Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (Mudman)

I've been toying with the idea of creating my own personal /newstuff-style review thread for a while, for a bunch of reasons. First of all, I spend a ton of time playing cool Doom wads, and many of them don't get award recognition because for the sake of our sanity and the usefulness of the awards, we have to draw the line somewhere. But since I played them and liked them, I might as well recommend them somewhere. Second, I get tired of people bashing maps they hate (whether it's among the Doominati or just in the general Dooming forumsphere), and wanted to create something positive. Third, The /newstuff Chronicles aren't really viable anymore, so I haven't had an outlet to keep writing about stuff I like throughout the year, and it's more fun to pick and choose what I like than to write about people's first map projects every week anyway. And finally, working on the Top 25 Missed Cacowards list whetted my appetite for covering WADs I like that haven't received much recognition.

So here we go. This thread will gradually cover an assortment of stuff I like that hasn't made the Cacowards/runners up or been recognized in 10 Years of Doom or the Missed Cacowards list. The reviews here are personal and in no way officially connected with the awards, though the other Cacoward judges have carte blanche to post guest reviews here if they wish, and I may invite other guest posters later on. For now, I'm going to start with releases from the last two Cacoward years, and then go back through some of my /newstuff reviews and then open it up to the whole history of Doom mapping if I'm still feeling up to it.

I hope you enjoy reading some of these, and maybe you'll find some cool stuff you've never heard of before!

Not the Cacowards Reviews:

Special Features:
My Top 20 Maps of 2019

My Top 20 Maps of 2020

2022 Post-Mortem and Cacoward Picks

2023 Post-Mortem and Cacoward Picks

Anatomy of a Megawad: Whispers of Satan

Level Design Daydreams: Pantheon Ark

Doom: Annihilation (2019 film)

Project: Kate by @Jimmy

I'm starting with Project: Kate because it's important to me, and because it's not like anything else that's been snubbed, or for that matter, like anything else that I've ever played. I spent a good portion of last year arguing its merits as a candidate for the Machaward, but support for Mr. Friendly was pretty universal (and I don't mean any disrespect to JP LeBreton, whose work was certainly deserving of the award). 

This mapset is dedicated to the late ZDoom modder Kate Fox and contains three separate maps made at three different times, allowing it to serve as both a time capsule to the friendship that Jimmy and Kate had while she was alive and an outpouring of grief after her passing. That's quite a cocktail of emotions, and if you've got a heartbeat, there's a good chance you're going to feel it quite strongly as you play (you can take that in equal parts as a warning and a recommendation). Maps 01 and 02 are previously published birthday maps, but to me there's nothing shoehorned about them, even though they're much more conventional than map 03 gameplay-wise. There's a distinct sweetness to them, a sense of love and support from one person to another that you can see in everything from the candy palette to the goofy scrolling Cacodemon texture to the way you light the candles on the birthday cake with rockets at the end of map 01, that makes them feel unexpectedly powerful as a lead-in to the final map. Plus, the plasma rifle replacement shoots rainbow lasers, and if you don't like rainbow lasers, I ain't got time for your shenanigans.

As lovely as all this is, the centerpiece of the mapset is map 03, "For a Fallen Fox," which is the map that was created in memory of Kate. There's nothing conventional about the way this map plays; you might even say it has been built from tropes that most people would advise a Doom mapper never to use. The progression is cryptic and puzzley and revolves around mandatory Arch-Vile jumping, the only weapons are the rocket launcher and chainsaw, and the start involves mandatory straferun platforming. It can be rough going, but I have to say that everything about it feels genuine and necessary, not like the mapper is just rubbing your face in things you're likely to find annoying. I respect the way every decision in the map is in support of the artistic vision, rather than serving any kind of existing mapping ideals. Why is it the way it is? I have to assume that the answer is because Kate would have wanted it that way. And assuming you're not trying to SR-40 that monsterless intro area with a keyboard alone, the emotional impact of the map is enough to make it worth everything it puts you through. Aside from being another beautiful visual tribute, this map also contains a secret letter to Kate (there are only two secrets in the whole mapset, one in map 02 and one in map 03; I recommend that you seek them both out) and a final memorial before you're spirited away and unavoidably rent to pieces by a quad of Barons on a platform shaped like a broken heart.

I don't want to spend too much time attempting to describe feelings that you can really only experience by playing the maps. Suffice to say that Jimmy poured everything he had into these maps, and I don't imagine that you can avoid feeling some of his loss when you play them. People don't normally make Doom maps this way; it's supposed to be about the player's experience, not about artistic expression. But we all know by now that Doom is an art form, and seeing someone use it to express something so deeply personal and meaningful—to express love, of all things, which is so rarely a matter that anyone is willing to touch in video game design—has been a powerful experience for me. I can't think of any other Doom projects that even attempt to offer something like that, let alone succeed, except for perhaps Lilium and A.L.T., or some of the memorial aspects of Threnody. That's why I felt that Project: Kate was the most artistically compelling thing I played in the 2018 Cacoward year.

I didn't know Kate, but there are a lot of people I like and respect who cared about her deeply, and I'm glad we have this mapset to remember her by. I'm sure she would have loved it.

Oscillation by @Forli

4 Seasons of Doom by Forli

Forli showed up on the community's rader in late 2017 and has been a strong contender for Cacoward runners-up in both the years I've been on the judging panel—first for 2017's Oscillation and then for 2018's 4 Seasons of Doom. 

Forli's style is action-packed and, at its best, conceptually creative, though for the most part you might describe it as taking a variety of mapping influences and weaving them together into some sort of middle ground that can appeal to a broad audience. The level of challenge Oscillates somewhere between skillsaw and Ribbiks, and the maps themselves take visual and combat elements from slaughter/hardcore maps but temper them with more conventional Doomy map concepts and moderately intense incidental combat to create a mode of play that's very tough but likely to be enjoyable for at least the median veteran player, albeit perhaps with some friendly cursing and throwing of small objects.

Oscillation is a 9-map set with a very noticeable difficulty curve. The early maps are satisfyingly violent but generally on the shorter/quicker side, and it gradually ramps up into more lengthy, monster-dense mini-odysseys that wear their Sunder/Combat Shock influences on their sleeves. The overall aesthetic for a lot of the set is sort of temple/ancient city ruins, but there are some pretty neat concepts to be found within, including a big, open crate-laden cargo bay in a deep void (map 02) and a haunted mansion in the vein of Doom 2's Hell episode, but with some serious fleshy infections (map 08, loving named "The Goreducts"). The most impressive maps are definitely at the end, including "Metal Monarchs" (map 07), which has you battling across the lofty platforms of a cybernetic Sundercity, or "Armageddon at Midnight" (map 09), where you duke it out with very heavy opposition on your way to a suitably climactic final arena battle to cap off the whole adventure.

4 Seasons is a somewhat smaller 4-map set that offers very similar gameplay to Oscillation, but in other ways is definitely its own thing. As you might guess, each map is themed after one of the seasons of the year, and each one has its own set of textures (and its own Vivaldi concerto in MIDI form) to match the theme. All of the maps are large and nonlinear, which I find enjoyable to begin with, but perhaps my favorite thing about 4 Seasons is that each map's nonlinearity is designed in its own distinct way that complements the visual theme. Spring (which is a gorgeous map, by the way) plays up the exploration elements as you delve into ruins and watery grottos; summer is mostly a single open area with islands in a tropical sea, where most of the fights and most of the real estate are available right at the start; autumn is a complex sandbox in and around a massive and somewhat decrepit fortress, with a three-key hunt to access the exit; and winter gives you treacherous branching paths raised up over icy waters, with combat that's as brutal as the weather. The mapset plays around with custom monsters as well, which gives some additional freshness to the gameplay. My favorite (and yours too, I'll wager) is the trash can Imp, which is—no joke—a turreted Imp that pretends to be a decoration and then pops up out of its trash can to ambush you. There are regular trash cans in the maps too, so you can never be sure which ones are monsters. There's also a flamethrower zombie with a clustered Mancubus attack, which is mainly cool because it explodes when you kill it, potentially taking other enemies with it. The other new monsters are less interesting in terms of their combat niches, in all honesty, but they add some sense of variety and are sometimes able to play to the design of the combat setups that they're included in.

Forli shines the brightest when creating gimmick battles, though these fights are relatively few and far between. The most interesting one, which appears in map 06 of Oscillation, traps you in a pitch-black parkour course with waves of teleporting monsters, but gives you several clearly lit switches placed around the room that allow you to temporarily turn on the lights in the rest of the arena. The setup forces you to manage both the combat and the light switches while also trying to maintain an awareness of where the obstacles are so that you can find your way around if you get stuck in the dark. Another cool fight in the 4 Seasons autumn map has you navigating a network of islands as the bridges between them raise and lower into toxic liquid, so you have to watch your timing and try to stay on dry land. Both sets also have some pretty interesting fights revolving around turreted Arch-Viles. I'd love to see more of this kind of stuff, and I'm sure we'll have the opportunity as Forli continues to grow as a mapper. All in all, both mapsets are worth the price of admission, especially if you like a challenge.

Super Mayhem 17 by @Marcaek and "a buncha super schmucks"

The Mayhem series has always been something of a role model for what I think of as "mid-level" community projects. On the one hand, you have the very high-end CPs like Community Chest 4 and JPCP, which sometimes take years to build and undergo intensive barrages of quality control; on the other, you have things like the the Doomworld Megawad Project series and 4800 Hell Knights, which are available to everyone in the spirit of open collaboration and generally don't sweat the quality of the maps too much. And then in the middle, you have stuff like the annual Mayhem projects, which are made over the course of a month in a relatively laid-back fashion but then take their beta testing and other quality control very seriously. Indeed, Super Mayhem 17 went through a longer finalization period than any other Mayhem, to my knowledge, taking 11 months to release—which is why it was considered for the 2018 Cacoward season.

In my opinion, Mayhem 17 was one of the most creative and fun community projects released in a long time, though it suffered slightly from the mixed quality of the maps like nearly any CP. Unlike most of the past Mayhems, which imposed core limitations on the size or type of maps that people could make, it gave its mappers a texture theme and let them run wild. And personally, I adored the texture theme. Super Mayhem 17 gives Doom the Super Mario Bros. treatment, using textures from and inspired by the early games in the Nintendo series. The bright colors and simple graphics give the whole mapset a really lighthearted feel—well, almost all of it. There are a few cases where the theme is subverted to create a really creepy atmosphere—but even then, it's sort of cute-creepy. The textures cover practically every Mario locale imaginable, from grass-and-brick outdoor areas to underground tunnels to fiery dungeons, as well as plenty of the more unique settings from the source games and even some oddballs that are more reflective of the Frankensteining of Mario and Doom. For instance, @Gothic's "Airship of Doom" (map 06) replicates the airship boss maps of SMB3, while @Pinchy's "Marina Moonlight" (map 04) homages the purple whales from SMB2. Pinchy's other map, "Skyward Vivarium" (map 16) is another airship, but the distinctly non-Mario vivarium element makes it feel more enigmatic.

In addition to the textures, there's a whole set of reskinned decorations and items that match the cutesy Mario theme. Ideas from the Mario series are often incorporated into the level design itself as well, particularly the use of pipes and doorways as teleporters to other parts of the level. As you might expect, there's a strong platforming element in many maps as well, though it's more of a nod to the semi-casual hopping around that you'd do in the more well-known Mario games and not the precision platforming you see in a lot of hardcore Doom maps. A few maps incorporate some of the rarer movement-related Boom features as well, most notably @A.Gamma's "Cool Cool Shotgun" (map 12), which uses slippery ice and wind to add to the challenge.

Variety and pacing are the key to creating a community project that's fun to play, and Super Mayhem 17 shines at both. The early stretch is populated by pretty casual maps with a classic bent to help set the lighthearted tone, and then toward the middle you start to see the more puzzly and mechanics-based maps. "Curse of the Mummy's Sister's Something-or-Other" by @Impie (map 09) and "Sinkysand Switchland" by @dobu gabu maru (map 31) both use that one puzzle mechanic where you raise all the red things and lower all the blue things or vice versa, whereas "Absolute Zero" by @Obsidian (map 14) is more about combat puzzles and spatial reasoning in the classic Doom sense. @Killer5's "Aztec Ruins" (map 11) is a particularly mysterious Eternal-style adventure, with about half of the map and half of the kills contained in secrets. @Xaser's "Zeigenhaus" (map 15) is my favorite map in the set, a haunted city with powerful weapons and enemies and an intricate layout that leaves you with a lot to puzzle out. At the heart of "Zeigenhaus" is the hunt for the secret Red Coins, which grant you access to my second favorite map, the aforementioned secret level "Sinkysand Switchland." This map is almost entirely a puzzle map, and like almost all of dobu's puzzles, it is very challenging but also intuitive enough that it makes you want to solve it rather than just clip through and skip it.

The end of the mapset provides a really satisfying and cohesive ramp-up in intensity: maps 20 and 21 ("Transformation Palace" by @Argent Agent and "Rainbow Road" by @Scotty) are challenge-oriented and monster-dense, maps 22 and 23 ("Chocolate Starfish Islands" by @Benjogami and "Down the Wrong Pipe" by @TMD) are short and sweet but dangerous for the unwary, and the final three maps ("Bowser's Daddy Dungeon" by @RottKing, "Bastille Bowser" by @Breezeep, and "Bowser in the Black Abyss" by Marcaek and @rdwpa) are a hard-hitting trio of impressive-looking castle/dungeon maps. The last map ends in a fight with a custom Bowser boss (accompanied by armies of spawning minions), which was a pleasant surprise.

I would recommend Mayhem 17 to just about anyone, as it scratches a lot of different itches. Whereas Golden Souls 2 uses a huge number of advanced features to explore the Mario/Doom crossover theme in a lot of depth, Mayhem 17 is more about playing Doom with a Mario reskin—but you may be surprised by just how much that reskin does to change the feel of the game.

Mayhem 18: Purple Edition and Orange Edition by @Obsidian and a bunch of purple monkey dishwashers/annoying oranges

It's amazing (though not surprising) just how different two community projects with the same name and similar guidelines can turn out to be based on what resources they use and what kinds of mappers those resources attract. While the playful, cartoony Super Mario Bros. aesthetic of Super Mayhem 17 inspired a large number of classicists and a good handful of people interested in agility trials and movement puzzles, the two Mayhem 18 mapsets are packed to the brim with slaughter and slaughter-lite maps. In fact, the mapper lists read like a who's who of the challenge community: Forli, Crunchynut44, Benjogami, Nirvana, rd, Scotty, Killer5, Demonologist, Roofi, WH-Wilou84. Rounding out the list are a number of regular CP contributers who aren't afraid to step in it, including AD_79, an_mutt, valkiriforce, Pinchy, and project leader Obsidian. 

I think there are two reasons for this surprisingly consistent focus on challenge. First, bright monochrome resource sets are virtually synonymous with Ribbiks-core slaughter, so the project likely drew these mappers like moths to a flame. But more importantly, both mapsets come with custom monster selections that fit perfectly in large-scale combat niches. This is especially true of Purple, which features a Resurgence-style revision of Scythe 2's plasma marine, a fast suicide bomber, and a flying projectile spammer miniboss (the other two monsters, a lower-health/higher-threat Cacodemon equivalent and a chaingun Arachnotron, are more conventional and less frequently used, but they certainly didn't hurt anything). The selections for Orange (headed up by new variants on some of the classic Realm667 standbys, the Shadow, Cybruiser, and Hades Elemental) are a bit more conducive to tight brawls rather than sprawling slaughters, and I think the maps reflect that somewhat, but they still keep the focus on tough combat. 

So if you hate anything remotely resembling slaughter, you're going to hate these mapsets, right? Well, maybe, but there's hope! Mayhem 18 actually includes a new weapon, a fully automatic rocket launcher that replaces the chainsaw—and as a non-aficionado, I think it's one of the best things that's ever happened to the hardcore challenge genre. The stark divide between BFG combat and slow grinding with the rest of the arsenal is erased, smoothing out the gameplay significantly for people who aren't a fan of the way the BFG handles or don't have infinite cells on hand. There are only a few of them given out in each set, but if you're playing continuously, it's a huge boon, since it just uses regular rockets. Frankly, I would like to see this weapon in every slaughtermap I play for the rest of my life, as I think it's a huge quality of life improvement.

Both sets also have custom texture packs based around their respective colors. Purple's resources look like they're based on CC4-tex and other variants of classic textures, but Orange is based on @jmickle66666666's Orange Is the New Startan, a much-anticipated project that had gone the way of vaporware until Jazz kindly donated the resources to the Mayhem team. It's a really nice set of textures, though the thing you're likely to hear people mention first and foremost is the Startan Key, which certainly deserves its place as the cherry on top. The textures in Purple aren't quite as slick, but on the other hand, Purple has a really cool looking set of weapon reskins that Orange doesn't use (though both sets have the auto rocket launcher).

With the combination of the great texture sets and the mostly consistent gameplay focus, each mapset—and both of them taken as a whole—ended up feeling very cohesive, though they do still have a few weaker maps in the roster. In part because this is one of the rare CPs that's more about the whole than the sum of its parts, it's hard to remember all of the individual good maps, but as I mentioned earlier, the list is pretty star-studded, and if you open up a map that was made by a mapper you like, you're probably going to enjoy it. A few that I remember distinctly from Purple are Obsidian's "Everwhere" (map 07), with its rocket-oriented combat, copious plasma marines, and structures rising out of the void; @an_mutt's intimidating and atmospheric "Heliotrope" (map 09); @AD_79's stylish and supremely streamlined "Pluto" (map 13); @BioRenegat's huge and adventurey "Permanganic Shores" (map 17), which contains one of the most awesomely goofy secret battles I've seen; and rd and @Scotty's three-key slaughter epic "Murasaki" (map 19). My favorites from Orange were @Eris Falling's adrenaline-fueled rail shooter "The Game Never Ends" (map 07); @Breezeep and @Marcaek's "Argent Orange" (map 13), a nicely paced base crawl reminiscent of BTSX and the like; @dobu gabu maru's "Wowee" (map 31), a bizarre and gorgeous tribute to Wow.wad, of all things; @Roofi's mysterious but monster-dense "Floreal" (map 20); and @WH-Wilou84's huge and brutal closer, "Volcaropod" (map 21). There are plenty of other maps worth playing.

Vaguely tying all of this together is a disturbing but honestly kind of hilarious story about terrible misunderstandings and violence against Pokemon, which goes to show how important the story texts aren't in a project like this. In any case, Obsidian deserves huge props for managing both mapsets at once, getting it all done in the same calendar year in which it started, and providing the community with so many fun and colorful maps.

Bury My Heart Knee-Deep by @Ryath

Ryath is best known for vanilla puzzle gimmick mapsets like the Cacoward-winning Absolutely Killed and the UnAligned series, so it's no surprise that Bury My Heart Knee-Deep manages to be equal parts experimental concept map and nostalgia trip. Bury My Heart is Ryath's largest and most ambitious map so far, potentially taking a couple of hours to play through despite a deceptively moderate monster count of under 900. The reason is that it's a fairly deep playing experience, with a lot to explore, a lot of optional content to puzzle out, and a lot of different ways to tackle its challenges.

Bury My Heart is crafted in the style of a Metroidvania, meaning that it's highly sandboxy but gives you specific item-hunting objectives that allow you to unlock large portions of the map when you complete them. Part of this is finding keys like in a normal Doom map (each of which will unlock several new areas throughout the map), but you also have the optional goal of figuring out how to access two sets of supply rooms, one containing Lite-Amp Goggles and the other containing Radsuits, which allow you to explore even more of the map's optional content. This map has a whopping 64 secrets—including a mega-secret bonus arena battle that you'll need to find multiple hidden switches to unlock—making it very likely that you'll find at least a few but very unlikely that you'll find them all on your first playthrough. Perhaps the coolest idea in the map is a set of storage closets containing useful items that are blocked off by forcefields. You can only open these using rockets, which means you have to decide whether to make the tradeoff of spending those rare and precious rockets to get the items inside.

According to the readme, there are even intentional sequence breaks built into the map that allow you to complete it without finding the keys, although I lack a speedrunner's eye and didn't find them myself. All of this optional content lets you theoretically tackle the map however you want and gives you lots of options for how you want to replay it. Do you try to find the way to complete it as quickly as possible? Do you go for 100 percent kills and secrets?

Aside from all that, the whole map just has a nice vibe to it. Ryath treats it as though you've never played Doom before, revealing each new monster like it's something special that you're discovering for the first time as you push deeper into the infested base. The initial lack of Doom 2 monsters also helps to firmly establish the Knee-Deep in the Dead nostalgia feel before moving on to include Doom 2's expanded content and open up more possibilities for gameplay. Each key has its own boss battle arena, with Pain Elementals, Cyberdemons, and Arch-Viles serving as your Ridley and Kraid for the day, and the spider enemies show up for a nice final fight that has you managing combat on multiple fronts.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable map, and the fact that its huge size is contained within vanilla limits is an impressive feat. The Metroidvania concept is a really interesting one, and I can't help but wonder how much further the concept could be pushed with Boom features, a higher level of detailing, and a set of custom resources, or ZDoom features and new items and monsters that emphasize the progression aspects. It's hard to say whether the simplicity of Bury My Heart is the ideal choice or not, especially since the mostly understated combat doesn't do a lot to push strategic thinking and emphasize the benefits of different approaches in a map that's theoretically all about choosing your own way to play it (though it does a good job with limiting your ammo and other resources). This map feels like a pleasant initial foray into a very engaging concept rather than something that's being explored to the fullest, but since it's the first of its kind, I think that's fair. For my part, I hope we'll see either a sequel or a spiritual successor someday.

Doomed in Space by @Doomkid et al.

Doomkid's brand is nostalgia—the kind you get from sifting through old shovelware CDs or playing the really obscure classic DOS games that nobody else remembers. His Doom mapping draws on an aesthetic that's as thick and cheesy as Velveeta, and although he sacrifices most of the more refined modern mapping principles in service to the cause, the underlying gameplay of Doom is still there, creating a nice mix of smooth pacing and cute, off-kilter map designs. 

Doomed in Space is Doomkid's brainchild but was handled as a community project, drawing in some familiar names like Pinchy, Nevander, and Crunchynut44, along with a bunch of people I've never heard of before. But that seems to be the great thing about this particular project—since the mapping philosophy is driven primarily by enthusiasm and personal quirks, it didn't take a lot of experience to embrace it and create maps that fit in perfectly. As a result, the mapset feels very consistent, to the point where I have very little idea of who made what or which maps were made by the more experienced mappers (though as always, it was glaringly clear which map is Pinchy's).

The story is similar to Doomkid's earlier work, or Mutiny, or frankly any distopian movie/video game created between 1980 and 1995, which is of course entirely intentional. The UAC rules the future with an iron fist, conscripting "undesirables" to experiment on in order to create an army of genetically modified soldiers. You play as a genetic supersoldier yourself, newly excaped from UAC imprisonment and out to leave a path of destruction on your way to freedom. Since you're up against a megacorporation, you'll mainly be fighting lightweight humanoid enemies, and this is one of the ways that Doomed in Space shines. There's a ton of variety, from hitscanners to plasma shooters of various kinds to a slightly borked flamethrower enemy, and none of them take much effort to put down, but all encourage you to play aggressively. There are a few larger and tankier enemies in the mix, but for the most part you play like an angry lawnmower, which is a mode of gameplay that never gets old in my opinion. Many of the player weapons have been sped up as well, which feels fitting for the combat.

Although there aren't any "great" maps in the set design-wise, everything about Doomed in Space seems to work together. The endlessly compelling lone-wolf-vs.-tyranny backstory, the straight-faced mock intensity of the inter-map story texts, the quick flow of most of the maps, the fast pacing of the weapon/monster design—it all falls into place to make you want to keep flying through the maps until you reach the end. It also creates a strange sort of emotional buildup that reminds me a lot of Tyrian 2000, a classic vertical shmup that has that same combination of melodramatic grittiness and high-speed gameplay. @Pinchy's "The Speed of Skree" (map 13) is the perfect finale for all of that, as it sees you plowing through fodder horde after fodder horde on a three-tiered spaceship shaped like a giant scarab beetle with the stars speeding by outside the windows and energetic space rock playing in the background.

Projects that don't take themselves very seriously (in terms of design as well as aesthetics and story) are always going to be hard-pressed to compete for award recognition—and I doubt that Doomed in Space was aiming that high anyway—but personally I love stuff like this. I'd recommend it highly to anyone who still has their head stuck in the '90s.

Shovelware Adventure by Doomkid (review reposted from The /newstuff Chronicles)

Shovelware Adventure is a throwback to the early days of Doom, when you could get away with raking up a bunch of other people's random crap levels and throwing them onto a CD to sell commercially. It doesn't actually play like a shovelware map, fortunately. Instead, it's more about having a cheesy retro feel and a very simple but high-quality design. The detailing is pretty spartan and I don't think there are any custom textures, but there's plenty of fun new content to help keep it interesting, mostly in terms of monsters and decorations. Besides the recolors and reskins, some of the new monsters include a spectral Imp and a plasma-shooting zombie with Duke sunglasses. These sorts of monsters don't create new gameplay, but they do contribute to the overall sense of variety and light-hearted fun, so I think they serve this map well. Two monsters that I do think add something new to the game are a tougher Imp with a faster double fireball attack and a zombie that fires homing missiles. Both of them take more damage than you expect and are unlikely to flinch, but their seeming weakness makes it very tempting to get cocky and face them out in the open with the assumption that you can stun-lock them or kill them very quickly, exposing you to some pretty dangerous attacks. There's also a nice custom music track that fits well with the retro feel of the map.

The level is very large and very open for exploration; it includes three keycards, but you don't even need all of them to win, and they're mostly used for opening up more optional areas where you can get better equipment. I never got tired of running around trying to find everything. Enemies are packed in pretty densely, but since most of them are weak, the map isn't too hard, as long as you can survive the occasional packs of hitscanners. I love this sort of gameplay, where there are tons of mostly low-tier monsters, so you're always mowing something down. The finale is a challenge, throwing you into the middle of an monster spawner battle and forcing you to clear a Spider Mastermind and a Cyberdemon out of the way before you can get into position to destroy the source (not too hard or annoying as far as IoS fights go, but it did catch me by surprise). Shovelware Adventure might be too quirky for some players, but I highly recommend it.

Unwelcome by @Plusw

Vivid, unusual color schemes have been a big part of Doom mapping ever since @Ribbiks hit the scene in 2013, tickling a whole new set of aesthetic sensibilities with his exceedingly purple debut (though the teaser shots of BTSX, a few oddball projects like Oniria, and the ubiquitous Simplicity palette should be given due credit for helping to pave the way). But for whatever reason, enigmatic pink and teal maps were particularly hot last year. The specimen that probably piqued the most interest was Magnolia, which unsurprisingly is also by Ribbiks—a cruel and rather polarizing reimagining of Eternal Doom-style cryptic progression in the mode of a hardcore challenge mapset. 

Unwelcome uses similar colors, but is otherwise a pretty different animal. While Magnolia contrasts its primary pink and teal with grungy browns and bloody reds, Unwelcome desaturates every other color in the palette to the point where it looks very close to grayscale. This jarring, washed-out look sets the tone for the entire mapset, which unveils and unravels itself like a particularly disturbing dream from the moment you find yourself plunked down in the starting room.

Unwelcome feels not just eerie but deeply psychological; its unsettling mood feels close to home in a way that's hard to put a finger on. The first map begins almost silent, letting you wander the halls a bit in near isolation before the music starts to creep in and the monsters begin to show themselves. Everything feels a little bit wrong: monsters don't show up the way you expect them to, doors don't look like doors, the geometry of the rooms is skewed, and you never quite know where you're going, but things unfold around you anyway as the sense of mystery drives you to explore the strangely self-contained puzzle dreamworld. As you go from one map to the next, that mood follows you constantly, carried by the creepy texturing and palette, the music, and the map design in equal parts. Each time you beat a map, you're given the same message—"The deed is done. Open your eyes"—which is your cue to go back to the start room and step on the eye graphic where you first spawned in order to exit.

Several of the maps have their own unique (but not terribly complicated) puzzle mechanics, but overall the gameplay feels consistent, with the nightmare taking on a slightly different shape and tone in each map, and combat that is usually light but never follows any particular tropes, so you're never really certain what to expect. Aside from the feeling that anything could happen, the set isn't too challenging, but the last few maps do present some surprisingly clever and tough combat choreography at times. The last map is a strong closer, translating the mapset's surrealism into a larger scale as you leap across islands over a teal ocean while avoiding a constant barrage of Caco balls from the eyes that have been watching you throughout the mapset. Your ultimate goal remains unfathomable, but you eventually penetrate the huge, dark fortress at the far end of the map to retrieve the mapset's only Gray Key and leave through a giant eye portal that takes you to either salvation or further nightmares.

Like many of the best Doom mapsets of the 2000s and early 2010s, Unwelcome leaves you with the feeling that you're looking for something that's been lost, like there's a longing or an emptiness that will never really get resolved. In Unwelcome's case, similar to A.L.T., it's almost like the game is happening inside your own head, teasing insight into the violence and desolation of your own sadness, fear, and dissonance but never letting you be certain of what you're seeing. I don't really have any answers about what the mapset means—if anything—but it left me wondering, and that is often a more satisfying experience.

Northern Powerhouse by @yakfak

...And here is another mysterious pink map, although its color scheme is pink/tan/gray, rather than pink/teal/gray. Unlike Unwelcome, Northern Powerhouse feels like it's taking place in a real location rather than inside a metaphor, though I can't say exactly why that is the case. Its surrealism follows more in the footsteps of Doom 2 itself—very real, concrete architecture that's being fragmented and subverted by some kind of unreality—and the mysteries you're left with are who lived there before and what happened to them, and whether the new reality has some other layer to uncover underneath it. It's the sort of map where when you finally beat it, you're left wondering whether you actually found everything or if maybe there was some "better" ending or hidden meaning out there somewhere.

In any case, it's definitely a yakfak map. At the title screen, you're given an image of a sheep to contemplate with the mapper's signature Weird Jazz music playing in the background. The gameplay is a combination of combat/resource management puzzle and spatial reasoning; you spend the whole map figuring out where you can go, how you can get there, and whether the place you're trying to get into is an actual part of the map's progression or just a cool little nook to explore. Nothing is handed to you, but as with yakfak's most famous map, Sheer Poison, that's clearly the whole point, and it feels like part of the natural charm of the map. Unlike with Sheer Poison, which I've never managed to complete, I felt like the challenges in Northern Powerhouse were pretty manageable with observation, exploration, and effort, perhaps partly because the map is more compact and easier to travel around than its predecessor. The spatial reasoning is logical enough, and the map is nonlinear enough, that you always feel like you have somewhere to go rather than just hitting a wall where there's only one way to progress and you don't know how it works.

Difficulty settings are super important in this map, because HMP and UV are designed as two completely different experiences. HMP has only 82 monsters (though their positioning and your lack of resources provide plenty of challenge in spite of the small count), and you have plenty of time to explore the map and figure out how things work at your liesure with relatively little pressure being put on you. UV is the same map, except that a horde of 2,400 zombies and SS Nazis will start teleporting into the start area at about the 5 minute mark, forcing you to optimize your route really well or find a way to deal with them all. I would highly recommend playing HMP first and treating UV as an extra challenge for a second playthrough, and I think that is probably what yakfak intended.

Northern Powerhouse is a pretty cool map, though it won't be for everyone. I think it is certainly the best yakfak map since Sheer Poison, and although it doesn't feel like as powerful an achievement, it is more accessible. If you can't get your fill of enigmatic pink maps, make sure to check this one out.

DBP Series (2018) by various

I mentioned the DBP series and its two star entries in the "Recommend Me a Coffee Break Mapset" sidebar feature of last year's Cacowards, but I wanted to take the opportunity to cover those two mapsets in a bit more detail and briefly cover some of the other sets in the series. The DBPs were monthly community projects that ran for about six months last year (with a seventh Christmas-themed one appearing much later around the holidays, and regular new entries appearing in 2019 under new leadership), keeping strictly to the one-month time limit and producing somewhere around six or seven maps per set. Each revolves around its own distinct custom texture theme, some of which are awesome (and some less so, but such is life). The basic philosophy seems to have been primarily about creating short maps with a classic feel—sometimes '90s classic, but usually more like the kinds of cozy maps you'd see in the 2000s in Dutch Devil's shorter works or the community projects of the day.

Of all the mapsets in the series, I think the one with the most synergy between the mappers was probably Monuments of Mars, which was the first in the series. I love the crap out of this set, and it's my favorite DBP in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay. The texture theme is sort of a hellish version of Mars, with red rock and lava surrounding a series of techbase outposts textured in a really nice sepiatone color, generally with moody lighting that plays up the contrast between the glow of the techlights/lava and the darkness under the starry sky. Besides being pretty, the thing that's most enjoyable about Monuments is the sense of easy-going but unrelenting pacing, which I described in the Cacoward sidebar as riding downhill on a bike. It's got such a smooth flow, rarely ever hitting a snag in its difficulty curve, but also keeping up the speed of the action and the sense of constantly pushing forward in such a way that it never feels dull. The highlights of the set are "Ares Compound" by @Phobus (map 03) and "Geothermal Gymnastics" by @NoisyVelvet (map 07), the latter of which ends with a really fun battle down in the lava, with plenty of Radsuit management and some Arch-Viles that are used effectively as support enemies/resurrectors rather than as primary offensive threats.

The next best entry in my opinion (and perhaps the most well-received by the general community) is Coffin Curse, which uses a classic crypt/gothic theme that you pretty much can't go wrong with when it comes to Doom maps. The mapset has a nice sense of atmosphere throughout and varied gameplay, sometimes focusing on tight confines and sometimes being more open and brawly or exploratory, but generally offering its challenges more in the form of tricks and traps rather than fast pacing and heavy onslaughts. To me, this feels highly fitting for the visual theme, which is reminiscent of Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider as well as some of the classic crypt-delving RPGs. There are plenty of solid maps in here, with @Big Ol Billy's oddly soothing "Greenpeace" (map 02), memfis and bigolbilly's dungeon crawler "Castlefreakz" (map 05), and @SuperCupcakeTactics's barrel-laden "Trenchgore" (map 06) being my favorites.

Of the remaining mapsets in the series, Forest Swords is probably the best, partly due to having a nice dark forest theme that creates a solid baseline mood/aesthetic. I don't think there are any really exceptional maps to be found here, but maps 02, 06, and 07 all have a nice atmosphere and interesting layouts. The whole set is pretty quick and cozy, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes the DBP mapping philosophy and wants more.

The last one that I think is potentially worth a runthrough is Xenomorph Base, which uses gritty Gigeresque textures to infuse a bit of a horror atmosphere into the game. Taking inspiration from the theme, the maps are generally a little bit sneaky and unconventional, as opposed to the more straightforward action of Forest Swords. As with Forest Swords, I would recommend it primarily to nostalgia Doomers who are looking for coffee break maps; others may prefer to skip it.

I didn't really enjoy the remaining two mapsets from the series' initial run—Circle of Caina and Vicarious Reality—perhaps mainly because I found the visual themes to be a bit of an eyesore (in Caina's case, it's more the colormapping rather than the texturing). If you like the other DBPs, they may be worth checking out. If you're only looking to play the best entries in the series, I would stick with Monuments and Coffin Curse.