a combat style less focused on overwhelming hordes and more oriented around resource management (you are inundated with ammunition, which admittedly is appropriate for a military base) and more intimate encounters. (Though admittedly I guess I don't know how you would do that, certainly not in the context of 2004-era Doom modding.) Nevertheless, Jonaya has displayed a good sense of dramatic tension and pacing that I don't normally see in Doom mods, especially these days. It struck a surprisingly apocalyptic tone (especially in the ending) that isn't seen often in the annals of Doom modding. While Special Edition did get a Cacoward for 2008, these days it seems to be seen as something of an also-ran, if it's recalled at all, which I think is a shame. According to Jonaya herself, her planned sequel, titled "Dead Rain," never came to fruition for fairly tragic reasons. It's a shame, but the history of game development (including modding) is littered with stories that end with "and then life got in the way." It is what it is, right?

You should play Cold as Hell.  The obvious way to do it is to grab yourself a copy of UZDoom (GZDoom being deprecated at this point for reasons not worth going into) and run CAH_SE.PK3 by itself, and set the new controls and features manually instead of using the included .ini. It's my hope that someday, Jonaya or someone will go over this mod and give it a fresh coat of paint, perhaps with the inclusion of new monster and weapon skins to bring a more cohesive look to the game. Nonetheless, as it stands, it's an important piece of ZDoom history, a pioneer in ideas now common to G/UZDoom modding but that now seems all but forgotten.

 

-june❤

P.S.: I'd considered doing map-by-map writeups, but as I neared the end of the game I realized that it was something of a pointless exercise given the nature of the maps and the purpose they served to the greater structure of the game. It'd be like trying to do writeups of the various rooms in Resident Evil's mansion. Better to enjoy the interconnected hub as a whole instead of trying to do deep analysis on what's essentially a collection of wooden shacks in the Greenland wilderness.