Titles are hard, it seems I was insufficient in coming up with a decent reference to make for this subject. :(

I've been thinking a lot about caves recently, so I guess this is a thread for cave appreciation. Here are some caves that stick out in my mind. Speed of Doom Map01 has this small cave that the wad starts in, if you back up a bit you can get a peek at some of the slime-green sky through an opening. It's a really, really simple piece of work that I adore because... I guess it's just cute, but not "doomcute", if that makes sense. I have an unfinished map on this hard drive that takes pretty heavy inspiration from this room's design, except it's got a slime river and turns slaughter-y very quickly.   Abandon Map05 takes place entirely inside a massive black-grey-brown-green cave system, populated with all the monsters you can imagine, some greenery, and glowing green stalactites. The sheer scale really starts to get to me, the foreboding feeling of dropping into these massive spaces carved out of rock... and some of them will very shortly be filled to capacity with the usual suspects.   Scythe 2 Map26 - originally, I was going to go with Deus Vult's Torture Chamber caves as a pick for "hell cave" aesthetic, but in all honesty.... DV's caves suck when looked at from the perspective of actually having to trudge through them. They're cool to think about, as a network of tunnels carved out of rock with another horror waiting somewhere 5 stone steps ahead, but they're essentially hallways with beef and bone blocking your way. Scythe 2's hellish caves put the heat (lol) and pressure on the player, everything wants to drive you into a corner and put you out of your misery. They're a much more enticing pick for what it would be like to trudge your way through an actual space of hell. The crispiness of software rendering also does it a lot of favors.   Box of a Thousand Demons Map03's cave is being eaten by itself, or what's pooling below it. Copious amounts of lava, oddly symmetrical rock formations, techno/alien-slabs... it becomes a bit of an open-ended clusterfuck when everything wakes up.   Sunlust Maps 11-16 - or as I commonly refer to it, the cave episode. It's hard not to put these together after spending so much time with them recently, they have a lot of things that really make me tick. The flow of running through Cave Culture when you know the layout. The chaotic clean-out to prove you are truly "dangeresque". Creeping through Skania's ruin. The whole underground waterway + temple in Troglobite. Strength & Anger's, well.... strength & anger, expressed through stone. And to find lost antiques. It would not be far-fetched to include Map17 in my list as well, but I tend to think of it as a separate kind of thing.   Share some caves you found cool and/or interesting with me? Let's go spelunking together. :)