Heretic

Heretic (1994) is a first-person shooter developed by Raven Software and published by id Software, built on a modified Doom engine and set in a dark-fantasy world instead of a sci-fi one. It first shipped for MS-DOS as shareware on December 29, 1994 (North America), with the expanded retail edition, Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, following from GT Interactive on March 22, 1996. You play the elf Corvus, who hunts the sorcerer D’Sparil across three episodes. The 2025 bundle Heretic + Hexen holds a Metacritic score of 84 from 6 critic reviews.

The name is shared with a later game, Heretic II (1998), which is a third-person action game on the Quake II engine, and with Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which is unrelated. The retail edition of this game is covered on its own page.

Technical Specifications

Plot: Corvus Against the Serpent Riders

Three Serpent Riders, D’Sparil, Korax and Eidolon, possess the seven kings of the realm of Parthoris and corrupt their armies. The elven Sidhe resist the Serpent Riders’ magic, so the Riders brand them heretics and set the kingdoms against them. The Sidhe destroy the kings and their armies, but the war weakens the elves, and the Serpent Riders kill the elders. Corvus, the last avenger, goes after D’Sparil, the weakest of the three. He crosses the City of the Damned and Hell’s Maw before reaching D’Sparil’s hidden Dome. After the sorcerer falls, Corvus is stranded and Parthoris is left in disarray. According to Wikipedia, designer Michael Raymond-Judy wrote the rough storyline and id finalized it.

How Heretic Plays: Inventory, Flight, and the Tome of Power

The level structure, armor and key hunts will be familiar if you have played Doom, but Heretic adds several things Doom does not have. It has an inventory of usable items, such as health potions and the Morph Ovum, which turns enemies into chickens; Wikipedia calls it one of the first shooters with inventory management. You can look up and down, which the engine fakes by shearing pixels, so steep angles look distorted. You can also fly, a feature programmer Chris Rhinehart added and Brian Raffel has described as a happy accident. The Tome of Power gives weapons a stronger secondary fire. Water currents and wind push the player around, and ambient sound fills the levels. Doom’s cheat-code habit carries over with a twist: IDKFA strips every weapon except the quarterstaff, and IDDQD kills you with a taunt.

Episodes and the Retail Edition

The original game has three nine-map episodes: City of the Damned, Hell’s Maw and The Dome of D’Sparil. The retail edition, Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, adds two more, The Ossuary and The Stagnant Demesne, and is the version most people mean today. Raven’s follow-up, Hexen: Beyond Heretic (1995), continues the story with a different structure and three playable classes.

Reception and Sales

Reviews in 1996 were positive. According to Wikipedia, Computer Gaming World gave it 5/5, Hyper 90%, GameSpot 7.6/10, Next Generation 4/5, Maximum 4/5 and PC Zone 78%. The PC Zone reviewer called the inventory innovative but found the game too close to Doom, and Maximum called it a clone while praising the retail episodes. Computer Gaming World ranked being turned into a chicken third among its “15 best ways to die” in 1996. Heretic sold more than 500,000 copies, and Heretic and Hexen together reached roughly one million units by August 1997. PC Gamer’s article on the 2025 version argues that Heretic’s maps make more architectural sense than Doom’s and that its core gameplay is still closer to Doom than the writer would like.

Source Code and Fan Ports

Raven and id released the source code on January 11, 1999 under a non-commercial licence, and it was re-released under the GPL-2.0-only licence on September 4, 2008. That made ports to Linux, Amiga and Atari possible, along with Blasphemer, a free-content adaptation in the spirit of Freedoom. Heretic’s legacy shows up in later id games too: the Tome of Power appears in Wolfenstein (2009), and Serpent Rider armor appears on the champion Galena in Quake Champions.

The 2025 Release: Heretic + Hexen

On August 7, 2025, Bethesda, id Software and Nightdive Studios released Heretic + Hexen, a single package with Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Hexen: Beyond Heretic and Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel. It runs on Nightdive’s KEX engine and adds two new episodes, Faith Renewed for Heretic and Vestiges of Grandeur for Hexen. Xbox Wire credits Sam Villareal (Kaiser) with Faith Renewed. The release has 117 campaign maps and 120 deathmatch maps in total, up to 4K and 120 FPS, a toggle between original and enhanced balance, and a remixed soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult that you can switch back to the original. Online crossplay supports up to 16 players, and in-game mod support is built in. Gematsu lists 12 added languages and text-to-speech among the accessibility options. PC Gamer reports that some weapons were subtly rebalanced, including the Ethereal Crossbow’s ammo capacity, and that you can turn the changes off.

Where to Play It

Heretic + Hexen is sold on Steam, GOG, the Microsoft Store, the PlayStation Store and the Nintendo eShop for PC, Xbox, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Switch. It launched at $14.99, was added to Game Pass at launch, and a physical edition is sold through Limited Run Games. According to PC Gamer, owners of any of the three original games get the bundle for free. Doom Wiki notes that the older Steam and GOG collection was delisted just before the re-release. The GOG version is Windows-only. Prices vary by store and change with sales, so check the store page.