Skip to main content

Revenant Bus brings a very slow kind of hell to Doom 2

The wheels on the bus grind down your soul

October is Skeleton Appreciation Month, and few people appreciate skeletons quite as much as Doom modder Marphy Black. Through his mastery of Agitating Skeletons, he has posed deep philosophical problems, made us contemplate infinity and sometimes just punch a whole lot of skellingtons. His latest is the most fiendish by far - he's probably going to make some poor Twitch streamer hate Doom, because this is basically Desert Bus, but more evil. You probably shouldn't play Revenant Bus, but you're not going to listen to me, are you? Below, a warning in trailer form.

Imagine Desert Bus, but worse. A twenty four hour trip trough the featureless, 2.5d deserts of hell - such is the torment the Bus Slayer must endure. Worse still, every seven seconds an angry Revenant teleports onto your bus. The good news is that they don't randomly fire homing missiles, just punch. The bad news is that you can only punch in return. It's cruel, it's unusual, and it's a clear and loving riff off the classic Penn & Teller joke-game and beloved charity fundraiser. The bus doesn't pull slightly to one side, but the eternal skeleton invasion is (arguably) worse.

Watch on YouTube

Because this is Doom and secrets are a thing, there is a way to complete Revenant Bus faster. It's also very hidden, very stupid and absolutely worth hunting for, because there's one legit great joke in there. I reiterate that nobody should seriously try to beat Revenant Bus properly, but I'm sure that someone will try, and I hope for their sake they're going to have people donate to charity to keep the attempt going.

There have been Doom stream challenges before. Recently, Monolith founder Jace Hall set up a co-op Doom server running a murderously unfair cocktail of mods, challenging the public to fight their way to the end and claim a $1000 prize. The meatgrinder was streamed live and is recorded on his Twitch channel. Over a week later, one group won, although only after hundreds of others had been flattened. I've also seen it posited that Okuplok's notoriously unnamed level here was designed for streamers to challenge (and fail at), as even a tool-assisted run takes hours.

You can grab Revenant Bus here on Doomworld. You'll need Doom 2 and any modern source port (I recommend GZDoom, but any should work) to play.

Read this next

Dominic Tarason avatar
Dominic Tarason: A freelance games critic, Dominic was a regular contributor to Rock Paper Shotgun from 2015 until 2020. In that time he wrote the site's mods column, Modder Superior, as well as flexing his indie game, first-person shooter and Path Of Exile expertise while covering PC gaming news in the evenings. He has also contributed to PC Gamer.
View comments (6)
In this article

Desert Bus

Android, iOS

Doom

Xbox 360, Nintendo GBA, PC, Nintendo Switch

See 1 more

Doom II: Hell on Earth

Nintendo Switch

Related topics

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.