Chex Quest HD:
Review

Before you ask, let's get a few obvious questions out of the way. Yes, this is a real review. Yes, if you are a millennial, the original Chex Quest was not some fever dream imagining when you were ten years old. Yes, playing it absolutely brought me some sort of closure and yes, you can play it absolutely free.

Allow me to take you on a short, magical, and very strange journey.

So Really, What Is Chex Quest HD?

Chex Quest is a game from a bigone era, built during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. It’s also clone of classic Doom; As I did research for this article and played through the game itself, I kept swinging back and forth whether or not the existence of Chex Quest, and therefore Chex Quest HD, was a good thing or a bad thing. After much deliberating, I’ve firmly landed on the side of… both. I love that this game exists, but it also is a harbinger of advertising and marketability in the gaming space. Of course, looking in hindsight after 20+ years of DLC, microtransactions, and battle passes, a free game that just wants you to buy their cereal is absolutely wholesome.

My first memories of Chex Quest was getting a copy in a cereal box in 1997. I remember smuggling it to my computer immediately to download, as I was not allowed to play Doom due to how violent it was, and I thought it was going to be the next best thing when I saw how the UI layout was. I also remember realizing I was bad at these sort of games, couldn’t figure out where to find a key card, and giving up to go back to Diablo 1 back when Blizzard had a chokehold on my attention.

In 2024, I found Chex Quest HD for free on Steam. Besides having multiple questions, I laughed really hard and said I’d beat it for that year’s community Finish The Damn Game Month. After all, it fit the bill as a game from your past that you’ve never beat and always meant to get back around to.

So, imagine my surprise when I open it up that I’m hit not just with nostalgia, but an amazing recreation. Here’s the original cutscene that I saw in 1997, and here’s what I saw over 25 years later. Original 3D fuzzy graphics turned into a drawn cartoon, but a faithful adaptation. The first time I use a zorcher to teleport a Flemoid back to their home planet, I remember the sound effect perfectly, both the confused shout of my slimy foe and my weapon discharging.

About sixty minutes later, I’ve beaten the game for the first time and I’m grinning ear to ear in confusion. What just happened, and why is this silly game so charming?

…It’s Really Just A Doom Clone (Complimentary)?

Half of the reason why Chex Quest HD feels so good is the source material. The original Chex Quest was built to be in many ways an early version of a mod. Built in the engine of 1993’s The Ultimate Doom, it was effectively the recreation of the first five levels of that game, reconfigured with new music, effects, and art assets. Scary demons became slime covered foes that (mostly) try to shamble at you. You still find key cards, but are now doing it in a brightly colored space station instead of one drowning in blood.

The weapons in many ways are one-to-one ratios to original ones in Doom as well, progressively getting stronger. However, each of the weapons were changed to look like remote controls or utensils to fit the theme or just become a lot less violent. In fact, back in that opening cutscene, it’s made clear your weapons aren’t ‘killing’ the Flemoids, but instead ‘teleporting them back to their home dimension’.

I’ll actually go out on a limb here and say that Chex Quest HD didn’t have to commit to the bit so hard. The weapons sound good and feel great based on the original formula. I really enjoy the extra animations you get when enemies are ‘killed’, looking confused as they vanish. Again, the original game was set in the Doom engine as a mod, but the HD remake I played was created in unreal engine 4, meaning a lot of time and effort went into recreating a very old game that itself was a remake.

A full run was only 60 minutes, but that was me probably going slow - looking around, taking notes and screenshots, and just enjoying exploring the space. Each level gets progressively more difficult; old FPS pros aren’t going to have a hard time, but I did get surprised once or twice with a few jump scare flemoid foes and did realize I had to watch ammunition in the early stages before I got more weapons to use. It’s also fun to see in hindsight how horrific pixelated gore was transformed into piles of goo, to hear all of the referential nods to its source material and yes, the many, many Zap Brannigan/Buzz Lightyear style phrases the now voice acted main character can say.

It’s an easy game to recommend to play for fun, especially since it’s free. The gameplay is enjoyable and properly ‘retro’, it has a unique charm that converted Doom into something you can hand to an eight year old without guilt, and they even seemed to add content to the HD version! Now when you beat the game, you unlock other playable characters to play through again. You can time attack and try and beat your old high scores, even finding some wonderfully cheesily written collectibles.

The one downside might be that while I was playing, the game crashed twice. Again, I’m not super mad about this as this was a passion project free reimagining of a free cereal box advertisement, but something to keep in mind.

So Why Does Chex Quest HD Exist, Exactly?

I could end the article there really - gameplay is classic ‘boomer shooter’, but made for all ages, it’s free, and just a good distraction. They even added co-op and a versus mode, although I’ll be honest that I’m a bad reviewer and didn’t deep dive into every game mode.

However, I couldn’t help myself. Why was this game made? Not just the original Chex Quest game, but how did it end up on Steam with a fresh coat of paint? Well, this led me down two nights of very strange ADHD hyperfocus that boils down to two things: An ambitious marketing strategy, and fandom.

First off, the original Chex Quest was made with a shoestring budget of roughly $500,000, thanks to many factors. One was the engine had already been made, and id Software gave an inexpensive license to General Mills for the project, in part because they had already moved onto the Quake engine and possibly because this was going to be a free project. As a note, my digging kept finding information that was often very similar, but with slightly different versions; it was difficult to find one fully coherent and accurate story, with most of my research starting through looking through references found on wikipedia’s main Chex Quest page.

A new programming company called Digital Café that worked on educational CD-Roms were the leads on this project, and General Mills cereal cut a deal with America Online to make sure the CDs would be made cheaply, so the roughly five-to-six million (every source seems to be within that range) CDs that Chex Quest were shipped on also came with a free 50 hours to start using AOL. They also created a website where you could download some new levels…

…which is where apparently without my knowledge at the time, you could download Chex Quest 2, because when Ralston Foods (which later was absorbed into General Mills) decided to make this project, they really did try to do a lot with a little. I have to stress here something that kept absolutely blowing me away: a reminder that a game like this could have sold for $30 on the market, for what was just a few hours of gameplay. Instead, it was released free, and was many children’s first look into first person shooters and video games.

This might explain the fandom. Yes, there is a fandom, with an active forum with posts as recent as this month! It turns out that the lead artist, Charles Jacobi, seems to have become a staunch advocate for keeping the torch of this series alive, having led a push to create Chex Quest 3 in 2008 alongside other Digital Café original members, using a new engine and downloadable here. Which leads us to now, where in 2016 Jacobi revealed he was working on, you guessed it, Chex Quest HD. Again, for free, it released in 2020 on Steam. Strangely, the only place I could find a place where you paid money for Chex Quest was Nintendo: you can also get Chex Quest HD on your Nintendo Switch for the low low price of five dollars when not on sale.

A Wonderful and Strange Trip Down Memory Lane, Worth The Free Price Of Admission

This feels like a LOT of words to share about a free promo game from 1997 that was remade in 2020. Yet, it’s just such an interesting story. Playing through Chex Quest HD was a surreal experience, conjuring memories from nearly 30 years ago to a time that felt more innocent, even wholesome… until you remember that this was all an advertising campaign, one that evidently worked since some people are still talking about Chex Quest decades later.

On one hand, you can look at this strange history and be really pessimistic. This was a corporate ad campaign after all, targeting kids and trying to sell Big Cereal. It was a jump off point, an evolutionary stage of marketing where some advertisers were trying to recapture the power they wielded with most 1980s Saturday Morning cartoons being walking toy advertisements.

Yet, at the same time, this story does feel incredibly wholesome. A group of people took a well beloved game, and worked hard to try and mod it to let kids enjoy the same gameplay but without the violence. It made enough of an impact to make there be a series, and even a remake. It’s a story about a few game devs like Jacobi who keep this torch burning, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out if General Mills or anyone else was paying him to do so. To me, it really does seem like it’s been kept alive for the love of the game.

Finally… it was just nice to play a free game. An honest, earnest real free game. No horse armor, no gacha, no upsell. Just an experience for an hour or two, and done. In comparison to many games now that use free as a way to lure you into buying digital currency that costs more than the price of a full game, it just felt wonderful to go back to a time where I felt like a kid, excited to come home with a box of cereal and get the prize inside.