Part 1

Your friend's guide to Painkiller Part 1: Cemetery. Learn enemy patterns, weapon strategies, and how to find all the tarot cards in this challenging first level.

Alright, welcome to Painkiller! You're stepping into the shoes of Daniel Garner, a guy who's spent 30 years fighting demons in limbo. An angel named Sammael offers you a deal: beat up four of Lucifer's top generals and Lucifer himself across Hell's realms, and you get to escape and see your wife again. Sounds simple enough, right? This guide is written assuming you're playing on Nightmare difficulty, just like I did, so you'll get the full experience and face the same challenges I did.

We're going to tackle this level by level, focusing on grabbing all those sweet tarot cards along the way. If you're using a text editor to read this, make sure it's set to a fixed-width font so everything lines up nicely. You can use CTRL+F with the table of contents to jump around, but for now, let's get started with the first level: Cemetery.

Before we dive into the action, let's quickly touch on the options menu. You'll want to tweak your controls to make things smoother. Keep your keys close together for easier movement, and make sure your quicksave and quickload keys are far apart – trust me, you don't want to accidentally quickload when you meant to quicksave! For mouse sensitivity, I found 33 to be a good sweet spot, but that's really up to your personal preference. In the advanced controls, assign number keys to your weapons; I recommend putting the electrodriver on '4' since it's the fourth weapon you find. Also, make sure you know which key toggles your flashlight – the game sometimes turns it on automatically in dark areas, but it can tank your frame rate, so you'll want to be able to switch it off.

Under weapon controls, you can set up your primary and secondary weapons. I'd suggest swapping the chaingun and rockets so the chaingun is your primary. Oh, and make sure you turn off 'Pickup' – you'll see why later.