Supplice

There is a difference between a game that remembers the 1990s and a game that never left. Most of the “boomer shooter” wave falls into the first camp: modern design wearing a pixel-art costume, complete with dashes, reload animations, and a compass telling you where to go. Supplice is squarely in the second camp, and it earns that position honestly. It began life as a Doom total conversion more than a decade before it ever touched a storefront, and it still runs on GZDoom — not a retro-styled engine, but the actual community-maintained descendant of the id Tech 1 source release.

Mekworx, the team behind it, are veteran Doom modders, and it shows in a way that a marketing deck cannot fake. Hyperstrange publishes, which puts Supplice in a small stable of studios that have staked their identity on this exact niche. The premise is deliberately thin scaffolding: you’re a young terraforming engineer on a distant colony world, an anomaly at the Flux Gate facility tears something open, and trans-dimensional bio-mechanical horrors pour through. Nobody is here for the narrative, and Supplice knows it — the story lives in the environments rather than in cutscenes.

Market positioning is the interesting part. Supplice launched on Steam on April 6, 2023, priced at $14.99, with a campaign planned across six episodes, and it has been drip-feeding content ever since. That’s an unusual model for a genre whose spiritual ancestors shipped complete on a stack of floppies. It also puts Supplice in direct competition with a crowded field — Dusk, Ion Fury, Prodeus, Selaco, Cultic — where every entrant claims authenticity. Supplice’s claim is the strongest of the bunch, because it isn’t a claim at all. It’s a lineage.

• A No-Compromise 1990s Ruleset: No reloading. No regenerating health. No jump button. Movement is fast and lateral, health comes from pickups, and progress comes from finding keys. This is a design thesis, not an omission.
• Alt-Fire as a Real Mechanic: Every weapon carries a distinct secondary. The flamethrower vents ignitable gas you can detonate to clear a room; the minigun deploys as a stationary sentry turret; there’s a mining drill in the mix alongside the experimental hardware. The alt-fires aren’t damage variants — they change what a weapon is for.
• Sprawling, Non-Linear Maps: Large industrial and alien environments built to be re-crossed, unlocked in pieces, and mined for secrets. Level design is the headline feature here, for better and occasionally for worse.
• Hand-Drawn Sprite Work: Not filtered 3D renders — detailed drawn sprites over chunky pixel textures, backed by a synth-heavy score.
• Full Mod and UGC Support: Ships with modding hooks intact, plus Steam Cloud and Family Sharing. On a GZDoom base, this is not a checkbox — it’s an open door to a thirty-year-old toolchain and the community that already knows it.

The Gameplay Loop

Supplice’s loop is the classic one, and it is tuned with care. You enter a large map, absorb its geography, fight your way to a locked door, backtrack for a keycard, and in the process trip a dozen arena encounters that reshape space you thought you’d already cleared. What separates this from a hundred competent Doom WADs is encounter authorship. Fights are placed like puzzles: the room tells you which weapon it wants, and the ammo economy quietly punishes you for ignoring it.

The absence of regenerating health is what makes this work. Every health pack is a decision about pacing. Do you top off now, or leave it in the wall as a safety net for the fight waiting two corridors away? Modern shooters have largely traded that tension for flow. Supplice takes it back, and the friction is the point.

The Arsenal Is the Argument

If you want one reason Supplice deserves attention beyond genre diehards, it’s the weapons. The alt-fire system is the most thoughtful thing in the game, because it treats each gun as a tool with a failure mode rather than a damage tier. The flamethrower’s gas-venting secondary turns a room into a trap you set and then trigger — a genuinely novel piece of design that no 1994 shooter actually shipped. The minigun’s deployable turret converts a mobile weapon into static area denial, which reframes an arena from “kite the horde” into “choose where the horde dies.”

The consequence is that Supplice has almost no dead weapons. The weapon wheel does not become a two-gun default by episode three, which is the failure state of nearly every shooter in this genre. You swap constantly, not because a meter forces you to, but because the room changed.

Navigation, or Lack of It

Here is where the purism draws blood. The maps are sprawling, interconnected, and frequently disorienting. This is the single most consistent complaint in the player base, and it’s fair. A great non-linear map teaches you its shape; a merely large one makes you walk it twice to learn the same thing. Supplice mostly builds the former, but it builds enough of the latter that backtracking becomes the dominant sensation in a handful of stretches. When you’re circling a facility for the third time hunting a switch you already flipped, the design stops feeling confident and starts feeling indifferent.

The Jump Button Question

The other flashpoint. Supplice has no jump, and a vocal minority hate it. The choice deserves a defense, with a caveat. Removing vertical input means every piece of geometry is a wall or a floor, never an ambiguous maybe — and it lets Mekworx build ledges as boundaries rather than as invitations. The design is internally coherent. The caveat: GZDoom supports jumping natively, players know it, and Supplice’s own visual language — catwalks, crates, gantries — reads as climbable to anyone raised after 1998. That mismatch between what the space looks like and what it permits is where the frustration actually comes from, not from the missing key binding.

The Early Access Problem

Supplice entered Early Access in April 2023 with six episodes planned, releasing them in stages. A years-long runway is a long time for a campaign-driven single-player shooter, and it creates an awkward proposition: the game you buy is not the game you finish. Buyers at launch got a campaign delivered in fragments, with months between chapters — which is exactly the wrong cadence for a game built on momentum and spatial memory. Anyone arriving now is arriving at the better moment. That’s a real critique of the release strategy, not of the craft.

The art direction is the second-strongest thing here after the guns. Hand-drawn sprites carry a specificity that rendered-then-downsampled models never manage — enemy silhouettes read instantly at distance, and the bio-mechanical designs land somewhere between Quake’s rusted industrialism and Doom’s meat-and-machine grotesquerie without cribbing from either. The chunky texture work is confident about its resolution rather than apologetic. Nothing is smeared with a bloom filter to hide the pixel grid.

The synth-heavy soundtrack does the job it’s supposed to do: it drives, it loops, it stays out of the way during quiet exploration and shoves during arenas.

Technically, GZDoom is a gift. The engine is thirty years of optimization stacked on a codebase that was efficient to begin with, so a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware by design. The tradeoff is engine-shaped: lighting and geometry have hard ceilings, and if you’re looking for the environmental complexity of a modern renderer, it isn’t here. It was never trying to be.

Steam-only, and mouse-and-keyboard is unambiguously the intended input. Supplice’s movement is fast and lateral — circle-strafing is the core defensive verb — and that demands the precision of a mouse. Gamepad play is survivable but worse suited; twitch target acquisition against fast sprite enemies is not what a thumbstick is good at.

The Steam integration is sensible rather than ambitious: Cloud saves and Family Sharing are both present, which matters more than usual for a game with a long Early Access tail. The more meaningful platform story is the modding pipeline. Because this is GZDoom, the modding community and toolset already exist at full maturity — you’re not waiting on a bespoke editor. The ecosystem around Doom-engine content is the deepest in gaming, and Supplice plugs straight into it. That’s not a bullet point; that’s a decade of post-release life.

Supplice is a retro shooter that doesn’t need the qualifier — but it does need its caveats. Strip the pixel art and the GZDoom lineage away, and what’s left is a shooter with a smarter weapon-role system than most full-price releases — the flamethrower’s gas ignition and the deployable minigun turret are ideas worth stealing, and nobody in 1994 had them. The 1990s framing isn’t a gimmick covering thin design. It’s a constraint that produced better fights.

The complaints are real and shouldn’t be waved off. The maps get lost in their own ambition, the missing jump collides with level geometry that visually promises otherwise, and the Early Access schedule asked buyers for a patience that a momentum-driven campaign shouldn’t require. Mekworx built something strong and then released it in a way that made it harder to appreciate.

The craft is not in question. This is a team that spent a decade learning one engine deeply enough to make it do things it wasn’t asked to do, and the result reads as a lost id or Raven title — not because it imitates the look, but because it shares the priorities. For genre veterans who can tolerate the navigation and the fragmented rollout, we recommend it. Everyone else should wait for the episodes to finish landing.