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

Besides the review I'm about to post, I also decided it'd be fun to share my Cacoward picks for the past year. These are in no way meant as commentary on the Cacowards or disagreement with anything written there, just personal picks. For those reading, this should give you a pretty standard glimpse of what award panel judging looks like. The Cacowards aren't a single set of picks that everyone agrees on, but rather a rough consensus reached by a set of compromises, vehement passion picks, and constant discussion. Every individual judge will always end up with their own distinct list, usually with each person's picks being about 60-80% in line with the official Gold tier and maybe a bit more differentiated in the Silver tier, like you can see below. Since I wasn't on the team this year, I'm seeing a bit more difference between my picks and the official list than I usually do, but tbh, that just makes it more exciting, and the expansions to the awards and the addition of what you might call a "bronze" tier have made any differences of opinion less vexing than ever. Even though these are just one person's selections, I hope people whose work I liked even more than the communal consensus will appreciate the shoutout for their awesome efforts. To that end, I'm only @ing people if their rank represents an "upgrade" from the official awards.

 

This list basically represents my picks as of December 9, before the awards were revealed (the 12/12 award format had already been a major point of discussion since roughly the day Ar Luminae was released, if not earlier). The only exception is Old Still Life, which I hadn't even heard of until the Cacowards came out but immediately knew I had to play. Unfortunately, I couldn't bear to cut a single thing from the list I already had...so eventually, I decided to honor the official team's decision to consider roofi's amazing Ventose as part of Deadly Standards 3 (which I still haven't played) rather than as a standalone map. Since it's one of my favorite maps of the year, I'll still have a chance to gush about it later as part of my annual top maps list and beyond.

 

Gold:
(first two are favorites, otherwise unranked)

 

1. Tarnsman’s Projectile Hell
2. Ashes: Afterglow
3. Old Still Life by @Rednov
4. Time Tripper by @msx2plus
5. Heartland 
6. Infraworld: Coma Moonlight
7. Fractured Worlds
8. Sold Soul by @Fryuko
9. Unhallowed
10. Atmospheric Extinction by @Velvetic
11. Arrival
12. Lullaby

 

Silver:
(first two are favorites, otherwise unranked)

 

1. Arceon
2. Doom 2 in Spain Only
3. Nameless by @Jimmy
4. Alfonzo Tries to Prevent Donald Trump From Starting Third Impact by @AD_79
5. Boaty McBoatwad by @Scotty et al.
6. Archi-Tek by @romsu89
7. URE2020
8. Dungeon Synths by @Big Ol Billy et al.
9. Uprising by @Cheesewheel
10. 1000 Lines Community Project 3
11. Intergalactic Xenology 2
12. I.H.N.I. Episode 1

(all special awards: no opinion or same as official awards)

 

Honor Roll:
(first two are favorites, otherwise unranked)

 

Haste
Infested
Alfonzo Throws Hands With the Purple People Eater
Cydonia
Dereliction Derby
Hellevator
Judgment
Micro Slaughter Community Project
Perpetual Powers
Ray Mohawk 2
Skulltiverse
Siderurgia
St. Alfonzo's Darkbase
Starlight Processing
Sucker Punch 2
Vow of Vengeance

Other Stuff I Played:

 

 

 

Archi-Tek by @romsu89

 

    

    

    

 

On the surface, Archi-Tek may look like a crash course in how to intentionally consign your work to obscurity; from a development thread written in Czech with a single screenshot, the project eventually graduated to a minimalist intro in English with no screenshots at all. Despite the author's best efforts, a friendly all-knowing demon appeared in the release thread, surfacing from the depths of its dark well to tell us about the abyss it had gazed into. That was how I realized Archi-Tek was something I needed to play. Even if you vaguely remembered the name and wanted to look it up, you might have missed it because the thread title was changed at some point to UVOLNIT (maybe that's the name of the WAD now?), even though the ModDB page still calls it Archi-Tek. It just goes to show that no matter how hard you try to hide your work, the Cacowards team will still find it and play it.

 

Once you've actually loaded up the WAD, it's easy to get hooked right away. The opening scene of map 01 teases a strong attention to environmental design, with plausible-looking equipment and computer console setups that make you want to examine everything closely, and a play of light and shadow that emphasizes the allure of areas off the beaten path. It's a brief series of relatively empty rooms with just a few Imps and zombies to perk up your attention, but the dark corners and side closets already begin to reward curiousity, which gets you interested in exploring every nook and trying to tease out secrets or caches of supplies. That inquisitiveness it fosters becomes more and more important as you dive deeper and the environments continue to unfold in weirder and weirder ways. 

 

And it really does unfold. What might seem like realistic architecture in that opening scene literally opens up into progressively bigger, more intricate scenes, and not just in the sense that it's waiting to spill more monsters at you. The veneer of ordinary human construction is sloughed off almost immediately, and the level of detail and horror that spills out from behind the walls is staggering. Sure, we've all seen helltech before, we saw it in 1993, but in Archi-Tek the infestation feels like it's already consumed the infrastructure from within and the tech that remains is only a surface plating that keeps popping off as the flesh bursts sickeningly through it, like each blocked door is a mouth that's strangling on the monstrous creature thrusting down into its throat, like each switch and console that survives is now powering flesh rather than tech, and the liquids pouring from each orifice are fluids from a disgusting body whose infinite arms are reaching out toward you. This effect is achieved with overwhelming amounts of microdetailing, used both in creating the organic Hell elements and the techbase equipment; many mappers will (wisely) advise that macro-architecture is more fundamentally important than micro-detail, but here the countless tiny swaths of detail laid over and cut into the relatively simplistic architecture are what gives you the feeling that the map is eating itself alive.

 

That complexity of surface detail belies yet another layer of complexity in how the layouts unravel. On the one hand, the walls are constantly disintegrating, the floors falling out from under you, ambushes of monsters bursting out around you at nearly every turn you take. It reminds me of Avactor, one of my favorite mapsets of all time, in that the surprises are so constant that you come to expect that they will happen, but they still get you every time by happening in new and different ways, or from angles you weren't expecting, or because you thought a sequence of events was over but it turns out it has one more thing to throw at you. There's a playful kinetic element at the heart of these maps, with events often being triggered by a series of triplines rather than a switch press or a key pickup. At the same time, there's yet another optional layer to the exploration; the obsessive microdetailing around the computer panels and wall insets makes you want to go up and press them in search of secrets or pseudo-secrets, a pursuit that's frequently rewarded. Or maybe there's a cage over there you think you can maybe reach with some jumps and ledge-walks. You only find this stuff if you look for it—but like I said, the level design encourages you to look for it. All in all, it creates a world where every piece of machinery seems like it's connected to something and every square foot of space has a hidden purpose, similar to URE2020 or Gods & Guardians.

 

It only gets crazier as you go on, and although it invites comparisons to a variety of other mapsets (which are all totally different from each other), it develops a strong voice of its own, particularly in the second half of the set (late map 02 and map 03). You know those fight scenes in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies where the action keeps changing direction? A guy picks up a treasure chest, and then two guys are swordfighting, and then three guys are swordfighting, and then a sidekick comes running in with a pursuing horde of cannibals, and then there are shark-men out of nowhere and suddenly they're all fighting on a giant wheel while trying not to fall off, and the treasure chest changes hands twelve times until finally the original guy has it again? Playing Archi-Tek is like that. And if you didn't like the Pirates movies that much (which I didn't), then just trust me that the sheer ridiculousness of it translates well as a video game.

 

Here's an example. After many other adventures in map 02, you end up high on a ledge overlooking the whole city you just de-infested, when you come to a crumbly bridge blocked by a little wall that you clearly have to lower in order to cross. The switch to lower it turns out to be in...a creepy cave set into the outer wall of a skyscraper? Okay, fair enough. So you press the switch, the door lowers, and an Arch-Vile appears to run amok among all the guys you just killed outside. But the cave entrance is blocked now. Suddenly there's a newly opened library in the back where you're immediately dropped down into muck and ambushed. The path you're now on tracks, backtracks, and sidetracks through a few more rooms and a couple warrens of tight hallway fights, with several red herrings in the progression, a couple surprise Arch-Viles, a key you have to go back for, and a scramble across the tops of bookshelves with incoming rockets before you finally get back out to the bridge and the Arch-Vile still running around out there, who has made some friends in the meantime. The whole thing comes out of nowhere, and there's no way you can possibly guess when all of it will end, with each new twist and turn in the sequence just serving to spin you around like a record (, baby). And all of this begins at a time when you're expecting the map to be almost over.

 

That's just one of many sequences you'll be tossed and kicked through, and the third map just keeps dialing it up—bigger and tougher fights, longer and crazier diversions from the main path, and a lengthier runtime with more cinematic flair. It all ends with an Icon of Sin looming over the top of a massive room and a long, spiraling buildup toward the middle that practically had me screaming JUST LET ME FIGHT IT ALREADY GODDAMMIT!!! but pays off in the end thanks to the ludicrous chaos of the final battle.

 

Archi-Tek is not without its flaws. Or maybe it's perfect, but the roller-coaster ride will have its ups and downs for every player, with none of us quite able to accept its full rabid genius. The dizzying way the layouts unfold combined with the large number of switches to press often had me wondering where to go, even though that dizziness can be beautiful in its own way. The visual insanity can feel a little too messy at times, even though that might be the point of it. And some of the back-and-forth and around-and-around can try your patience, even if its thrilling. But Archi-Tek is just cool. I've played it twice now, and not regretted it once—if anything, it only becomes better on a second playthrough as you try to tease out more of its secrets and overcome its obstacles with greater finesse.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Not Jabba

2022 Post-Mortem and Cacoward Picks

2022 gave us a wealth of awesome Doom releases, just like every other year, though thankfully it was a lot less intense and stressful for those of us trying to keep up with new releases than 2021 was. I was away from the game for most of the first half of this Cacoward year due to health problems and surgery to fix them, but I've gradually gotten back to more-or-less normal, and it's been good to catch up on this year's releases along with a few things from last year's Cacowards that I missed. I promised myself to take it easy and only play the things I really wanted to play this year, rather than be sucked down a rabbit-hole of playing everything I come across, and I've...er, somewhat mostly succeeded at that. Even so, it looks like I played 63 Doom wads this year, which hopefully is nothing to sniff at. I'm also sorry that I've written virtually nothing this year, but there was a lot of life to catch up on.

 

Because we're the most active fan level design community in existence and we're engaging in constant discourse about what we're doing right and wrong and what we have a lot of and what we're missing, every year ends up with its own unique areas of high representation. In other words, for the past couple of years people kept saying they want more of X, so this year we get more of X. This year, I've noticed three strong trends that are all exciting to me. First, there's been a ton of more laid-back releases among my top 24, ranging from genuinely casual to moderately tough but with calmer pacing in between combat peaks. The average difficulty of high-quality wads is lower, or the average quality of easy wads is higher, than in other recent years—however you want to look at it. Second, there's been a huge number of projects focusing entirely on short to medium-length maps, which has been a long time coming. 

 

Finally, for whatever reason, there's been a proliferation of great city maps this year, in everything from DTYBotC and Relyctum and Anomaly Report to more fanciful, fantastic versions in Endquest and Ozonia, and even in more surprising places like Jumpwad and Irkalla's remake of "Unholy Cathedral." If I were to make a list of my favorite maps from this year, I think the majority would be city maps. I mean, seriously, look at all this:

 

   

   

   

(Pictured: Don't Turn Your Back on the City, Jumpwad, Relyctum, Irkalla; 

Endquest, Ozonia, Hydrosphere, Anomaly Report;

PRCP2, Nostalgia, Oripathy, Devilution)

 

The trends of chiller and shorter maps feel like a breath of fresh air coming after 2019-2021, which, although diverse, tended toward big projects that require a lot of energy to play. I like to think that in the coming years, the pendulum will even out slightly and we'll hit more of an optimal equilibrium of chill vs. challenging and short vs. long than we've had in a while. But even so, it's pretty clear that 2022 Doomers haven't forgotten that hard maps or huge adventure odysseys are still a lot of fun. That's one of the great things about this modding community: the temporary mapping trends tend to bring something to the table that we all knew we needed, but we never really lose out on diversity. There's always plenty of stuff to play. And if you still don't have enough of something, go make it, so I can talk about how your project is another breath of fresh air in a few years!

 

So, award picks.

 

Just to be clear, the following are personal picks and not affiliated with the Cacowards or based on insider information. Between team turnover and my personal biases, I have roughly zero confidence that my list will line up with the official awards—but here's hoping. I definitely can't say with any certainty that the award team and I will align on what is eligible. These are my picks as of November 15, the most common cutoff date, but they may have gone later or even earlier. More to the point, there's a growing trend among Doom mappers to do partial releases of projects and keep adding pieces on until the project is done (or "maybe done but maybe not," in some cases), which blurs the lines quite a bit on what is to be considered award-eligible and how many times it is up for awards. It's a huge pain in the ass from an award judging perspective, but it's useful for mappers and players for a variety of reasons, so I imagine it will continue to be very common. I also don't know whether the award team has gone back to the 10/10 award format or stuck with 12/12.

 

Since I don't know what is getting official awards, I'm just going to @ all of you. Hope that's ok!

 

Gold:
(Top three are favorites, otherwise unranked)

 

1. Don't Turn Your Back on the City by @Trashbang
2. Jumpwad by @Ribbiks and @Grain of Salt
3. Knee-Deep in KDIZD by @esselfortium et al.
4. Infested E2 by @ginc
5. Caffeine Injection by @Misty
6. Anomaly Report by @valkiriforce
7. Overboard by @mouldy
8. Elementalism Phase 1 by @Bauul et al.
9. Ozonia by @Deadwing 
10. Intergalactic Xenology Trilogy by @Dreadopp and @Lord_Z
11. Infection by @exl 
12. 2022: A Doom Odyssey by @pcorf, @Kristian Nebula, @Chris Hansen, and Richie Skarj Gay

Silver:
(Unranked)

 

1. Sally by @baja blast rd.
2. Hydrosphere by @Bri 
3. Pagodia^[1] by @Egg Boy et al./Team Squonker
4. Occula by @bemused and @tourniquet
5. Atolladero by @Soulless 
6. Relyctum by @BeeWen
7. Endquest by @Egregor, @DeathevokatioN, and Vordakk
8. Corrupted Cistern by @Lutz
9. Nensha by @RonnieJamesDiner
10. Irkalla by @Phobus, Vordakk, @SuperCupcakeTactics, and @Peerdolius
11. Oripathy by @Origamyde 
12. Heaven Stroll by @Roofi

 

Dootaward:
Elementalism and Knee-Deep in KDiZD

 

Creator of the Year:
Amuscaria or Deadwing

 

Honor Roll:
(Top two are favorites, otherwise unranked)

Deep Space Thruster
What Remains^[1]
CountryCide
DBK Holiday Special
Divergence
Emerald City
Gloombase
One Rabbit Open Slay
Nostalgia
Plutonia Revisited Community Project 2
Tomb of the Old Lords
Wormwood IV

Some stuff that looks good but I haven’t played it:
Squenched Avocausage (seems to still be WIP, but no clear target for completion), Malignant (seems to be a partial release), Not Even Remotely Fair (partial release of a larger project), Bellatrix (partial release of a larger project), Malevolence (partial release of a larger project), Midnight Isle (definitely WIP), Reelism 2, Solar Struggle, Disorder, 10x10 Project

Other stuff I played (These are generally also good):

 

[1] Pagodia and What Remains are pretty much interchangeable.

 

Edited December 1, 2022 by Not Jabba

The last few years have seen a renaissance of short-form mapping—not only maps that take a short time to play, but also maps that take a short time to create. Short maps take less energy, and for many people, that makes them far more relaxing than long maps, less toll on the mind and soul. For others, short maps are simply faster, which means you can cross more things off your infinite checklist of stuff to do. For some, it's just the pragmatism of not having much free time. From a mapping perspective, some find speedmapping to be a better way to generate ideas, an efficient form of brainstorm that leads to more creative projects.

 

This is an important movement, and its logic is not unwelcome, though I'm finding that as the world emerges from the pandemic and I'm not exhausted 100 percent of the time, I'm already starting to turn back toward longer, more demanding works with enthusiasm. Like many people, I love a slow burn—a game, megawad, or even a single map that takes so long to play that its concepts start to cook in your brain, flavors mingling and juices bubbling over the course of hours, days, or even weeks. In this way, the playthrough becomes something much more than the sum of your reactions to individual moments—by the end, every new moment you experience is being built onto the arc and architecture of a whole host of other connected experiences, allowing the core themes and concepts to snowball and evolve within the framework of a single piece of art, which is part of why bigger maps and games often feel like they go deeper and hit harder. A shorter map can accomplish something similar through repeated playthroughs, through connections and references to other works, or by being so brilliant that it stays in your mind after you finish it, but there's something special about having that process happening while you're experiencing a meaty chunk of content for the first time, not yet sure where and how it will end.

 

Today we're going to look at two very *long* megawads, both created by the same person. If you're looking for rabbit holes, here they are. Each one of them takes around two weeks to complete if you're going at a measured pace ... which you should, because trying to rush through them will feel miserable. But the length of these two mapsets, the amount of effort you have to put into them, the sheer difficulty of getting all the way through them, is precisely what makes them so great. 

 

 

Greenian by @BeeWen

 

     

     

     

     

     

 

 

The Cacowards covered Greenian as a special feature, but that article was more about the creative process and the legacy of the source material, and I wanted to give a bit more attention to Greenian as a mapset, since that was mainly how I experienced it. I know that I played the two Herian megawads in the mid-2000s when I was new to fan-made Doom maps, but the only thing I remember about them is the giant cruise ship that appears in the second one. The two late '90s megawads share a partial conversion, which combines part of the Doom bestiary with reskins from Heretic and Hexen, giving them a hybrid sci-fi/fantasy vibe that's similar to Eternal Doom.

 

Greenian is a remake of Herian 2, but it gets rid of the janky Raven trappings and instead builds a setting and bestiary that are more unique and cohesive while still serving the same basic function as the original. The story is that a desperate and nearly defeated human military foe has allied with the demons in an attempt to overrun the "good guys," whoever they may actually be. The three zombie enemies are replaced with human enemies in green uniforms, while an SS Nazi reskinned as a gun-wielding cultist bridges the gap between them and the demons, hinting at how the two groups may have become connected. Many of the demons have new skins as well, but they keep their more Doomy forms, either using variant versions from Realm667 (like the Cthulhu-Hell Knight) or from Doom 64 (like the Arachnotron). This "alternate universe" version of Doom still feels like a bit of a hodgepodge, but it's more to the megawad's advantage; it's never really explained what you're facing and why, but it feels a little bit alien, a little bit eldritch, a little bit demonic, and still as much fantasy as science fiction. The world itself certainly isn't Earth either, though it is Earth-like. The maps take place across cities and fortresses that feel like they might have been built by a race of cyberpunk Elves, a society that's advanced in military technology but is built over the top of a more mystical, high-fantasy heritage and retains its grand, palatial architectural sensibilities. The relationship between the past and present feels uneasy in this world, and the military structures and towns weave through forested mountainsides and honeycombs of caverns in a way that almost feels like an attempt at reclamation, as though the cyber-Elves realize deep down inside that they've sold their souls and are trying futilely to reconnect with their ancient roots. I don't think they've succeeded. In this megawad, even the wilderness feels shadowy and dark. Whatever organization you're fighting for or trying to save is faceless, never seen or explained, and it creates an unsettling ambiguity as you pursue your goal across the endless succession of brooding landscapes. You may not actually be working for the good guys. There might not be any.

 

All this is my own personal interpretation, but it goes to show how much lore the game feels like it has, and how much work has been put into elevating the setting of Herian into its own distinct thing while still keeping the same basic idea of it. The setting is deeply reminiscent of Eternal Doom and other cryptic adventure megawads of the '90s, and the gameplay wears those same inspirations on its sleeves—it's exactly what you think it will be, except better. It's a 2023 megawad, and a few of the really rough edges of those '90s inspirations have been smoothed out, but not too much. Greenian avoids the feeling of jagged unevenness that Eternal Doom has—you don't have to press on a tree to win—but the sense of rawness and hardship is still there and still pervasive. Nothing is ever given to you by the guiding hand of God. You're alone, and you feel alone—lonely, even. It's a feeling that never relents for the many, many hours you spend playing the megawad.

 

All the expected hallmarks of the classic puzzle-adventure genre, as well as the Russian works of the 2010s, are there. The maps are big and sprawling, but not flowy. You're never shown where to go and have to search for most progression points, some of which are hard to see. The big spaces are inhabited by sparse populations of monsters, sometimes creating a slower and more contemplative pace, other times casting aside clean, balanced combat tropes in favor of sheer meanness, sniping hitscanners and all. Ammo is often pretty tight, even playing continuous. 

 

In Greenian, as in other mapsets of its type, these tropes work together to create their own style of play. The tighter ammo and lower monster counts allow you to form personal vendettas against each enemy you encounter, from the lowly machine-gun cultist to the drifting Cacodemon to the plaza-dominating Cyberdemon, committing each grudge to heart and building micro-relationships with them as they snipe you from towers or hunt you through narrow streets and alleys. It lets them feel like your enemies, rather than like cogs in a machine. The slower pace of gameplay and the frequent difficulty of moving from place to place lets you observe your surroundings more carefully, which is required to progress. Movement is crafted realistically as part of the setting, whether you're looking for a back staircase leading up to an almost hidden room or a ledge to drop down from, which is part of why the world feels so believable, and therefore so believably sad and forsaken. The long treks, searches, and backtracks are part of the feeling of being a lost and hopeless wanderer, a violent pilgrim whose needs are unclear even to themself. Maybe the door you want to open is at one end of the map and the key for it is in some random guy's back pocket in another building. The maps are designed that way because that's just how it is. That's the hardship and suffering of life in a broken world, sifting through the wreckage. Perhaps the most important thing about the map design is that you spend a lot of time in the maps, often not doing much, and that gives you a lot of time to listen to the music, inhabit the character, observe the world, and think.

 

Part of what makes those pauses worthwhile is that the soundtrack, while not original, is exquisite. The all-MP3 tracklist includes a bunch of different styles and comes from a bunch of sources (none of which I recognize), but it all feels unified somehow by how well it portrays the murky, desolate world of the game. Some tracks are ambient and horror-like, featuring distant background sound-effects like screams and moans that remind me of the Diablo series. Some are monotonous mechanical grinding that you feel in your teeth and it just never seems to let up until you find the sweet release of the next map. Some are gorgeous, sweeping electronic pieces that make the sunsets, the looming mountains, and the silhouettes of the cityscapes feel more alive. As you play through the megawad, you move back and forth between all of these moods in step with the narrative of the maps themselves—some industrial and brutal, others ancient and magical, all lonely and mournful. The track for map 20 best exemplifies the whole soundtrack; it ripped my heart out, over and over again with every loop.

 

Intermission texts every few maps give you some basic plot points to build your head-canon from, providing more context for the map-to-map progression than Herian 2 had, but most of the really interesting narrative happens in the maps themselves. The first five maps serve as an introduction to the enemies and the types of mountain-castle-cities that dominate the mapset, revisiting certain areas multiple times in different maps as the player takes a winding path. Map 06 ("An Old Friend in Trouble") kicks into a higher gear, beginning to hint at the broader story—I don't think you ever find the old friend or learn why they contacted you, which is pretty eerie. It also pulls away the curtain on the "medieval" world, revealing very suddenly how much of the setting is saturated with declining industrial tech, including a movie theater that's probably the first real inkling of how strange the world of the megawad really is. This builds up to a first boss battle of sorts in map 08 ("He Shouldn't Be Here"). The demonic army turns out to be pretty feudal, with Cyberdemons and Masterminds serving as titanic commanders that lord over the open spaces in a great many of the maps. Nearly all of these boss fights are set up to be conquered with infighting, and Cyberdemon-vs.-Mastermind infight battles are probably more common in this megawad than any mapset I've ever played. The story texts themselves reference how spiteful the monsters are toward each other and their masters, like dogs fighting over the bones of a long-since-picked-over carcass, which feels like yet another element of how chaotic and decayed the game world has become.

 

It keeps getting better from there. Map 09 ("Escape to the Isles") has you traveling between islands by boat, then sneaking through underwater passages to get inside buildings. Map 10 ("Things Are Getting Worse") has you besieging a gigantic coastal castle, dismantling the opposition piece by piece. Map 14's "Bon Accord Centre" offers one of the best setpieces for the whole setting, a mansion converted into some sort of elite academy or convention center in the high mountains, a place that feels important but whose importance remains a mystery—and then in the next map you're transported to somewhere completely different, an utterly desolate, windswept snowy techfort on an even higher mountaintop. Each new setting, each huge, echoing worldscape—the burning city of map 31, the red-tinted wasteland of map 32, the pumping station and outdoor conveyor beltways of map 16—builds another piece of the journey. Map 18 ("Captured Trading Post") is one of the most lifelike settings in the megawad, a combination of harbors, posh great halls, and shadowy maintenance tunnels. At the end of that map, you finally rest, locating a safe haven and locking yourself in to recover your strength. Then in map 19 ("Night Cricket"), you wake up in the same location at twilight, taking a back exit and shooting your way through dark, flooded canyons amid heavy fire. It's a fantastic piece of in-game storytelling, a great way to use two overlapping maps as bookends for a piece of plot advancement but also make each of them play completely differently. Map 20 ("Journey to Herian City") is theoretically more of the same, a complex medley of ruins and palace grounds, but it's one of the biggest and best maps in the set, and its crowning moment lets you watch an entire cliffside fall away to reveal a hidden city. 

 

After the climax of map 20, you're thankfully sent through a series of slightly shorter, fairly tough, concept-oriented maps, one of which gives you squads of friendly monsters and another of which circles around a giant lake of lava, before the main plot picks up again. The enormous cruise ship that I remembered from Herian 2 is there in maps 25 and 26 ("Cargo Bay" and "Ship Beyond"), and boy does it deliver; the trek through the dockside warehouse zone and then the three floors of the ship itself remains one of the most memorable legs of the whole adventure. Map 27 gives you one last melancholy wasteland to slosh through before dumping you into map 28 ("Serious Canyon"), another truly climactic world-crawl. Probably the coolest thing about this map is its towering vertical spaces, which create an almost puzzle-like sandbox where you traverse the world by finding ways to drop from one place to another and access new parts of its vast teleporter network. Another of the most fun moments in the megawad is this here:

 

 

...because yes, you do walk up that crazy spire to grab the key, and it's so silly and awesome. Map 29 ("Cavern") is the penultimate battle in a place that looks like it's not too far from Hell itself, and map 30 ("Final Showdown") is a truly worthy Icon of Sin fight, a dense urban adventure puzzle-box with monsters raining down around you as you try to figure out how to reach the boss—though it compromises with you a bit for the sake of sanity, as the bulk of the monsters spawn in the mountainous ring outside the playable space and then trickle in through teleporters, making the whole setup more manageable and satisfying.

 

Since I don't remember the original Herian maps, I can't say how much is the same or different about this megawad, though Dynamo's Cacoward writeup gives me the impression that they are fully re-envisioned and rebuilt. To me, the Cacoward writeup feels correct when it describes the maps as "the metropolis built over the ruins of the ancient city." And that feels so appropriate, because it's exactly what the maps themselves are portraying. The layers of history and heritage and folly that peel back as you explore the dying lands may be a by-product of how the maps are built over the top of older maps created in an era that now feels like ancient history for the Doom community. If so, it's genius, and it explains why there's nothing else that feels quite like Greenian. But even if you told me that the geometry is mostly the same, then I'd still think Beewen's work is much more than just a paintover. The music, the effects, the much more varied and evocative texturing, the distant and detailed horizons of each custom sky, all of it makes the megawad feel different—deep, expansive, endless.

 

When you put it all together, Greenian represents a long road. It's one of the most time-consuming megawads in recent memory and one of the most demanding in terms of patience, thoroughness, and observation, but it rewards you with the feeling that you've traveled that whole road, from one end of the world to the other, and stared its bleak reality in the face. There are many megawads steeped with in-game lore, but there will always be relatively few that make you wonder about what you're really looking at, and that make you feel like you're a part of the world in which they take place, rather than a visiting demigod using the player-character's eyes as a HUD. For that, Greenian lives on in my head in a way that its predecessor never did.

 

 

Relyctum by BeeWen

 

    

    

    

    

    

 

Most of what I said about level design in Greenian applies to Relyctum as well, though it's an entirely original work and not based on any other megawad. As with Greenian, almost every map in the megawad is huge, lengthy, and challenging to navigate, meaning that you'll spend quite a few hours dwelling in this massive beast, unraveling it one piece at a time, and building up the feeling of being on a single lengthy journey, rather than a feeling of reaching and conquering many separate destinations. 

 

Beewen is one of the key figures in now-classic Russian community mapsets like Sacrament, and I mainly know him for creating labyrinthine exploration maps that feel sorrowful, solemn, and isolated. This is true not only of Greenian, but also for Beewen's famous Sacrament map, "Controlled System," as well as the mapping and directorial work that he did for A.L.T.—each of these projects makes you feel like a guilty voyeur traveling in apocalyptic ruins, feeling both a calling to witness and remember the civilization that was lost and the regret of still being alive when everyone else is dead. Relyctum retains the labyrinthine exploration and the perpetual sense of isolation, but it trades in the sorrow and solemnity for something more fundamentally and classically Doomy. In contrast to the epic, Eternal Doom-esque tone of Greenian or the more personal and reflective mood of "Controlled System," Relyctum feels like a vast, heavy dungeon crawl, like if Sandy Petersen's Doom 2 maps gained sentience, began to grow and multiply via some sort of unholy architectural sporing, and kept evolving and ballooning outward until they became their own game.

 

One key difference between Greenian and Relyctum is that Relyctum uses only stock textures (and monsters), which is part of what makes it feel more classic. The entire megawad mainly emphasizes Doom 2's city and techbase textures, but the convoluted structures of each map are more abstract than realist, which (along with the opaqueness and mystery of the progression) is what calls Sandy's maps to mind so strongly. The relatively limited texture set is a strength here, because when used over such large spaces across so many maps, it causes all the individual settings to blend together into a single superstructure, where you can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins except for the intermission screens. This is actually really effective for the atmosphere of the mapset, because it emphasizes that feeling of the unending dungeon crawl. You don't have to get very far into the megawad before it all starts to feel like one interconnected sprawl, a single unfathomably huge metropolis that you can only keep going deeper into, no matter which direction you go. The heart of this world-city seems to be map 20 (which is titled "Clear," just like three of the four maps before it), which is my favorite map in the megawad and one of my favorite maps of the year. This is the map where the city-dungeon reaches perfect form, with towering and intricately detailed scenes and a dazzlingly complex layout. Once you pass map 20 and reach the final third of the megawad, the more hellish textures start to show as the city begins to merge with Hell's reality and become subsumed by it. This process happens dramatically fast, and because the metropolis itself has felt so titanic and alive, you really get the feeling of watching one god being swallowed by another, even larger and more powerful one. In the final few maps, the city itself has ceased to be recognizable.

 

The other big difference between the two Beewen megawads is that Relyctum has much higher monster counts on the whole. The combat in Relyctum is dense and relatively high-pressure, occasionally pushing into slaughter-lite territory, although I only remember it having a few of what I'd call combat puzzles—it's generally closer to heavy Plutonian brawls. It also rarely stops, except in moments when you've cleared out the areas you've already visited and are stuck on progression. The quiet and contemplative moments so common in Greenian are rarely present in this set, though that means that it offers a lot more of what many people see as pure Doom: bloody violence and tense tactical maneuvering.

 

Even so, it's definitely a slow burn; in a megawad that takes place on this kind of scale, the individual combat moments are just drops of water in an ocean, and the overall experience is something very different. The bigger picture is seen in the layouts—the way you loop around huge structures to come at them from different angles, geometry shifting to reveal new pieces of the puzzle each time, as you carve the maps out bit by bit. The bigger picture is "Where the fuck is this switch?" and "What the fuck did that switch do?", and the answer to both is just that you have to keep looking. It can be rough, but the megawad honestly might not offer the same ineffable, indifferent hostility or the same sense of harsh stoicism and hard-earned progress without those intricacies.

 

I do find that the combination of more aggressive combat and obscure progression is a bit more frustrating when you get stuck; with the slower pace of Greenian, the challenging progression points feel natural, whereas with Relyctum it often feels like hitting a wall when you'd rather just keep going. Greenian is more "my thing" in many ways. But I played Relyctum first, and it was a great experience too. Everything that makes Doom 2 an exceptional megawad—the tough, shell-pumping combat, the eldritch unraveling of reality, the cartoony exaggeration of The Video Game Experience, the eerieness of abstraction, and the strong sense of place in spite of that abstraction—is amplified in Relyctum, so those who find they have the patience to conquer the entire mountain will no doubt feel right at home.

 

Edited June 25, 2023 by Not Jabba