Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (rd reviews The Iron Forge)

[jazzmaster9]

Ayy nice to see Break Point on there :D

Thanks so much for the Silver Jabbawards, @Major Arlene lead this project so well and it was a blast collaborating with Her and the rest of the team on this.

[baja blast rd.]

Heaven Stroll by @Roofi

 

Heaven Stroll, along with RJD's Nensha, cannonball's Night on Doom Mountain, and Albatross's Beware of Falling Angels, are what I considered the best standalone maps from the 2022 cycle that didn't make the award tier (Silver and higher), based on what I had played at the time. Although honestly HMs were becoming awards even in 2022, and Nensha was featured in the 22 for '22. 

 

Roofi, whether it's works like "Ventose" (Deadly Standards 3 e3m4) or his 180mpv and Mayhem 2020 contributions, has stood out to me as one of the most imaginative working authors. It's not quite the Dobu Gabu Maru or Mouldy sort of creativity the word 'imaginative' might most evoke these days, which is characterized by this hyperdensity and hyperactivity of ideas -- a relentlessly rich layering of events and microdetails and backstories. It's more in the category of authors like Muumi or Xaser, which is a broader-strokes style characterized more by having unusually cool themes, settings, architectural constructs, and visual setpieces -- which are then supported by good smaller-scale designs and subtleties. Like Muumi and Xaser, I get the sense that Roofi draws on a lot of "real world" references for his ideas -- and even maps like "Ventose" that are far from realistic in their worldbuilding appear to be so creatively rich as to draw heavily from a mix of art or fiction or even daydreams.

 

Heaven Stroll, in depicting a small out of the way mountain resort (I think? lol) with a central lodge, is a meeting point of that design style and a thematic area he explored in a few of his very first Doom maps, which is a naturalistic woods theme with Doom's stock textures that reminds me a lot of a certain niche of early '00s slaughtermaps that includes Hell Revealed 2 and Kama Sutra. 

 

   

 

Heaven Stroll is presented as a very humbly scaled, cozily themed map, belonging to a style that would not be out of place in even the '90s -- it even vaguely resembles a myhouse.wad ;) -- but it has very deftly crafted architecture and polished texturing and a general seasonedness to the design that not very many authors had in their creative toolkits back in the earliest days of pwads. Roofi in particular is fond of using arch-like runs of foliage or other overhanging features, which loop over paths and interrupt lines of sight, in the process slicing up planes into richer scenes that change depending on where you're standing. There is a reason arches are so common in the visual arts. 

 

One of my favorite aesthetic things that Heaven Stroll does is grounding the early-'00s trope of STEPTOP-textured false-3D bridges -- which charming as it could be, could also look out of place or like an "advanced feature for its own sake" affectation -- in a basis of pseudorealistic design that suddenly has it making perfect sense visually. It looks totally natural to be able to stand on the awning of a cabin en route to a key. They are also used to let you navigate the second floor of the lodge, which crisscrosses over the first floor at one point. 

 

 

Heaven Stroll is a very brief map but is loaded with cool little design moves like that. Another of my favorite is how the central house has many doors with blue key strips but there's not a blue key to be found in the whole map. Instead, the blue key strips simply explain why you can't open certain purely decorative doors, but here's the thing: at least until you realize they are inert, they draw more attention to those doors existing (when you might otherwise tune them out as set dressing), and get you thinking about the supposed rooms on the other side, which can't actually exist because of Doom engine limitations but are now strongly implied, which helps make the house feel even more 3D than it is. That might not have been the consciously thought-out plan, but I've always felt "intentionality" unnecessary for subtleties like that to matter in criticism, because happy accidents are very much a thing and everyone's interpretation of every work is different. 

 

There's a lot of good Doomcute, and what I find interesting about it is that much of the Doomcute is very lo-fi, like indoor shrubs being rendered as blocky columns rather than anything more fine-tuned. That, combined with the frequent recurrences of it, causes much of the Doomcute to play more of a role in core theme-building than serving as those one-off concentrated bursts of detail, but there's also powerlines and a pool table and a sawmill, so it goes both ways. 

 

The inner house also has this secret wardrobe, which I'll let speak for itself. 

 

 

Heaven Stroll isn't the pure leisure map that the idyllic visuals and Nirvana cover MIDI might have you expecting, but it is also not very difficult or combat-oriented. One little amusing touch about it is how the initial turret enemies tend to occupy positions that look like fortifications, which has the campy and charming effect of making the lodge look like a zealously guarded military base. This meshes with setpieces that definitely make me think of Hell Revealed 2, with the way the tight interior spaces end up filling up with several hell nobles or revenants (with vile guardians). That isn't a lot, but it ends up reading as very "slaughtery" thanks to how snug these spaces are -- and as a result the combat evokes that early '00s era of slaughter, while going even further than Kama Sutra to ground it in pseudorealism. Almost every encounter ties into the aesthetic somehow, or draws attention to some architectural feature, often through slightly comical enemy placements.    

 

All in all, Heaven Stroll is a very good map, and it's supposedly a one-off from an aborted mapset. If there are maps in that project that are even half as interesting as this one, I would personally love to see that continued, but I'm not making any demands. :) 

[evil_scientist]

On 12/2/2023 at 9:32 PM, Not Jabba said:

Stuff I Really Liked by Newer Mappers:

 

@evil_scientist: Everything Is Going Crate

 

Sweet, thanks for the mention :D

[baja blast rd.]

Iron Forge by @Xaser and @Not Jabba

 

Iron Forge is a standalone Heretic map made by Xaser and Not Jabba, which naturally means that Not Jabba could not review it for this thread without raising some eyebrows. I have some light parenthetical descriptions for people who have no familiarity with Heretic (without being too bulky for those who know their stuff), so I hope some of you read this too. 

 

Xaser handled Iron Forge's layout and map design, which remakes a Dark Souls 2 level, likely explaining the high emphasis on inhospitable architecture. Just about every major combat zone -- and a couple of "no combat" zones too -- features some type of platforming or environmental hazard, or uses the lava to greatly curtail your movement and make the enemies that much more dangerous. This emphasis on narrower combat spaces -- picture a long ledge that is about as wide as a door, with a lava drop-off on one or both sides -- suits Heretic's monster design very well. Melee enemies and monsters with straight-line projectile attacks, which is a lot of Heretic's bestiary, become a lot more dangerous when the player can't run easy loops around everything.

 

  

 

Not Jabba handled the thing placement, and his approach reflects a good understanding of how to design to Heretic's strengths. This shows not only in the enemy placement, which regularly gets a lot of danger out of a modest enemy count, but also in the use of Heretic's items. There is a vicious early sandwich fight with a gang of saberclaws (fast, but not particularly sturdy melee enemies) on one side and weredragons (tanky, hard-hitting projectile enemies) on the other, which I don't mind spoiling because you won't see it coming anyway. :P You can get overwhelmed very quickly, but this fight is pretty much designed for you to quickly spam a bunch of time bombs (an inventory item that is like a grenade dropped in place) to fend off one side of the sandwich, while taking on the other with your weapon. The one very circleable arena in the entire map -- at least with respect to its core shape -- uses maulotaurs (Heretic's tanky cyberdemon analog, which has three attacks). One of their attacks is a powerful dashing charge that is easy enough to avoid but has this cool emergent effect of constantly moving the maulotaurs to the very edge of the arena, getting in the way of your circle-strafe lanes each time. (Okay there is one other very circleable arena but that is used for an amusing diversion where iron liches -- huge scary mask enemies of roughly miniboss strength that have multiple attacks -- use their tornado attack to pester you but inevitably send hapless minions hurtling into the air. Part of Doom's appeal is its more consistent undercurrent of humor -- but Heretic can be equally as funny.) Nearly every major setup really feels like it was the main idea behind its area all along, and *uses* the space rather than simply taking place in it. 

 

In one setup midway through Iron Forge, you're platforming on a knife-thin corkscrewing strip of iron in the middle of a lava pathway, and two disciples (flying robe-wearing wizards with a spreadshot attack) are released at you, which is terrifying. It's a very good setup to show off how the hellstaff (Heretic's plasma rifle lol) now has homing projectiles as per the Wayfarer mod's challenges, which allow you to take out the drifting disciples that otherwise might be a big pain to finish off. This platforming stretch has only a handful of enemies, and it's clear throughout how Not Jabba is very conscious of letting some areas breathe and serve more of an ambient role. 

 

 

 

Breaking up the combat with silence is a good, natural choice because Xaser's striking visual setpieces call for moments where you can slow down and appreciate the design, instead of constantly being preoccupied with survival. The overall look of Iron Forge is very appealing and plays off of Heretic's fantastic palette. My favorite color in Iron Forge is the cherry red, which is in the sky, more surprisingly in the lava falls, and less surprisingly in the opulent velour or marble or whatever material happens to be inset in temple facades. I also love the stained glass windows that glow a luminous blue, and the way this blue is the same color as the dragon claw orbs (an ammo pickup). The way I've described Xaser's design in the past is that he is a conceptually cohesive author -- yet he uses very different methods from the more dominant Scythe 2 style, which involves building the whole map around a limited palette of materials and detailing ideas. The way this plays out in Iron Forge is that most new areas introduce a new visual motif or type of material to the mix, while retaining a selection of some already established ones -- so it's naturally, it's not that "'90s beginner map" feeling of walking into a completely different map with every doorway you pass through. It's like the map's identity is created through the design of individual visual-concept setpieces, and is rooted in the emergence of how such areas play off of each other, rather than following a predetermined plan. The detail level in any given space tends to match the 'type' of the environment and its underlying character. Chapels and temples are inset with geometrically precise recurrences of stained glass windows, or are wrapped in interlacing sheets of baroque architecture, or are embroidered with other ornaments (which are usually done through texture choices rather than microdetail). Whereas the ruins, the claustrophobic iron torture gauntlets, and the precarious lava-worn places tend to be pretty bare, undecorated walls doing all the talking, which is something Xaser isn't shy about doing, and runs counter to the idea that you might want your maps to be decorated at the same consistent visual complexity everywhere. With the striking use of red and orange-red throughout, it's delighting that the map ends on this large fire construct that juts out of the exit of the Forge. Just about everything in the level is strongly suggested to be "human-made" rather than surreal, so this is the feather on the cap of a handful of constructs that establish the in-universe designer of this place as kind of a nutjob. 

 

 

 

In late 2018, when this map was released, the modern resurgence of Heretic interest was about to take off, but since then we also have The Wayfarer, Faithless Trilogy, UnBeliever, Quest for the Crystal Skulls, Sold Soul, Blasphemous Experiments, Quoth the Raven, and more, which means a lot of potential starting points if you want to get into the game. Try one of those or I'm going to morph you into a chicken.