So, maybe in 2-3 years, if your wife softens on the issue a bit, he can play some of the less 'oppressive' Doom content, despite the blood factor. In my single digit years, I would have gone completely ape shit, in a good way of course, for something like Golden Souls 1 & 2, MarioDoom, Pirate Doom, and many others I'm forgetting despite that they are technically the same level of violence as Doom (shooting stuff til it becomes a bloody mess). I was frankly obsessed with mods like Simpsons Doom and Dragonball Doom as a kid because I loved those shows so much, and they made the whole thing feel so fun and goofy that any trace of 'unsettling' stuff in unmodified Doom was completely negated. (hilarious recalling this as someone approaching 30, and none of this stopped me from wanting to mod the game even at an early age.)Īnyway, forgive my rambling, I promise there's a point to it all. I can say that until I was about 9, the official Doom maps and MIDIs definitely did spook me out to some degree, and the 'sweet little dead bunny' of the first Doom ending flat out terrified me, I refused to ever beat E3 or E4 specifically to avoid any decapitated-bunny related visuals, rofl. I don't mean to soapbox, my intention is by no means to change you or your wife's minds, rather I just want to recall my own experiences as a single-digit kid playing a whole lot of Doom.

My parents let me play Doom as young as 3 years old (well, it was the hot new game and they knew I loved Wolf3D) but I guess they never cared much about censorship so long as they taught me right from wrong. So, there are a lot of fantastic recommendations here already that don't require any alterations or anything, but I'm torn about recommending The Golden Souls 2 as well as the MarioDoom mod because they are still technically as violent as Doom is, but the environments and 'vibe' is still far less oppressive, scary, spooky and unsettling as the original Doom maps and music combination.

Wolfenstein 3d wad doom