Nightmare longplay of Doom (2016) with the pistol only by Raitro

Raitro, a well-known speedrunner of modern Doom games, and as of 2023.06.22 the current keeper of the actual world record in Doom Eternal in the category 100%/Unrestricted/Nightmare, in DE:TAG2 in the category Any%/Unrestricted/Ultra-Nightmare and in Doom (2016) in the category 100%/Ultra-Nightmare, recently made a full playthrough of Doom (2016) with the challenge of only being allowed to use one weapon — pistol! 🔫 The run is done on the Nightmare difficulty.

Personally, I sympathize with this form of walkthrough videos and this play style in general, as I myself tend to enjoy various challenges in Doom games quite a lot. In my opinion, this particular challenge (like many of his previous ones) that Raitro chose to complete cannot be done with a snap of a finger, as it truly requires a lot of patience to beat the game with the basic weapon only, without ever having the opportunity to switch it to whatever else.

What are your thoughts on this video? Would you like to challenge yourself to find out what your skills are with this particular requirement?

I tried playing pistol-only in HMP, and could beat the first levels until the Foundry... there's one tight room there where a Hell Knight makes it very difficult to win with the pistol only, you have little space to evade and you have to hit the Knight a ton of times without being caught, it's certainly possible by I threw the towel after dying 10s of times in a row haha.

Raitro just dropped another run, also on Nightmare, but this time with all the weapons, and we can see that the run is done several times faster :) This is however a collab with Games Done Quick and Hotfix, but still the difference in time is quite obvious, which shows that the pistol challenge is really not that easy ;)