One of the weirder things to happen in PC gaming this year was that a new Painkiller came out and pretty much instantly disappeared. I’m aware PC gaming moves so fast nowadays that many games get washed away without anybody noticing. But I thought Painkiller would have sufficient cultural cachet to stick around a little bit.
Perhaps it’s because Anshar’s studios reboot made some major changes to Painkiller’s formula, reworking People Can Fly’s devoutly singleplayer horde shooter as a Left 4 Dead-style cooperative blaster infused with Doom Eternal-ish movement. The combination was ambivalently received by those who did notice Painkiller’s release, with the game receiving a Mixed rating from just under 600 Steam reviews.
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That said, it’s true that the games are structurally very different, and it’s this which Chmielarz has an issue with. “I will never understand why you’re taking the IP and then sort of turning it around. What’s the point here? You grab the IP because you believe the IP had something, but there’s no traces of the DNA of that IP in your game. That’s weird to me.”
In addition, Chmielarz has issues with the new Painkiller’s tone. “Half of Painkiller was about the atmosphere, and Painkiller was treating himself seriously. You can laugh at that, that’s fair. So it wasn’t the best, but at least it gave you the idea that the people who made it believed in it, believed in that world, and wanted you to have more horror experiences than a silly game that’s going to be filled with one-liners and explosions.”
Ultimately Chmielarz believes the games are so different that, like Arkane being forced to call its System Shock successor Prey, Anshar naming its game Painkiller harmed the game’s commercial chances. “If they’d actually called it something else, they would have sold more copies and the reaction would be much more positive.”
Chmielarz has long since moved on from Painkiller, though many of his subsequent games have featured strands of its design. His current project is Witchfire, the long gestating “RPG shooter” that released as an Epic exclusive in 2023 and landed into Steam early access last year. Witchfire’s latest update, The Reckoning, released last week, though developer The Astronauts quickly had to amend it due to its new “World Corruption” feature unbalancing the experience so much that, according to Chmielarz, it “made the game switch genres”.
