It was Michael's birthday the other day (happy belated birthday!). Inspired by their birthday wish, today's blog post is about an obscure game that is very dear to me: Heretic II. Heretic II is a "wicked 3D action fantasy" that came out in 1998 developed by Raven Software. You might be thinking it's a sequel based on that "2" in the name, it's actually the fourth game in the Hexen/Heretic series, following the previous Serpent Riders trilogy games (Hexen, Hexen 2, and Heretic). I've only played the one game though. Right now it's abandonware. You can't buy Heretic II anywhere anymore. Heretic and Hexen are available on Steam but not the sequels. ] Look at the size of that game box!! I remember my dad going on about how amazing the graphics were. The game has a few cutscenes that looked positively movie-like at the time. I'm not sure when we ended up getting the game vs. its release date. I think my dad bought it for himself to play and eventually when we got older, we started playing too. The game also features a few multiplayer options, one being that two players can play together in the main campaign, making it much easier to complete (as the difficulty options remain the same despite you having literally double the power). This is the main way I played through the main game together with my brother because I was just too chicken shit to play alone. The story of the game follows Corvus, an elf who returns to his home of Parthoris after he was banished to the Outer Worlds at the end of the previous game (summarized in Heretic II's intro cutscene). His trusty tome of power finally wakes up, as the other tomes are now in use once again, so she is able to create a portal, allowing him to finally return home. But when he arrives, his hometown Silverspring looks nothing like how he remembers it. "This isn't right... where is everybody?" It turns out the land of Parthoris has been infected by a mysterious plague. Everyone who's still alive has gone mad and will attack on sight. Even the rats have gone feral. The beginning area of the game takes place in the town of Silverspring, starting out near the docks and moving through other areas of the town as you solve various button and lever puzzles, and ends in the Silverspring Palace with the area's boss. There are two more barrels around the corner and another barrel behind the two in the distance, for a total of 8 barrels in this small area. This first section of the game also has LOTS of breakable barrels everywhere. Because of this, little-me used to refer to this as “the barrel game”. There's another specific enemy that my brother and I called "the stinky guy" because he released a big green cloud of green when you approached. The audio cues he makes in the distance always really freaked me out. The first boss of the game is in the Silverspring Palace and after defeating him, allows you to move on to the next area of the game. This boss was HARD. I remember us being stuck on him constantly and ultimately only beat him by using cheats that we found online. We would noclip into the boss arena, do some damage, noclip out and then spawn a bunch of mana and health in the preboss room, safely hidden from his attacks. In later years, my brother played the game solo and said that the boss really wasn't hard at all. Places like Fairbury and Savna aren't in the game and I always wondered what they were like. The rest of the game follows Corvus as he travels across the land, solving puzzles, meeting new enemies, defeating bosses, and searching for a cure for this mysterious illness. I love the adventure of it all and the rich world that exists around the game's storyline. I always felt so immersed in the lore of the game, wondering who were these people? What did Silverspring look like before all the people got infected? When moving to different areas, there is a loading screen map and I often wondered what was in all the other areas of the map and wishing I could go visit them. Unfortunately, I learned even if you use noclip cheats, you can't walk to those areas. The game also has a pretty banging soundtrack. I only recently discovered that the tracks actually have names via this remastered soundtrack I found on youtube. They existed as audio files on the game disk, which I ripped many years ago to add to my music collection of game soundtracks. I knew them only as "Heretic 2-1" or "Heretic 2-5". In addition to the main adventure, the game also had a deathmatch game mode. This is where the majority of my hours lie. My brother and I would spend hours playing 1v1 PVP on the different maps, using the intercom feature on our landline phone to talk to each other while sitting at our computers in our room. As time went on and our computers were upgraded, the game struggled to install itself properly. The workaround, we found, when switching to a new computer or upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 was to simply copy and paste the Heretic II folder under program files onto the new computer. For whatever reason I think the installation wizard didn't launch properly? Or perhaps we encountered some of the issues I most recently experienced trying to install the game in 2026 on Linux. Thanks to this reddit post, I've got it up and running using Lutris (the key points being needing to run setup using H2DEMO32 not setup.exe and needing to load into the tutorial first before the game itself would launch). My brother was even able to get the game running for him too, set up a dedicated server and we were able to play multiplayer deathmatch again! I'm sure that a big chunk of my love for this game is nostalgia and all the memories that it holds from when I was young. But I don't think it's only that. The fact that I think about it (and play it) to this day says something. I had a lot of fun messing around in deathmatch with my brother! I am really curious about the game's difficulty level. I suspect it isn't as hard as I remember but now that I've got it up and running again I am hoping to play through it again all on my own. I thought about doing that before hitting publish on this post but I think that would only delay it even further, so I'll have to make a second update post after that happens. I think I'll have a great time playing through it again. 12/100 reply by email