Hexen: Beyond Heretic

Hexen: Beyond Heretic expanded on the fantasy world of its predecessor Heretic with a more interconnected, hub-based level design, three distinct character classes with their own weapons and abilities, and a darker, more gothic atmosphere full of puzzles linking levels together, requiring the player to return to places visited long before. As with Heretic, the verticality of the environment and the ability to look around freely made good use of Forte VFX1 support, while the more complex interconnection of levels meant that spatial orientation mattered even more to players than in the simpler shooter titles of the time.

This is precisely where the headset's limits showed up most acutely, since Hexen relied on the player remembering the look and layout of places they would later need to return to with a new key or item, and the VFX1's low-resolution panels made distinguishing individual parts of the levels a substantially harder task. The limited field of view also made it harder to read the navigational cues that the interwoven level design depended heavily on, so longer play sessions in the headset were impractical even for players who otherwise didn't experience much nausea with other titles.

Hexen is valued today as an ambitious and innovative title that tried to push the fantasy shooter genre toward more elaborate puzzle design and nonlinear progression between levels, even at the cost of demanding more from players and their sense of orientation. The choice of one of three characters, each with its own arsenal, playstyle, and distinct strengths and weaknesses in combat, also gave the title a degree of replayability that the simpler, more straightforward shooters of the time usually didn't offer. In the history of the VFX1, it remains an example of a game whose greatest quality — a complex, interconnected world — was exactly the trait the headset's technical limitations undermined the most.

Why play it: Anyone who appreciates elaborate puzzles and three distinct characters with their own arsenals will find in Hexen an ambitious step forward for the fantasy shooter, even though its complex interconnected world was the biggest burden for the VFX1 headset.