Late last year, Nightdive Studios released Blood: Refreshed Supply, its second remaster of Monolith Productions’ brilliant FPS debut. For PC gamers with one Blood remaster already in their Steam library, the highlight of the package wasn’t anything technical—it was the addition of the concluding part of one of Blood’s best mods.
That mod is Marrow, a new campaign for Monolith’s deviously difficult and ferociously violent shooter. It’s sort of Blood’s equivalent of John Romero’s Sigil—a continuation of Blood’s storyline that concluded with protagonist Caleb slaying his demonic former master Tchernobog. Like Sigil, Marrow restricts itself to Blood’s original assets (weapons, enemies etc) to power the experience, focussing instead on using those assets to build large and complex new maps for the game.
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thelordoffliess “Fantastic mod; played it with the new edition and it felt great. Can’t wait to see what the author does next,” writes ModDB user albatrosslos. Meanwhile, thelordoffliess simply describes the mod as “one of the best I’ve ever played.”
If you’re wondering why there was a three-year gap between Marrow’s two chapters, it’s largely because Palsmier has been working on another Blood-infused project. Specifically, Palsmier was a map designer for Chapter 2 of Blood’s modern descendent Cultic, which fellow FPS sicko Ted Litchfield declared one of last year’s best shooters in his Cultic Review:
“This exercise in demon worshipper annihilation is a meat and potatoes boomer shooter that primarily distinguishes itself by executing everything at a very high level,” Ted wrote in December last year. ” Great maps, great guns, great enemies, plus one of a kind art direction and suffocating jaunts into pure horror.”
I do wonder what Marrow’s release into the wild means for Refreshed Supply as a prospect. By all accounts, Nightdive’s latest Blood transfusion is vastly improved over Fresh Supply. But the price has led to grumbling from players who already bought a Blood Remaster once (more at Atari and Warner Bros than Nightdive itself, admittedly). The inclusion of Marrow Chapter 2 helped sweeten the deal for those die-hards, but now they are mainly paying for improvements and fixes that, ideally, should have been in Fresh Supply to begin with.
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