Blood (video game)

Did You Know?

• Ports for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn were planned but never completed.
• The source code for Blood has not been officially released, though multiple incomplete versions exist online.

Plot

The game's setting is a jumble of eras, with levels mixing elements from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s alongside futuristic tech and a weird West feel. The sequel later pinned the year as 1928. The story isn't told in the game itself, only on the developer's website and a text file. You play as Caleb, who was once the top commander of a cult called the Cabal, which worshipped the demon Tchernobog.

Caleb was a ruthless gunfighter in the late 1800s American West. He joined the Cabal in 1871 after meeting Ophelia Price, a woman whose husband and son might have been killed by cult members, and she later became his lover. They both climbed to the cult's highest rank, the Chosen, but Tchernobog betrayed and killed all four members for reasons unknown. Years later, Caleb claws his way out of his grave, wanting answers and revenge.

He goes after a gargoyle named Cheogh, starting at a rail yard and boarding the northbound Phantom Express. After fighting off undead on the train, he stops it by blowing up the locomotive. He then fights through Cabal loyalists and monsters, enters the Great Temple, and uses a teleporter to reach Cheogh's altar. There he finds Ophelia crucified, kills Cheogh, and burns her body on a funeral pyre.

Next, Caleb travels to the Arctic on a frozen wooden sailing ship. He gets off at a lumber mill the Cabal turned into a processing plant for human remains. He then goes into a mine to find the lair of the mother spider Shial.

Expansion packs

Blood first appeared as a shareware episode, with the full retail version arriving on CD-ROM and containing all four original episodes plus content absent from the shareware release. Its extreme violence later led to a censored version with reduced gore. Two official expansions followed. Cryptic Passage, developed by Sunstorm Interactive and released on June 30, 1997, offers ten new single-player levels and four multiplayer Bloodbath levels.

Its story follows Caleb as he seeks an ancient scroll for his own dark purposes. Monolith's own add-on, the Plasma Pak, came out in September 1997 and adds an episode called "Post Mortem" with nine single-player levels, plus two new multiplayer Bloodbath levels (one based on Monolith's offices), totaling eleven levels. New enemies include two Cabal loyalist types, Chrysallid pods, miniature Calebs, and a boss named the Beast. No new weapons appear, but new abilities are introduced: the Tesla Cannon can be used akimbo with the right power-up, and the Napalm Cannon and Life Leech gain secondary attacks.

The Plasma Pak also incorporates many bug fixes from earlier patches. A special collection, One Unit Whole Blood, was released on July 15, 1998, bundling fully patched versions of Blood, Cryptic Passage, and the Plasma Pak, along with the Blood: Unlock the Secrets guide. Published strategy guides include Blood: The Official Strategy Guide and Blood: Unlock the Secrets.

Reception

Critics gave Blood generally favorable scores, according to Metacritic's aggregation of seven reviews. They highlighted its clever, detailed level designs, dark humor and pop culture nods, extreme gore, diverse environments, and creative, unusual weapons. GameSpot specifically called the voodoo doll "the coolest little accessory to ever grace the weapons belt of a first-person killing machine." While some complaints surfaced, reviewers disagreed on them.

GameSpot found the game "just too damn hard," pointing out how fast enemies could kill the player, but Next Generation argued it was "lengthy without being too tedious, and challenging without being too difficult." GamePro acknowledged flaws but said they "are easily swept aside when your guns start blasting and the bodies start falling." In a 2015 retrospective, GamingOnLinux's Hamish Paul Wilson declared Blood "one of the most underrated shooters of the whole decade," claiming it "arguably built more on the legacy of Duke Nukem 3D than Shadow Warrior did" by pushing gameplay to "sophisticated new heights."

Player Attack in 2011 called it "the best of the Build engine games after Duke Nukem 3D," praising its scary atmosphere, great level design, and challenging gameplay. Over 350,000 copies were downloaded, hitting one million within six months of release. By 1998, worldwide sales reached 120,000 copies.