I've got exactly the opposite problem from what you think: I'm holding Heretic to the
same standard as Doom and being grossly disappointed.
I could write a
book about the (perhaps mostly
but by no means entirely unintended) religious symbolism and allegory in Doom. There is a unity to it, a flow from one concept to another, that goes well past the explicit conscious intentions of the authors.
This is not abnormal; any work of fiction will be informed by everything each author has read in the past. Everything anyone writes should leave some threads that naturally lead to other things outside the work itself. I can do something similar with Starcraft or Fallout. (Mass Effect is too blatant to mention.)
Trying to follow any such threads in Heretic, in comparison, is an exercise in futility and confusion. First enemy, the gargoyles. Why are they red
imps? Obviously something infernal. But why are they called
gargoyles?* I'm stumped.
Golems. They look like mummies and even the sprite name is MUMM. This sheds some light on what happened with the gargoyles: the graphics people drew one thing and then whoever wrote the lore wrote something else. The death animation clearly depicts some kind of organic thing animated by an evil spirit. An organic,
wet, bleeding thing.
Compare:
A mummy, which is a preserved dried corpse.
A golem, which is a clay figure given life by the inscription of the name of God on its forehead.
This
thing in the game is very obviously neither. At best it can be read as a blasphemous mockery of them by the devil; but that makes no sense since
there is no suggestion of any sort of God in Heretic. Doom has no explicit references either, but Doom is supposedly taking place in
our world which gives the player the licence to read in what they know of their world. Heretic's world is a flatland in a crystal dome from outside of which come the Big Bads; there's no point of connection to our world at all from which we can make any such inferences. So either we step back further and conclude that
the entire game is a blasphemous mockery, to be treated on the same level as Communist propaganda or
The Secret, or we take the alternative interpretation and conclude that all of this was designed by people who have only secondary or tertiary pop-culture-osmosis knowledge as to what a mummy or a golem (or a gargoyle) is and just didn't give a crap.
And this is before I even get to the way things are named. (And I thought "Arachnotron" was bad... but
apparently even that has fairly decent classical pedigree!) [EDIT: though one might argue that both roots ultimately coming from
some Semitic origin might make "
Nitrogolem" less completely grotesquely out of place than it might initially feel.]
Sorry, but this is just bad. It's like listening to Megadeth, or Ripper Owens-era Judas Priest. Or reading SFF written by a teenager who plays videogames 144 hours for every page of literature they've read written before 2000.
*Ironically, one complaint about RL gargoyles reflects my frustration well:
What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters before the eyes of the brothers as they read? What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these strange savage lions, and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man, or these spotted tigers? I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat... Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities, we should at least regret what we have spent on them.