Doom 64 Trophy Guide

Getting the Full Set on Doom 64

Doom 64 is a short game if you just want to beat it. You can finish it in under three hours on lower difficulties. The trophy set is designed to make sure you spend significantly more time than that. I spent about twelve hours across multiple runs last time I went through it, mostly because I kept dying to the Argent D'Nur versions of things you thought were safe. The trophies break down into completion-based ones, challenge ones, and a few hidden things that the achievement tracker doesn't tell you about until you've already missed them. The completionist trophy — the platinum equivalent — requires collecting every single artifact across all acts. That is where people get stuck. The artifacts are not all marked on your map, and some of them sit behind switches that don't light up until you step into a certain trigger zone. I ran into a specific problem with Act 3, the section with all the water and the Baron of Hell variants. One artifact, the Skull Key, requires you to go back through a level you already cleared once. The door mechanism closes permanently after you collect the key inside it, but the artifact behind that door only spawns if you reload a save from before you picked up the key. I wasted about forty minutes running back through the level blind, thinking it was a glitch. It wasn't. Just reload that checkpoint.

The challenge trophies are the next pain point. There is one for completing the game on Nightmare difficulty without dying. This means absolutely zero deaths. No reloading. If a shotgun blast misses and a Imp gets you, the trophy is gone for that run. I completed this one on my fourth attempt after burning through three full runs. The fifth attempt worked because I stopped using the BFG 90 aggressively. It sounds backwards, but the BFG causes more friendly fire deaths and ricochet kills than anything else on Nightmare. The rocket launcher and the chaingun are your reliable options. Save the BFG for single large targets only. There is also a trophy for finding every secret room. Doom 64 has about fourteen secrets across the four acts. Some are obvious — just shoot a breaker. Others require you to stand in a corner for three seconds while a hidden wall slides open. There is one in Act 2 where you have to walk backward through a doorway. The game registers it as a secret only if your back is facing the far wall. The remaining trophies are fairly standard: kill counts for specific enemies, completing the game on two different difficulties, and finishing all episodes in under a certain time limit. The speedrun trophy has a hard cap at under fifteen minutes for the full game on a specific difficulty. That is tight. You cannot afford to miss a single turn. I clocked in at fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds on my first legitimate run, but I died twice in that attempt by pure accident. My best recorded time was twelve minutes and eight seconds.

The Doom 64 Trophy Guide itself is not a single document you download. People on forums like NeoGAF and ResetEra have compiled their own walkthroughs over the years. The most useful one I found was a thread that mapped out every artifact location with exact screenshots. I used that alongside the in-game pause menu, which shows a partial map after you've visited each area. One thing that catches people off guard: the game supports save states heavily, but the trophy system only checks real playthrough conditions. Using save states and reloads is fine for most trophies. It is not fine for the no-death trophy. Once you reload after dying, that trophy locks out permanently for that save file. Make a fresh save before attempting it. Another downside to be aware of — Doom 64 on modern platforms is an emulated version, and some trophy tracking can be finicky depending on whether you are playing on PS3, PS4, or the Switch eShop version. The trophy list is consistent across platforms, but completion percentage sometimes lags. I noticed my artifact count showed twelve out of fourteen even after I had collected all of them. Restarting the game refreshed the tracker. If yours does the same, do not panic. Check the in-game journal, not the external progress screen.

The game itself runs on a modified Quake engine. It is dark, slow-paced compared to the original DOOM, and deliberately atmospheric. That atmosphere is why it works as a horror-tinged shooter, but it also means the lighting makes it harder to spot secrets in some rooms. Turn on the HUD's minimap if you are struggling to find artifacts. It marks major landmarks and secret triggers even when you cannot see the walls yourself. I would recommend tackling this in two passes. First pass: complete the game onnormal difficulty, collect every artifact you can find naturally, and note which secrets you miss. Second pass: focus on Nightmare, the speedrun trophy, and the challenges that require multiple lives. Splitting it that way saves time because you are not trying to learn the maps and manage trophy conditions simultaneously. The second pass usually takes about six to eight hours if you are already comfortable with the level layouts.