The DWmegawad Club plays: Sunlust

[Demon of the Well]

Map 16 -- Lost Antiques - 109% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Set in a huge temple of unspeakably ancient air at the summit of the mountain we've been climbing for the past several levels (notice that you can no longer see surrounding hills or the like in the outdoorsier areas), this is a brilliant level, a triumph in both its utilization of space and especially in its sense of pacing, which strikes me as being rather singular within the context of this mapset. The general story of Sunlust, of course, is discrete setpiece battles, yes? Well, while 'Lost Antiques' certainly fields its share of these, including a few that the player is locked into or cannot otherwise retreat from (the 'pincers' fight after the dropoff into the southern caves and the final claustrophobic onslaught come most readily to mind in this regard), it delivers much of its intense bloodshed in a less micromanaged way, and so is perhaps one of the most open-ended levels in the mapset in terms of playstyle, along with map 18 later on, also by Danne.

Some of the level's largest encounters, ala the huge horde of undead that bursts forth from its tomb to protect the red skull key, are situated not inside of self-contained arenas minutely designed to rigorously mandate a particular tactical approach, but rather in the context of a larger environment that the player is able to navigate more freely before, during, and after a given battle takes place. For the sake of clarity I suppose we might dub these encounters 'insets' or something similar--significant, detailed battles that are situated in a more open/generalized space, as opposed to 'setpieces', which derive much of their flavor from the specifics of the space where they occur. From a player perspective, the prime difference between fights like this RK battle and those that occur elsewhere in much of Sunlust is a much greater freedom of approach; since the battlefield is spacious, complex/irregular in arrangement (lots of architecture/topography to block line-of-sight with spiders/viles at the west end, but easier to outflank/outposition the horde via the stairs/raised landing at the east end), and, perhaps foremost, not somewhere we are required to stay, many alternative tactics open up to players with the situational awareness to spot them--for instance, several DWMC players mentioned choking off the horde by weaponizing the big lift to the upper temple. Of course, this IS Sunlust, and so Danne's not going to sit back and allow players to shamelessly take advantage of obvious exploits without a catch--hence the six sorcerers (on UV) who take up residence near the elevator at the outset of the above encounter--but there's a big difference in impact between utilizing a 'soft' barrier like this and actually physically constraining a player to a given space via bars or dead-drops or the like, in that enough ingenuity (or luck) can often overcome soft obstacles and put a different spin on the battle, whereas a hard lock-in narrows the range of possibilities as a means of enforcing a particular type of challenge (which is not necessarily a negative thing, mind you).

Another example of using a softer restriction to alter the tenor of combat in the context of a more open playspace is found in the upper level of the temple where I spent what must've been half of the FDA: this floor is an expansive space with lots of interconnection, with monsters arranged to spring in groups on fairly obvious triggers (like the backpack, SSG, etc.); the player is never locked into a given part of this layout, and so the challenge in gaining a foothold is not so much in navigating a specific series of fights in a specific way and specific order, but rather of finding a way to conquer the greater area with fairly limited means, which can be done in a wide variety of ways, from taking a careful austerity-conscious step-by-step approach to springing several ambushes at once and pitting them against each other. Again, there's a richer sense of flexibility here, beyond the 'stage select' flavor that many of the set's other levels take, allowing the player some choice of itinerary in tackling what are essentially linear strings of self-contained battles. Incidentally, after watching the FDA it seems I'll have to amend my earlier comment about hardly ever using the berserk pack for anything in Sunlust, looks like I went Streets of Rage on a gang of skeletons up here--just one possible approach among many to dealing with them.

As aforesaid, though, 'Lost Antiques' does still field its share of the signature Sunlust setpieces, which serve as intense action climaxes which play out at measured intervals in the progression. If it sounds like I've been dumping on this style of encounter above, it was not my intention--sometimes you need to make a player take his/her medicine whether they like it or not, and doing this naturally entails removing the possibility for them to do whatever they wish whenever they wish. The claustrophobic BFG-fest in the subterranean sanctuary at the end of the level, which goes from 0 to 100mph in literally an eyeblink (and that acceleration taking place in something that's probably more or less the size of your own garage), works entirely because it's so frantic and cannot be simply escaped from; in this case tightly controlling the situation allows for an encounter that delivers a visceral shot of adrenaline to make a satisfying capper to an epic level, except the real capper is the unexpected sneak peak of the strange dimension that hosts the next block of levels. This is what I meant when I spoke of pacing earlier--what really appeals to me about this level is the way it comfortably marries more open-ended, exploratory (yet still quite bloody/violent) play with these challenge-oriented setpieces in the context of an environment where both types of experience seem equally credible, and so alternating between the two at various points in the overall progression feels quite natural. The vast majority of Sunlust is a feast for the eyes in a presentation sense, of course, but there's a cinematic quality to the sights and varying experiences on offer here that has really cemented 'Lost Antiques' in my mind as one of the set's highlights. A lot of what I love about Doom is neatly encapsulated here, many thanks to Danne for bringing it into the world.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 17 -- The Womb - 103% Kills / 66% Secrets - FDA
As you step through the gate in heart of the temple sanctuary, the unnatural stillness of the crisp night air gives way to fetid damp, stultifying warmth, and the rich cloying coppertone scent of raw meat. You can barely see anything in the sudden enveloping darkness, but you sense a deep pulse thrumming irregularly all around you, like the fevered murmur of a titan heart. As your eyes begin to adjust to the gloom, you see an incarnadine cave complex stretching out before you, glistening and contracting queasily, a quivering wonderland in horsemince tartare. There is a vague sense of unwholesome light in the distance, beckoning, you think, from regions external. The mandala of the otherrealm is opening, but before you can make your mark upon the world, first you must be born unto it.

There is relatively little subtlety at play in this short level; its intentions are clear and its methods as uniform as its lurid steak-velour texture scheme: you will be smothered by Hell's children in a selection of tight, clammy spaces, nothing more and nothing less. Each of the three main setpiece fights (essentially the only real fights in this case) is built upon a packed swarm of powerful hellspawn into a limited playing field that it is very easy to lose control of; in that sense it maybe plays a little more like something we'd expect out of Danne, but clearly Ribbiks knows how to go for all-out offense as well when he feels the need. Speaking of, the willingness to commit to total offense is more key to player survival here than in past maps, particularly in the third fight, where the only way to avoid a quick death is to immediately carve yourself a safe(r) place to stand out of the last cyberdemon's field of vision, and the only way to avoid death via empty clip a few moments later is to strike a decisive blow against the last brood of arch-viles at more or less the very moment of their appearance (letting them resurrect just a few bodies when cell ammo is about to run out would be disastrous in these constricted environs). There is still something of a more cerebral aspect at play here in little tricks that can (or even must) be used to help you gain an edge in space management, ala engineering an infighting scenario between the first cyberdemon and his baron cohorts by micromanaging rocket splash in the opening instants of the fight, but generally speaking these encounters call much more urgently for action, rather than for thought. The strange crusher-puzzle setup with the collection of lurking arch-viles that serves as a preamble to the first real fight is something of an elephant in the room here, of course, but it's more a brief novelty than a significant piece of gameplay, something that's extremely easy to manage as soon as you understand the gimmick, and a gimmick that monster pathing AI will inevitably obligingly demonstrate for you sooner rather than later, given the relatively small size of the battleground.

Another thing that struck me here is just how powerful the secrets are, even though their potential impact on actual choreography is fairly limited, which speaks to just how carefully thing-balance has been planned out in these maps (at least on UV). The early BFG acts mainly as a limited-use panic button in the first big fight, and perhaps lends you a bit of extra ammo slack in the later fights if you can save its battery for long enough, allowing you just a little more leeway that can nevertheless make all the difference. The secret backpack, likewise, seems insignificant until the end, where it can be the difference between taking 300 cells or 400+ cells into the final onslaught. The green armor (which I didn't find in the FDA) likewise allows you to hold up better under a bit of the extra 'enthusiastic' group-hugging you are likely to encounter in the final fight, which again can easily be the difference between a sloppy success and a brutal failure (in my case, I was just lucky I decided not to be too item-stingy and topped myself off with a soulsphere I'd managed to save earlier on before going in there).

Something I'm interested in: I've read that at least one person adamantly believes that this level is significantly more difficult on the HMP skill setting than it is on the UV setting, particularly where the third fight is concerned. I've gotta ask, what's so fundamentally different between the two settings that this might be the case?

[Cynical]

The Cyberdemon in the fight with the non-secret BFG is replaced with about 50,000 more Barons on HMP, removing the possibility of infighting.

(I think that's actually the second fight in your nomenclature, though).

[Demon of the Well]

Yes, rereading the thread I see I misunderstood which fight you were talking about at first. Well, replacing the cyberdemon with a bunch of barons in that second fight seems to me like it's as liable to be more of a lateral shift than a marked step up or down. With no cyb there's no infighting, it's true, but having the nerve and know-how to effectively provoke infighting in that scenario at a moment's notice and with relatively little collateral damage is arguably a little bit more of an 'advanced' technique (hence appearing on the UV skill setting), whereas the fight with just Barons is a more straightforward matter of holding down the trigger and dodging (I've also read there is more ammo to work with on HMP). That being said, in a hypothetical case where the player is stuck in a bad health/ammo situation from the outset in that fight (perhaps by coming in from a bad save after narrowly surviving the previous fight, which is perhaps a situation more likely to befall a non-UV player), I guess I could see where it could pan out to be harder to surmount than the UV setup, since without infighting the Barons will not relent and will be difficult to liquidate without a lot of DPS potential on the player's part.

I suppose it's a matter of The Bloat versus The Adversary, then, simply a case of what kind of fight a given player is more comfortable with.

[Cynical]

The problem I have with the HMP setup is that the monster density is FAR higher than on the UV setup -- to the point where space is at a real premium and just holding down Mouse 1 with the rocket launcher won't even begin to make a dent in the tide of noble flesh before it corners you and kills you -- and, unless you know the one exact tactic that will keep you alive in the fight (which is somewhat unintuitive), you're forced to try to punch through a weak spot in the wall once it closes in with a single BFG shot (there's no more cells on HMP than on UV), which is a very low percentage tactic.

With the UV setup, it's easy to get everything pissed at Mr. Cyberdemon, flip the switch and leave the area while it's all still infighting, wait for the infighting to end, and then kill the Cyberdemon from the other side, where you've got all the room you could ever want.

[baja blast rd.]

Map 17 -- The Womb - 103% Kills / 66% Secrets - FDA

I predicted four deaths. O_o

[Demonologist]

This guy's unkillable, nevermind. A worthy target audience for misanthropic sadistic experiments.

[Ribbiks]

heh yah, dotw has an almost suspiciously keen sense of how a trap is going to play out. the "here's the basic idea of this encounter before you get started" thing has been a pretty core part of my mapping, but it still surprises me that nothing manages to surprise this guy :p

anyways yah, thanks for the writeups, been enjoying reading them. m17 and m18 are probably my favorite maps in the set to go back and replay occasionally. as a fun aside, m17 was "speed-mapped" in a sense: made the entire thing in a day (though it took roughly the entire day -.-), and the only ideas I really had going in was "redrock, blood, and the silly AV crusher gimmick." credit to danne for the tex scheme, m17 was based on m18, which was completed earlier. I still like the crusher gimmick, even if at it's worst it's slightly tedious. The idea of using the environment to kill enemies (an idea revisited in the ultra-obscure secret area in m30) is fun to me, and was partially inspired by a map in... chillax maybe? or maybe it was dark tartarus, that had a similar cyberdreams-style gimmick of luring cybs into a death zone.

[dobu gabu maru]

Yup, Demon's playstyle is immaculate; it's borderline artistry how he deduces and escapes from danger.

[Demon of the Well]

^^When dealing with certain mappers, I always try to plan for the worst. Don't worry though, my streak of luck comes to an end here pretty soon (and how!).

Map 18 -- Mu Cephei - 130% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA (complevel -1)
Certainly the closest thing that Sunlust has to a genuine sandbox map, Mu Cephei is a fratricidal romp through an unseemly landscape of flesh and poisonous vernix, where the very ground is monstrously pregnant with evil just clamoring to be born. The openness and freedom of movement that defined several areas in 'Lost Antiques' is the order of the day here, with only the final fight in the pit at the center of the map being a one-way ticket until its completion (the toxoplasmic megasphere cave is not as difficult to simply escape from as it might initially appear, provided you act quickly). Monsters are staged in waves/pockets which instantly erupt from the ground when the player draws near; while with care, awareness, and perhaps a well-informed route it's probably possible to treat this map as a downright leisurely safari tour, on a blind playthrough it's far more likely that you'll end up waking up half the map (or more!) while you dash around trying to collect enough good ammo to efficiently beat back the ever-growing mob, which of course opens the door to all manner of highly organic/plastic infighting and crowdshaping scenarios, with the assorted ground-bound cyberdemons making for some excellent unwilling allies. Naturally, the hellspawn tend to appear in great numbers (the monstercount of 400+ blows that of all previous maps out of the water), but overall monster density is not too oppressively high given the amount of room to roam you enjoy. Also worth noting that, as is the case with pretty much every Sunlust map with a hefty bodycount, a huge chunk of the actual population is comprised of fodder monsters, in this case the contents of the squalid imp-hive where the yellow skull is found.

From a progression standpoint, the sandboxy flavor here comes from the key situation, where an interactive, uh, 'growth' locked by all six standard keys secures the exit (which is located in a different corner of the map, oddly). Three of these are actually nested in the last frantic pitfight, though, so for the most part it's a classic case of romping around to collect the traditional 3-key set in any order you please, which again plays to the loosely structured, horde-based combat, where the primary tactical consideration is generally which of the small side-area fights to do first (the imp-hive, the dais in the poison pond, the beheaded cyberdemon hill, etc.) and how, as having any of the skull keys will allow you access to the BFG, provided you can outlast its coven of sorcerous guardians. An interesting detail is that the BFG is technically totally optional to proper progression, but the final battle doesn't seem realistically survivable to me without it, and so for all practical intents and purposes it's an item you must secure if you intend to be the pick of the litter. Once again, I suppose this could be interpreted as a design flaw--a bit of 'false' non-linearity, perhaps--but I myself don't subscribe to the idea that it should be impossible for the player to fuck himself by failing to explore thoroughly (if actual physical progression can be irretrievably broken that's another matter, of course), so I see no problem. One minor gripe I do have here, though, is the use of incidental pools of damaging liquid on high-traffic patches of ground. This is something Ribbiks does fairly often, and so I sort of expect it from him as a form of 'positioning tax' (although he occasionally takes it too far as well, IMO), but it's less common for Danne, and doesn't seem like it really belongs in this map. What makes 'Mu Cephei' stand out from pretty much every other map in the set is that, in contrast to their often controlling/restricting nature, it's unabashedly a sort of holiday where you're allowed to run around totally wild and free to your heart's content, and putting little bits of spite-damage out in the middle of your running lanes works against that.

Aesthetically this is also one of the most singular maps in the set, incidentally, almost wholly through virtue of color and texture, with bits of glow-sector here and there for zest. In terms of shape and topography it's an instantly recognizable Dannescape (perhaps slightly reduced in scale, in line with the general tendency Sunlust has shown to focus mostly on short-to-medium-length maps), and the gradual undulations in the topography serve the visuals as well as they do the gameplay. I'm not quite sure about the prevalence of sandstone masonry in the exit corner of the map (having one part of the map textured very differently from all the rest is another subtly Sunderesque design trait, incidentally), but overall the visuals are striking enough in their relative simplicity to suit the more 'free-play' combat nicely. Also, I find those weird mango-pomegranate torches strangely fascinating. Oh, and I liked the BGM selection, as well.

It doesn't surprise me to see Ribbiks say he replays this map just for fun on occasion, it's quite enjoyable and a much-welcome change of pace in the mapset. I do enjoy a challenge, but I also enjoy being able to feel like an empowered badass on occasion, and this map ably delivers that sort of experience. I reckon it's the best/most memorable of Sunlust's breather maps (and it has a few of those), easily.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 19 -- Blood Geometry - 110% Kills / No secrets - FDA, 5 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)
Elysian Blaze reference, perchance?

This is a rough one, a smorgasboard of several of Ribbiks' nastier tendencies. Whereas 'The Womb' just goes straight for the jugular and is thus pretty much a straight slugfest, 'Blood Geometry' blends a stressful, austerity-based pistol-start with a selection of crowd-control scenarios ranging from the relatively simple (the plasma gun/red key yard) to the devastatingly brutal (the final battle), and also fields what will surely be remembered as one of the mapset's signature battles in years to come, the struggle against the six elder blood-monks in the central steeple.

A more artifice-based take on the fleshy red theme of the previous two maps, here we see Ribbiks playing more with spindly gothic towers emphasizing the vertical element of scenery (lots of height change in the player's position over the course of the map, incidentally, although most fights are essentially limited to one practical plane) and oddly tessellated layerings and formations of masonry, in contrast to the whispy, swirling, not-quite-organic curvature of many of his other recent maps. I was most immediately reminded of his fine collab map 29 with Tourniquet in Nova II, come to think of it, although that one is significantly gloomier and more downbeat, whereas this one's relatively bright lighting and determined BGM lend it an air of a climactic battle. Instead of the odd sandstone bracing from parts of 'Mu Cephei', there's some sort of palestone composite shot through a lot of the structures here (along with the usual dark metal trim), along with a few banks of tanned hides here and there; a very similar overall color scheme to map 18, but I think the combo is smoother here, perhaps a function of how anonymous the light 'stone' (if it's even stone) texture is. Dropping down into the final area, where this texture dominates and the architecture and ceiling detail take on some odd 'geode' formations, I was left with the impression that the visuals were intended to put one in mind of being inside a huge cross-section of osseous tissue (with a marrow comprised of pure EVIL, of course), in contrast to the dominant emphasis on flesh and blood and bile for most of the rest of this thematic block. All told, a compelling presentation once again, though I do find myself wondering what it might've looked like with a different, darker sky--the ruby-red sky is a few shades away from the fleshy melon-pink that dominates in map 18, but here it blends with the crimson stone walls and the like to the point that a bit more contrast might've helped the towers and such 'pop' more, as the expression goes.

Right, so the main thing to talk about with this map's action is of course the central steeple fight, a very creative encounter that I reckon is likely to be referenced in future WADs. Most of the map has an undercurrent theme of perched 'overlord' enemies who immeasurably complicate what would otherwise be fairly manageable scenarios (the cyberdemon mercilessly surveying the starting landing is the single cruelest of these, but we also have the vile-twins in that same area and the knights who swarm the balcony over the RK yard), but the concept of being oppressed by overlooking evil while having to multitask on other fronts is really brought to the fore here via the device of the six arch-viles who appear and disappear in rhythm, alternately denying you the use of one side or the other of the steeple as you try to beat back the horde of hellish parishioners advancing from the far side of the chamber. It's as novel as it is tricky, but by dint of occupying pride of place (and rightfully so) in the map, the nature of the encounter is also telegraphed aeons in advance, giving you the chance to sit back and make a plan before the furor begins, which is why in the FDA you'll see me staring vacuously at the setup for years at a stretch, trying to get the timing down. Planning paid off in this case, I was able to soundly defeat the encounter by creating a safezone for myself by eliminating some of the monks as quickly as possible, after which the fight is just a matter of stemming the tide. Interesting to hear how effective a blitzkrieg strategy of launching an all-out assault on the key's sanctuary and then camping out there is on HMP; I think I'd have screwed it all up if I'd tried the same thing on UV, thanks to the absence of a BFG (which this level is pretty notable for not having, incidentally). A really fun and surprisingly manageable encounter, this, and of course a concept that's going to be revisited later.

So......those 5 deaths. Well, they are all in the final fight, which launches a multi-front assault on the player while offering him/her a diabolically limited amount of movement space. The encounters in 'The Womb' were even more claustrophobic than this, to whit, but the key difference is that in that map you had a BFG, whereas in this one you've just got rockets and a plasma rifle, which makes the Baron Brotherhood in particular vastly more intimidating than it otherwise would be--you simply cannot muster the DPS to realistically win with a bolthole strategy in this fight (and believe me, I tried), and so you've got to repeatedly juke the colliding crowds until the revenant/imp cloister finally clears out enough for you to launch a decisive artillery barrage from there. As for my experience, I feel okay about the 2-3 deaths which are exploratory experiments, but the 4th sees me choke and repeat exactly the same mistake from the 1st death (where I almost pulled it off, agonizingly!), and the 5th was just a flat-out stupid idea that anyone with half a brain could've seen just wasn't going to work without a BFG. In the interest of tactical analysis for those who like to read about the minutia of fights and stuff, I think the core mistake I made in most of my deaths here was over-prioritizing the Barons as targets (which speaks to how psychologically intimidating these bruisers, so often treated as laughingstocks in modern popular parlance, can be when you can't just nuke them with a BFG or jackrabbit away from them all fucking feisty and fancy-free); instead of trying to pound through them I should've been targeting the other fronts of monsters instead, which basically would have let me establish a tenable position to fight from earlier in the encounter. Instead, I repeatedly misjudged the enemy offensive (notice that in pretty much every case I start shooting at the Barons first and foremost), and so was repeatedly cornered and brutalized.

Pretty tight, demanding stuff. It's at this point I felt that the mapset was starting to really show its hand, and so this is where I started using occasional saves, I think the very first one here was prompted by my not wanting to sweat through the rigorous, stressful austerity of the opening battle in this one a second time in the likely event of my forthcoming demise. Ironically, the first half or so of E3 turns out to be fairly chill, but you can thank this unearthly piece of Geometry for being the first trial to really start drawing some serious blood.

[Ribbiks]

Demon of the Well said:

Elysian Blaze reference, perchance?

correct. the astute doomguy will notice a smorgasbord of various media references in our mapnames, at varying levels of hipster esoteric-ness :D

very nice that you did the "intended" strat for the central fight on a first attempt. A few other players seemed to settle on bumrushing the YSK and camping that little outdoor nook, fine by me. the idea behind the final fight was to clear imps first, then rev/caco, eventually taking refuge in the imp box once all the skeletons are done wandering in. if you find yourself with rockets to spare going into it you noticed you can clear some of the imps out ahead of time, makes it a bit easier. one of my favorite tropes in slaughter map design is when the least dangerous enemies become the highest priority because they're the easiest way to carve out some room to maneuver.

[baja blast rd.]

What texture pack did the tan cubes in map19 come from? I have a vague idea for a map that might use them.

Which I'm afraid of, because mapping is so draining. It feels almost sacrificial.

[Ribbiks]

not sure from where they originated, but I found them in SoD. Interestingly they were part of a set of "flesh-techbase" textures: startan and various grids recolored with the classic doom-flesh tans and pinks. most of them were horrible to use, but with enough fiddling I was eventually happy with the tan cube (which I've amusingly heard interpreted as sandstone, which makes sense).

[kmxexii]

Ribbiks said:

(which I've amusingly heard interpreted as sandstone, which makes sense).

Lol whoops

[Demon of the Well]

Map 20 -- Inverti in Darkness - 103% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 6 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)
This is a rough one, a smorgasboard of several of Ribbiks' nastier tendencies..... Wait, is there an echo in here?

Evidently a partially remodeled thematic holdover from the 'ruins' episode earlier in the game, 'Inverti in Darkness' is a grim, sardonic affair, holding the distinction of being one of the biggest difficulty spikes in a mapset already renowned for being tough. As is so often the case with these things, a lot of the impact is probably psychological: aesthetically it's very foreboding and uninviting (in a good way, I mean) with its pervasive dirty gloom and vistas of places where bad things are sure to happen, with an abrasive midi en tow (this is NOT such a good thing--I think I got tired of this piece after all of 90 seconds and IDMUS'd to map 14's track instead), and just from what you can infer from simply looking around you from the starting point you can tell that you've got a lot of hard, hard work to do. Now, in hindsight, it occurs to me that the level's difficulty progression is heavily frontloaded, and with foreknowledge and/or the luck to find a couple of key secrets (particularly the V-sphere in the eastern sludgefall) a lot of the second half of the level--post RK altar and onwards, let's say--is much less stressful to tear through than what preceded it, especially considering that a lot of that second half is completely optional (again, the stuff related to the red altar) and probably superfluous in terms of the rewards it confers for someone who has developed a sound plan for conquering the final battle. That first half, though.....

Like a nightmarish echo of map 19's opening festivities, here the player begins in an unenviable situation in the midst of a complex crossfire that eliminates any hope of comfort until you can significantly thin the enemy presence in the area, easier said than done given how limited ammo and other resources are with respect to the amount of demonic HP you're up against. The real trouble in the early going this time isn't so much the perched cyberdemon (though he is fiendishly placed to be able to kill you from miles away later on in the progression if you ever get too careless and forget about him) as it is the platoons of commandos, who will strip away health at an alarming rate if not dealt with effectively, a ploy all the more cruel because they enter the fray at around the same time as a handful of pain elementals, who at all costs cannot be allowed to propagate any significant number of lost souls--the early ammo situation just simply can't support this outcome. I made heavy use of infighting and collected all of the scattered ammo around the starting terraces, and still ended up entering the rocket launcher's quarry with a whopping 2 shells and 0 bullets, or something like that. Granted, this situation emerged partially from my decision to plink away at the pair of arch-viles I'd inadvertently released down there from the relative safety of the ledges above, but I don't suppose dropping down there with more shells but with those two still waiting the wings would've had any better an outcome. The rub is that there's so much shit flying at you in key areas that you realistically need to spend some ammo to eliminate at least a few key snipers if you're going to get anything done, but you're not really equipped for the task--bullets disappear fast given your high-HP targets, and of course the SSG's great weakness is that it's largely ineffective at longer ranges and from certain sharp vertical angles. I found myself pining for a basic pump-action shotgun, of all things. In Sunlust! Oh, the inhumanity...

If you are resourceful enough to make it out of the RL pit your ammo momentum will be on the upswing (plenty of rockets and shells in the map from there on out), and you'll have the choice of making a detour to the exit tower to gather additional supplies or continuing to the abyssal crypt to the west. My decision to check out the 'Exit' tower first was ultimately ill-fated, as I was killed versus what KMX has memorably dubbed the 'revenant clowncar moment' while wielding only the rocket launcher. Point of fact, I reckon this battle is very winnable using only the RL, but I messed up and was thrown by an arch-vile attack directly on top of the nearby berserk pack, the resultant weapon-switch time snafu resulting in my demise. Nevertheless, some good did come of the venture, as I found the V-sphere which would prove instrumental in a later gambit, but for in light of this first rebuke I opted to try my hand at the other fork of the path. A most fateful decision.

The aforementioned crypt to the west is pure evil, plain and simple; I guarantee you that if you employed a cutting bureau to do the pertinent research, you would find that the number of reported births of two-headed calves, of infants born with cauls over their faces, of stigmata and ghost sightings, and of general unrest in psychiatric wards the world over would've all multiplied exponentially on the night that Ribbiks finished this area. It begins with a slow-burn trial of gradually clearing out the mausoleum floor as the tombs burst open one by one; a simple idea, this, either you eventually panic and probably die, or you don't panic and probably don't die. This process is arguably a mite tedious, but I appreciate it for the bit of psychological warfare it represents--trying to goad you into moving faster and choking at every turn--which nicely sets up the Total Soul Rape that follows at the segment's conclusion. I will admit flat out that I don't really see any one strategy for reliably surviving the insane arch-vile/cyberdemon horror scenario that ensues when the westernmost tombs open, and I feel like I got out of there (after 5 deaths) as much based on luck and raw reflex than as a function of my general approach. Going for the BFG from the outset seems to be a death-sentence, and I did have some limited success with the RL-based strategy I started using on the third attempt (which I essentially had in the bag, incidentally, before totally fucking CHOKING against the cyb and the last couple of nobles), but any way you slice it the execution of whatever approach you adopt is going to be really, really tough. Running away from this one is also impractical to the point of impossibility by dint of the switchhit + meatshield combo used as a locking mechanism, and since you can't leave the area without triggering the last onslaught once you've entered, I'm not sure how viable trying to use the V-sphere is, either.

Make it out of there, though, and you're over the hump. Excepting the final fight, later encounters mostly take place in familiar locations (which by this point will be open ground you can turn to your advantage rather than intractable sniper hotbeds) or those where you're afforded much more readily accessible safezones (even the cyberdemon artillery crew beyond the red gate disappears once you've mustered the courage to rush their position). While some assorted moments of ill-will naturally remain--the damaging ooze pools beyond the red gate are a good example of a case where Ribbiks seems to have included these for literally no other reason than pure spite--at this point it's nevertheless much easier to feel like you've some measure of control over your fate, rather than a helpless ragdoll in the author's sadistic hands. Resource and ammo management remains a factor--got to be careful how you choose to spend cells versus the cacoswarm, etc.--but this aspect of play eases up as well. Indeed, the whole point of the RK sidequest is to afford you with a modest surplus of powerups to take into the final battle, though as aforesaid if you're smart you may not even need it. The opposition in the exit tower is much more easily quelled with the BFG in hand, and the final fight, while dangerous (the warping platoons of chaingunners are probably the nastiest jab), ought to seem like Salad Days after the violation of mind, body, and soul that was the western crypt. Figuring I was on the homestretch, I opted to use the V-sphere I'd found earlier for a blind charge of this last challenge, and in this case at least things went well for me. How 'bout that final BFG shot? :D

Exhausting and expansive, this makes for a worthy conclusion to the second episode, and is easily one of the stiffest challenges in the game. I know that I for one am definitely suffering a lot more PTSD from the crypt here than I am from anything in the much-vaunted map 29, at any rate!

[Ribbiks]

ahh yes. this one is incredibly harsh. there are a few sections I'd call arguably luck-based (or "twitch-dependent" might also be appropriate), the western BFG room, and the 4-cyb switch post caco swarm. I figured if there was any map where such dickery would ever be thematically acceptable it would be this one. if I were to change anything about this one though I would probably have the doors in the western area open several at a time, and perhaps I'd deny the ability for the player to cheese-kill the block of HKs before the RL encounter, but at least you played it as intended :). the bgm choice for this one was rather unpopular, but ohwell, I love the fft soundtrack, and I thought the oppressiveness of the track was fitting.

just for funsies, here's the first version of the map: https://www.mediafire.com/?bs3hlqnfukxdg1h

that link includes a demo I recorded, partially in response to repeated complaints about the BFG room. it was rather annoying to play though, actually, because the map had so little ammo at that point, even by my standards :p

[Demon of the Well]

Map 21 -- Entering Aquatic Desert - 110% Kills / 75% Kills - FDA, 1 death (-complevel 1)
Had a good time with this one. I think this is one of the more entertaining FDAs in the playthrough, incidentally, lots of wild and woolly stuff happening (read: me failing horribly yet somehow making it work), I am proud of the intuition I showed with the spiderdemon telefrag. Also, the first/failed attempt would make a cool idle/startup demo, I reckon, if a mite long for the form.

I guess you'd call this a 'breather map'--really, the first several levels of this final episode sort of feel that way--though I suppose that impression elides largely from being the followup to the axe-murderer that is map 20 (to use Steve's terminology), as it certainly doesn't lack for action. Following the characteristic Sunlust template of forking paths of discrete setpiece encounters, the major twist to this level is apparently that your initial route choice affects your final weapon loadout (or the 'extra info' textfile says something to that effect, anyway), although this didn't seem clear to me as I was playing.....it looked to me more like the path to the red key (and thus the exit) can be accessed with either the yellow or the blue key, each of which also grants access to a bonus weapon for your arsenal. As is my wont, I opted to cover all of the ground available to me, and so I ended up with both early keys and both bonus weapons. It wasn't until after playing that I read in the textfile that the BK route supposedly involved getting a BFG, but I never found one (maybe it was in some really obvious secret I missed?), and at no point did I ever feel like I needed one, and so I suspect there was a lot going on conceptually with this map that I just failed to perceive. All the same, I felt it flowed pretty naturally while I was playing, and it's interesting how many discrete and totally different/separate fights are crammed into what is really a rather small space (as the crow flies, anyway) without much in the way of reuse of space (basically just extra monsters on the upper walkways that lead to the three key-locked switches at a couple of points).

Speaking of, there was no fight here that I didn't like, seemed to be a good deal of variety on offer given that every battle is based without fail on close-quarters combat. The secret trooper/vile rave-rave-rave bit is perhaps the single most memorable, but I also quite liked the nifty telefrag solution to the spiderdemon/imp Mexican hat-dance yard, and the flexibility of the cacodemon/PE ambush in the YK area which is invited by the easily accessible escape teleporter and the plethora of windows in the main building. Also neat how the spiderdemon room and the cyberdemon canal seem like they were designed to work equally well as standalone encounters or as a larger complementary scenario, that's fairly rare for this mapset, where most marquee battles take place in relative isolation.

Aesthetically, it also suits my sensibilities pretty well. There's a lot of light contrast at play between the thick darkness in the outer areas (with the stylized conceit that the main building is a source of phantom luminescence, as the interiors are generally brighter than the relatively mood-litten outer yards under the clear starry sky), and I've always been more disposed towards 'cold' color palettes, ala the black/grey/blue scheme at work here, than very warm/saturate approaches (ala your traditional ruby-red/fire-orange hellscape, for example). The BGM's really cool, too, Stewboy does it again, surprising no one. The general theme, notably, is very much alike the 'somnolent sea fortress' maps from much earlier in the set, and I do mean VERY much alike. There are relevant differences in design and mood, of course--it's darker outside in this one, and the inclusion of polished checkerboard tile and some extra glowing tech elements add a sort of neo-baroque flavor in contrast to the more medieval/fantasy flavor of those earlier maps--but nevertheless I think we'd be remiss to overlook that, in appearance at least, this map really looks like it has lost its intended place. This is one aspect where I think the third episode of Sunlust loses a step on the second (which I had little but praise for): outside of the green/void mini-block near the end, it seems much more thematically scattershot. Again, explicit story/narrative are not priorities for this mapset, and individually the E3 maps continue to look pretty cool as a generality, but....well, I guess the analogy I'd make is that the first two episodes feel like the A side and B side of an album, and then E3 is a bunch of rerelease bonus tracks tacked on at the end, if that makes any sense. On point, though, I suppose this cosmetic unevenness could be viewed as an acceptable side-effect of an overall improvement in the finished product--the earlier version of Sunlust had a sort of snow/glacier cluster which preceded the green/void cluster initially, more in line with the thematic pacing of the earlier episodes, but it seems this snowy segment did not fare well under the rigors of QC/testing/public feedback, and so much of it ended up gutted or discarded and replaced with new bits and bobs which now comprise the rather polyglot first half of the episode.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 22 -- Black Rabbit - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA (complevel -1)
If you don't know what the title refers to, kids, ask your big sister (or even your mom, if you're brave enough). Also: troll mode engage!

....by which I mean to say that I more or less broke this map (the RL fight in particular) in pursuit of novelty. Many of the DWMC players expressed some variant of the sentiment that 'Black Rabbit', while reasonable enough on its own merits, fails to make much of an impression in the context of the mapset as a whole, and I reckon I more or less agree, I believe the only reason I've retained as much specific memory of it as I have is due to my getting up to shenanigans during the actual playthrough. The reason for this is pretty cut and dry, methinks: to be frank, there are a lot of other maps in Sunlust that are arranged in just the same way and that have the just the same flow (e.g. bilinear forking progression, etc.) as this one, while also having some other feature or features that distinguish them from their broadly similar brethren--the fleshy theme and claustrophobia of 'The Womb', the highly memorable steeple setpiece in 'Blood Geometry', the cyberdemon primer of 'Oneira', the air of mystery and buried secrets in 'Troglobite', etc.--whereas 'Black Rabbit' seems to feature no particularly pronounced gameplay gimmick, no unusually brutal or complex encounters, and like map 21 before it, a visual theme that recalls an earlier part of the game.

As aforesaid, battles here, while sensible enough in execution, feel fairly rote at this point in the mapset. It seems that the general pacing of the map was intended to extend the 'breather' period that began in map 21, but I'm not entirely sure it's to the map's benefit; map 21 feels like a change of pace by dint of immediately following the sadistic map 20, and map 23, which is also on the easy side by Sunlust's general standards, features much more of a pronounced gimmick/concept to build its slower-paced gameplay around. Just about everything here, by contrast, is something you've seen elsewhere before--a cacoswarm, crowd-moshing with limited space, a few perched viles and another perched cyb for selective area denial, and so on. Also featured is yet another relatively slow-accelerating, low-resource pistol-start where pacifistic projectile-judo is a prime tactic; I was becoming somewhat tired of the predictable repetition of this particular trope at this point in the mapset, which probably informed my unwillingness to cooperate with the mapper's vision later on in the map. So, in the FDA you'll see me poking around the edges of the play area and such, looking for ways to escape and exploit. Typical for Sunlust, most of the scenarios are tidy and firmly controlled, but obvious vulnerabilities in the placement of important trigger lines in the RL fight, which is supposed to take the form of a frantic noble-rush with deadly overlooking artillery, means that it can be cheesed with very little real risk, interesting since the first 'secret' step in doing so (parkouring to the SSG ledge out of the berserk secret) is clearly part of the level's proper design. Ammo and momentum preserved here allowed me to blow through the rest of the map with relatively little difficulty, although it seemed fairly obvious that one wrinkle of a more standard playthrough of the level would be that doing the BK part of the level is probably a lot harder if one ventures there before getting the RL and/or PG from the other side.

Thematically, I see that the base of heavy castle masonry with sci-fi tech trimmings and a snug blanket of nocturnal darkness around the illuminated towers comprising the play area (and also a share of toxic sludge, I suppose, though you'll most likely only notice it if you fall off the map to your demise) is a little more in line with the theme from map 21 than I may have initially given credit for, and so the overall effect is again something of a remixed throwback to the look of the dream-fortress episode earlier in the game, albeit with the blue highlights kept to a minimum (the only time I really noticed the color contrast was via the blue torches on spindly poles near the cacoswarm fight). Perfectly decent in overall presentation--I liked the strangely sinister and rather suggestively-shaped black metal towers in the distance--and the midi is just fine in this case, but again, I think this incidental thematic similarity to previous maps, coupled with its relatively unassuming gameplay (the final ambush is bizarrely gentle), does make it more difficult for 'Black Rabbit' to assert its own identity amidst the host of its more idiosyncratic brethren.

Map 23 -- In Flight - 117% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA (complevel -1)
I'll bet you a kajillion space-pesos that 'In Flight' was originally conceived as something for slot 21--a shorter, relatively sparsely populated episode-intro that takes the angle of Tyson emphasis and resource austerity to lend flavor to its otherwise light, straightforward gameplay, a megaWAD more that at this point is nearly as well-established as the map 07 Dead Simple redux. It also doesn't really fit in aesthetically with anything that surrounds it, not even on the level of the very loose similarities between maps 21 and 22, appearing more than anything like a map from Crumpets--plentitude of circles, night sky, rich green ooze, and cozy relaxing BGM track and all--albeit with the coffeecake ruins replaced with some vaguely industrial-looking techbase elements. Perhaps these aesthetic qualities belie the level's true origins?

Whatever the case, in Sunlust things are seldom as entirely straightforward as any straight reference to a particular PWAD, no? Somewhat off-beat mapslot aside, 'In Flight' does evince many of the characteristics of the map 21 Tysonfest, although viewed in the context of the author's larger body of work it seems much less outré, as resource austerity, tight spaces, and whimsical secret/exploration elements are all part and parcel for Ribbiks' mapping style. I would characterize 'In Flight' as being in a kindred vein with 'Troglobite' from earlier on, with the crucial difference that in 'Troglobite' it was quite possible or even likely to pass through the level totally oblivious to all the hidden content, whereas in 'In Flight' the way in which the player experiences the mandatory parts of the level is drastically impacted by his/her ability (and willingness) to participate in the treasure hunt for optional goodies (with a handful of extra fights en tow) that Ribbiks has laid out. Eschewing most or all of this optional questline (the mere existence of which is not hidden from the player in any way in this case, note, as the YK hub/prize-pad is right next to the level's initially blockaded exit tunnel) will amount to a laborious slow-grind through mostly mid-tier monsters using primarily fists and bullets with very limited medical aid, but taking the trouble to find the various bronze-plated switches will net you some powerful gear in the YK prize-hub (at 1, 3, and 6 'tokens' respectively), and additionally sniffing out at least some of the actual secret areas in the process will bolster you in body and mind to the point where you'll swat the level's later encounters like flies, whereas without any of the optional stuff you'd basically have to scrimp and save every ammo resource possible earlier on (via the berserk pack) to make it through the RK corridor.

I firmly believe that the best secrets are their own reward (via hidden sights, hidden fights protecting them, and the simple thrill of the search itself), and so in that sense my attitudes as a player probably predisposed me to play it in a certain way, which of course will have impacted my experience with the level to no small degree in comparison to what several DWMC players faced. Generally speaking I found the level to be very gently paced, the only time I faced what felt like real danger (to the point of being very near death, to whit) was purely a result of some genuinely terrible/incompetent gameplay on my part vs. the two prizehub viles (and maybe a nasty 80 damage rev rocket a bit earlier on). That nearly-fatal hiccup aside, I found that participating in the optional sidequest and secret-finding stuff kept me consistently ahead of the curve as far as how my armament stacked up against the level's monsters (and there really aren't very many of them, when you get down to it), such that by the end I had most of the arsenal (no SSG, again, though), a middling stock of ammo, and perhaps most tellingly, several unused spheres lying around. By contrast, there is not a scrap of doubt in my mind that this level (at least on UV) is absolutely no fun to play if the player doesn't clue in on (or chooses to ignore) the breadcrumb trail of optional stuff. I suppose this is yet another battleground for proponents of various schools of design philosophy--e.g. is it sound level design to include optional/missable content that is crucial to a level not playing like complete ass, and thus not effectively optional from a practical standpoint?--but for my part I'll just say I don't have a problem with it, and I've never believed that a player should be actively forced to do what it takes to prosper. Supporting different playstyles is a wonderful thing, of course....but it's also a totally shallow and meaningless thing, likely indicative of a toothless and coddling gameplay experience, if different approaches are always carefully kept on an even footing.

Given the oft-cited issues with the way difficulty settings were implemented in the WAD, I also imagine this particular level is a snoozefest on anything below the UV skill level, since the logistical/supply inconveniences it poses--and the problem-solving process of circumventing these--is really all that it has to offer from a gameplay standpoint, its actual fight choreography being vastly more simple than in practically any other Sunlust map, save perhaps map 31. In Doom, most problems involve monsters and guns, and if you soften the balance in an already fundamentally sparse/gimmicky level like this, I imagine there's liable not to be much of substance left. I found the level to be a palatable short diversion, but I'm not sure the set needed 3 breather maps in a row (Danne will promptly address this with his next couple, fortunately), and I don't feel that this level really quite 'belongs' where we encounter it, which is not so much in deference to difficulty progression (I also prefer an irregular curve of spikes and valleys over the course of a long WAD, as opposed to an idealized steady upward slant) as it is to general pacing/arrangement of the greater mapset.

[baja blast rd.]

Yes! Today was a good day, and it's only getting better!

[Ribbiks]

m22: my weakest map in the set imo. If we were to keep cleaving away at substandard content this would've been next on the block. It's an extremely basic map, mostly because it was among the very first I contributed to the set (some 2+ years ago now? yikes). I liked it at the time, simple, straightforward "can you place rockets well?" type gameplay, but it just feels obsolete to me now (compared to more interesting things that got placed before it). It became fixed into an E3 mapslot after more snow levels grew around it, perhaps improperly pinning it to an episode that could've been harder, on the average. The one thing I don't regret about keeping the map in the set is that it yielded some hilarious demos that broke the shit out of everything (way back when Phml had found a similar way to run around the rocks and skip triggers, but I had thought I fixed that -.-).

fun introspective fact: m22 was made in between sd20x6 and swtw, aesthetically it was pretty much me goofing around with the spiky shapes that would become more prominent in whales' maps.

m23: used to be m21, that's correct. Why'd it get moved? I forget. Maybe we thought it was texturally closer to new m24 than it was to the current m21/22. Anyways, it's a quasi-tyson map, the hardcore zerk ordeal that it replaced wound up in summer69.wad. I liked playing it Hard-Fisting™ style, so in testing I made sure it was possible if the secret prize-pad shenanigans were neglected. Thus I somewhat disagree with your assessment of it being required, even if it does make life much easier..

[Demon of the Well]

^Oh yes, I'm sure it's quite beatable without doing the optional YK goodie-machine stuff, what with the berserk pack being placed right at the start and all. I reckon it's just not very much fun to play it that way, as perched snipers are the bane of every pugilist's existence.

Map 24 -- Dying on Cue - 102% Kills / 50% Secrets - FDA, 9 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)
Ooof, this is a rough one, IIRC I believe I died more in this than in any other of Danne's solo maps in the set. Part of this is just more poor play and a key misjudgement or two on my part, but as one of the set's longest maps it's something of a test of endurance, the supply-balance is surprisingly strict for a map of this size, and there are a couple of spots that will flat out kill you instantly if you make even a tiny mistake (especially the pre-exit Pagoda of Vileness, damn). And I wouldn't have it any other way..!

The monstercount here dwarfs that of any other Sunlust map, save for one notable exception, and so going in I was expecting something in a full-on Combat Shock vein, which at this point in the mapset would've been a welcome change of pace after a selection of shorter/lighter maps. As per usual with this mapset, you can't quite judge the book by its cover in this case, but it's a worthy effort in its own right, again exemplifying a characteristic of Danne's Sunlust maps I find particularly appealing, that being the marriage of a sense of adventure/exploration with a horde-based, somewhat choreographed style of combat, two design elements which don't always sit so comfortably together. For instance, 'Dying on Cue' begins with a big unfolding brawl in a modest network of caves and tunnels, where several distinct waves of monsters flood the player's space, challenging him/her to maintain enough situational awareness to repeatedly outflank them while whittling down their numbers, with more routes opening up as compensation for the waves progressively growing in pressure (either because they're developing more damage potential/space denial, or because the player's resources are getting thinner and thinner, ala vs. the vile + his cult of trashmobs). In broad form it's a self-contained battleground expressly designed for the encounter that takes place there--like the majority of combat scenarios in Sunlust, in other words--but it's 'disguised' or presented as a more organically-developing situation, taking place in an environment that to the naked eye is a credible incidental backdrop, as opposed to a baldfaced arena. Both of these design sensibilities have their value, of course; the cool thing about Danne's maps here is that he uses them together in a comfortable, natural way.

Spatial contrast also plays into this, with Danne using both highly congested/claustrophobic areas and much more spacious settings to play off of one another. Coming out of the caves finds Doomguy battling for his life in the noose-tight cuboidal ruins serving as a hub for deeper forays into this cursed grave-city, where ridiculous quantities of demonflesh repeatedly flood a ridiculously stuffy network of right-angled corridors, leaving you to frantically spam plasma and every other resource at your disposal just to keep their yellowed fangs, tusks, and claws out of your hide; later on this spatial dynamic is flipped on its head with the final massive slaughterfight on the planet's decaying surface, taking place in a huge open clearing (with some kind of techno-magical derrick drawing poison or some other substance out of the earth at its center) where the marine's raw footspeed and ability to repeatedly outflank the massive horde is vital to victory. Again, sometimes maps are well-served in focusing in on one particular angle towards combat/geometric interplay (e.g. all tight uncomfortable spaces, all open/uneven natural terrain, etc.), but I think having some element of stark contrast is key in larger maps and in longer mapsets (and this is especially true of unusually sedate or unusually difficult sets, I daresay), not only because the greater variety in active moment-to-moment gameplay that this naturally engenders will help to keep things feeling fresh, but also because these contrasts generally serve to flesh out a sense of setting/location and progression/journey through said setting; that extra sense of place being, for me at least, often the little extra something that separates a decent/respectable map from a really good one, or even a good one from a great one.

Finally, here we again see the recurring elements of player choice and optionality (although again just how truly optional some of the side stuff really is is debatable, I suppose), something Sunlust as a whole has consistently been pretty good about, but here there's a different spin put on it, in the form of the teleport hub the player reaches after surviving the horror show on initial foray into the ruins. Speaking for myself, I've always found something fundamentally appealing about 'Stage Select' setups, and the ability to port around at your own behest for the middle third of the map is an interesting take on presenting what are probably the map's hardest fights. I died most in the RK fight (the one down on the cave floor below, not the strange holding-pen area up above), encountering a lot of difficulty gaining a foothold in the fight's early moments, ironic considering that in hindsight this seemed to be the one time where trying to camp out somewhere while thinning the groundlings (read: in the shellbox niches with the line-of-sight tunnels at the back) might've been the smartest approach, HKs + cybs be damned, whereas in most of Danne's fights it's crucial not to allow yourself to be boxed in for any reason. Also perished a couple of times in the NASTY arch-vile pagoda guarding the final fight, once while learning it (cue hilarious wastage of secret V-sphere) and then again as a result of a small timing error (which is really all it takes to kill you instantly there). In this regard the hub setup not only offers you some long-haul flexibility (e.g. you can go and try the YK fight if you're getting frustrated in the RK one, and vice versa), but also allows for the development of an overarching 'puzzle', where the solution to a major encounter (the aforementioned pagoda) is not simply in finding the right movement pattern, but also in assembling extra 'pieces' to the puzzle that you can use to make victory easier. Cool stuff.

Map 25 -- Proxyon - 101% Kills / No secrets - FDA, 8 deaths I think? (complevel -1, uses saves)
And then there's this map, almost the polar opposite of Danne's larger, more adventuresome affairs ala maps 16 or 24. In a sense, you can think of 'Proxyon' as a raw distillation of the core Sunlust formula: a linear series of highly choreographed setpiece fights in a handful of modestly-sized arenas. And nothing else--no secrets, no exploration, no incidental combat, nothing but 7-course meal of straight-up fights. The only nuance of progression here is the Sunlust standby of a fork in the path at the outset: you can do either the RK route or the YK route first (but you need to do both to finish). You receive all of your kit, no strings attached, at the very beginning of the level, so in that sense there's no obvious reason to favor one path over the other, although from my experience I feel like I probably could have cut my deathcount by 2-3 if I had done the paths in the other order (I did RK first, then YK), as it seems a bit easier to finish the YK path with a better health/armor situation overall, and at least a couple of my deaths at the start of the YK path were the result of my own ill-advised attempts to stretch the megasphere in there when I should've been prioritizing other matters.

For a map that's nothing but fights, I suppose the best compliment I can give is that there's little repetition in battle themes here, beyond the general lack of comfortable amounts of space to move around in. The RK path possibly has a underlying theme of advancing 'fronts' of monsters (e.g. one solid, dense front in the first fight, two larger, squishier fronts enacting a pincers movement in the third fight, etc.), and the YK path possibly has a sort of 'circle the wagons' theme where shit flies all around you as you try to control the center (bodies in the first fight, projectiles and projectilized-bodies in the third fight, etc.), but I may be reading too much into things there. I can at least say for sure that each individual fight is pretty simple/straightforward in strategic terms, the only real bit of guile being the nasty surprise you'll get as soon as the Barons in the second fight on the RK path inevitably move to engage the cyberdemon, and so in that sense we could perhaps characterize this as a slaughtermap that really is more about twitch arcade shooting skills and quick reflex reactions than anything more cerebral. Not to say that some elements of higher strategy aren't in play, of course--i. e. in the noble stampede at the start of the RK path it's good to know that targeting your rocket barrage at one side of the advancing wall will almost always garner better results than firing at the middle, which theoretically maximizes splash damage but also makes it much easier for the viles to repeatedly counteract your work--but I think it's safe to say that a killer instinct is more important than a chestful of wargames medals in this one, which is fine by me.

As aforesaid, all but one of my deaths occurred in the cacoswarm fight at the start of the YK path, which I entered with around 50% health and armor, which pushed me to try to preserve the top-up megasphere. Not a good choice, got me killed a couple of times, should've just nutted up and focused on dodging better rather than trying for 'victory through economy', if you take my meaning. I hit on the one keynote strategy for success here from the outset--that being to not allow the tunnelful of skeletons to break containment once the barrier there recedes--I just simply failed to execute several times in succession after very nearly pulling it off on the first try. Again, this challenge was all about aerobics and dodging, and so perhaps the 'skill ceiling' is a little more evident in this level compared to many of the others, dunno.

Aesthetically it's functional--it's a more proper introduction to the verdigris-and-iron theme that's going to define the next few maps than the (very) loosely palette-similar trappings of map 24--but in honesty I barely noticed the visuals here, beyond a vague awareness of some complex scrolling striplights which must've taken ages to arrange. From a layout perspective it's sort of interesting how it crams so many discrete arenas into a small space by making clever usage of height change (and also how the whole is strikingly reminiscent of a giant battery or the like, I suppose), but moment to moment I might go so far as to say that its starkly utilitarian black-iron texturing and persistently blocky shaping is a mite....bland? In the absence of the lushly detailed green skybox I suspect the level's visual plainness would be a lot more pronounced, and so in that sense it was probably a good choice. I reckon we might characterize this level's look as being largely a function of its very practical/no-frills nature, and I suppose that's what I'll take away from it as a whole experience--as an unabashedly to-the-point one-off I think it's just fine, but it does make it clear to me that my generally very positive impression of Sunlust elides from the whole presentation and not just from the fights/challenge aspect in a vacuum, or, put another way, I don't think I'd want to play a whole bunch of maps like 'Proxyon' one after the other without anything else to break them up.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 26 -- Kinetics - 99% Kills / 50% Secrets - FDA (complevel -1, uses saves, no deaths)
Hmm.....I think a lot of what I said (or intimated, at least) about 'Black Rabbit' is probably true to some extent of this level, that being that while it's a perfectly reasonable offering in the general Sunlust patois, I feel like its impact is lessened by dint of being "another textbook Ribbiks map" that tends to be overshadowed somewhat by the host of cool/memorable maps that surround it on both sides. I was also surprised to read in the textfile that the authors were initially unaware that the title "Kinetics" was earlier used in one of the more infamous (or 'famously unpopular', let us say) maps from Memento Mori, because oddly enough some of the gameplay concepts that Avatar experimented with there (albeit somewhat clumsily) do actually seem like primordial-ooze versions of non-combat 'niche' gameplay tropes that are popular in certain corners of Doom's modern 'high skill-ceiling' market, e.g. fiddly platforming and obstacle course-style traversal and progression, the likes of which occasionally rears it head in certain segments of the recent 'Italo-Doom', for instance.

Anyway, to the "textbook Ribbiks" comment, it's actually probably the sense of aesthetic here that gave me that gut reaction the first time I played. While it would of course be vastly unfair/incorrect of me to characterize Ribbiks as a mapper who only works in a scant one or two themes (as is demonstrated earlier in Sunlust itself), I do think it's accurate to say that there are two particular themes which he has claimed as his signature stomping grounds, those being A) caves and caverns with lots of liquid and B) dark metal and neon with somewhat less liquid. 'Kinetics' is very much an iteration of theme B, with most structures wrought in stark, heavy planes of black iron plate, scored here and there by vibrant green trim and highlights. Black + green is a great color combo in the Doom palette (and in general, IMO), and so generally speaking the visuals are more than palatable enough, though outside of a few bits of macrotectural flourish here and there (best exemplified by the view southwards as you're standing at the skull switch which unleashes the Goat Tsunami fight) I reckon the whole presentation feels significantly more unadorned or less lavish than is the mapset's general standard. There was also one little thing that bugged me more than it probably should: doubtless I'm opening myself up to well-deserved japing about "trying to think of Doom as realistic lol" here, but I noticed that there's a skylight (through which we can see the same green sky from map 25) over the mancubus/backpack platform area, which directly abuts the small room looking out over the exit pad and the macrotecture beyond, which appears to be either floating in a black void or contained inside an immeasurably vast cavern, where the 'ceiling' (or categoric absence thereof) is blatantly much, much taller than the nearby 'sky' would indicate should be possible. A minor/harmless thing in the grand scheme, of course, but it seemed to me like an error/oversight rather than a deliberate design decision, since every place spatially/structurally analogous to the manco platform area everywhere else in the map uses an abstract green ooze-ceiling, instead.

Combat! It takes the form of--you'll never believe this--a series of closed/discrete setpiece encounters arranged in a forking path that branches very early on. The largest of these is the aforementioned 'Goat Tsunami' fight, where a small army of hell nobles pours towards your position (your back against a wall) while you try to beat them back with rockets, being careful to stay back far enough to avoid entering spell range for a host of arch-viles which appear on pillars at the back of the area. Entertaining enough, though again it loses some impact as a result of occurring so relatively soon after the similar (and probably significantly more dangerous) fight in map 25 earlier. I am left to wonder about the possibilities of having the cyberdemon who appears in that area still alive when the nobles are triggered, will have to try that sometime. Other fights are fairly straightforward (if no less pressuring) space-management affairs in close quarters, again nothing that really stands out at this point after seeing so many similar encounters throughout the set. From my initial playthrough the thing that struck me most about the map is how pronounced the classic concept of 'dangerous non-linearity' is here: of the two basic routes you can take after the map's preamble, one seems vastly more favorable than the other, as dropping into the (unhidden) BFG's little arena from its eastern entrance at earliest opportunity will see you painfully underequipped to deal with the fracas that ensues therein. In my FDA, on the other hand, I had a fairly easy time with the map; not because the map itself is easy (it most certainly ain't, boys and girls), but because I happened to fall into a pretty optimal route from the get-go, which can perhaps be attributed in some small measure to observation/intuition, but was mostly just crass luck (don't worry, I get my comeuppance in the next map).

Incidentally, for the sake of the FDA it's probably better I didn't find the secret BFG/megasphere area. By the time I became actively conscious of its existence/position I erroneously concluded that the only way in there was to get a helping hand from the pegged arch-vile (then dead) who appears near the threshold near the backpack early on (this does work, by the way), not noticing the switch in the post-hopping room which allows access via lift. I say 'for the better' because if I'd found that switch the FDA almost certainly would've been two hours long, with 15 minutes of me playing the level proper and then 100+ of me repeatedly failing to hit the switch/make the platforming run to the lift in time--I think next time I play this map I shall opt for the vile-jump route instead!

Map 27 -- Emerald Spire - 104% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 2 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)
It's funny....I suppose I must've sounded somewhat unenthused when writing about maps like 22 or 26, saying that they're "textbook" or "par for the course" or other little bittersweet nothings like that, and now I'm about to say that 'Emerald Spire' is "another textbook Sunlust map." It's really good, though!...in this case, it's 'textbook' in the sense that it's a great posterchild for the mapset, a verdantly shining gem of a map that neatly encapsulates this megaWAD's prime virtues: tight, nuanced, clever fights in beautiful surroundings.

Aesthetically, 'Emerald Spire' hits an artistic sweetspot where it's simultaneously thematically understated--a simple theme of saturate green/black painting a loose selection of disembodied and generally structurally simple battle arenas--and yet visually very arresting by virtue of wide vistas, diorama-style beyond-bounds detailing, and pronounced sense of vertical scale (which, note, is actually largely illusory in this map's case, with most actual playspaces being pretty flat). One of the things I complimented about some of the more adventuresome earlier maps (14, 16, etc.) was that their approach to optional content and free-to-roam map traversal helped engender a palpable sense of particular place/location (which is something that holds value for me as a player) out of Sunlust's characteristically sweet gallery of eyecandy; the visual theme in 'Emerald Spire' is striking enough, and realized with enough artistic flair, that I got that same sensation here, even though it's a very different sort of map, pretty much all isolated one-off fights, without much of an active element of exploration or runabout. It's aesthetically captivating on so many different levels, from largescale concepts like the way the whole setting is framed (so many of the unobstructed views from one isolated segment of the map to another, with the titular spire itself looming up over all into the endless shadows above, are downright enchanting), to the metamaterial sensibility (the recolored stock marble assets and recolored lacquered cement texture are a delicious combination where they appear!) to the level of finegrain visual touches (love the simulation of 'rounded' prisms of light on several of the Spire's buttresses) that I could probably prattle on about it for hours and hours, but in the interest of time, alas, I cannot. Suffice to say this is a real beauty, folks, one of the best-looking maps in a set full of lookers.

As aforesaid, the gameplay follows the definitive Sunlust pattern of bilinear paths (although in this case it's kinda-sorta trilinear) of discrete setpiece battles with each occurring more or less in a vacuum, while yet being lent shades of variability via possible differences in player armament/status depending on a given player's route (boy don't I know it!). Some of these are more 'orthodox' in aspect than others (e.g. the fairly straightforward spiderdemon & pals hatdance fiesta which precedes accessing the BFG), but I found every fight here enjoyable in its own way, the only feature of play I felt a little numb to being the again repeated appearance of the ammo-starvation pistol-start trope (and even that might've been vastly less pronounced if I'd jumped into the HK den fight from the start rather than blithely wandering off in the other direction). The most innovative of these is the bizarre revenant/Baron crusher-fork fight to the southeast, where you have to alternate brief periods of frantic rocket/plasma-spamming offense with nerve-wracking moments of defense-oriented micro-dodging and standing stock-still when you inevitably get forced into one of the piston-sockets by the milling herd of hellbeef; but perhaps the most breathlessly adrenaline-soaked is the symmetric brawl in the northern tower, where you have to remain in literally constant motion while mentally keeping track of a complex web of arch-vile LOS to avoid a gruesome death. Granted, some of these fights might be a bit less of a to-do if you have the BFG, which I, uh....didn't. As extracosmic payback for my good fortune in map 26, powers that be saw fit to send me dimwittedly carousing through the rest of the level without making the early BFG detour....I picked it up moments AFTER killing the Spire's final inhabitant, having come back to it after missing it early on, despite its fairly obvious visual telegraph (I don't think I ever saw the gun itself behind the green forcefield, and must've assumed the monsters in there would teleport out somewhere else at a later time or something). This assuredly made things tougher and more stressful, but nevertheless all fights remained beatable with a bit of strategy and maybe just a pinch of luck, once again serving as a testament to how finely balanced these maps are (on UV). Really good stuff.


Oh, and as a random aside, I did like the music selections for this green/void cluster of maps as a generality, but I really, really, REALLY feel like the tracks in maps 26 and 27 ought to switch places. Am I just a lonesome phillistine, or does anyone else agree?

[baja blast rd.]

Demon of the Well said:

Map 26 -- Kinetics - 99% Kills / 50% Secrets - FDA (complevel -1, uses saves, no deaths)

The sequence of accidental fall -> rev bitchslap symphony -> cyb casually wandering into another infight and taking out the HKs too, starting at around 11:30 or so, was absolutely hilarious.

[dobu gabu maru]

Demon of the Well said:

Am I just a lonesome phillistine, or does anyone else agree?

I definitely see your point, but I think the intimidatng FFT music for MAP27 gives it a distinct, foreboding mood that the midi for MAP26 would miss. I do feel that perhaps MAP26 needed a bit more energy to its theme, but when I think of MAP27 the first thing that comes to mind isn't "sullen" or "mysterious" (which the MAP26 midi would invoke) but "frightening", and I think that's in part due to the music selection.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 28 -- Maelstrom - 132% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 6 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)
A meisterwerk. If 'Proxyon' is the distillation of the Sunlust essence to its primal form and 'Emerald Spire' is a model specimen of the breed, 'Maelstrom' is Sunlust Deluxe Edition, a celebration of all the mapset's salient features vested in particular extravagance, a smorgasbord of visual treats and raucous encounters, all with a deep, dark secret waiting to be uncovered at its gleaming veridian core.

I reckon that aesthetically this is another of Sunlust's strongest levels, no small feat in a set characterized by strong visuals. The green/black void theme continues and culminates here, in the midst of massive stone islands jutting out of a vast lake of the planet's poisonous ichor (indeed, in my Sunlust headcanon (TM), the 'void' we see in this final portion of the game is not a void at all, but an incomprehensibly vast cavern, with the final stretch of Lustguy's journey beginning when he drops down the Morlock hole at the end of Proxyon, from then on descending ever downwards towards the final revelation at the planet's black heart--an artful spin on the classic Doom 'Hell' narrative, if I do say so). Interestingly, in contrast to previous levels where the dominant scheme was black materiel with vivid green highlights (Kinetics) or a more blended tu-tone look (Emerald Spire), here the 'black' in the color scheme is far more a function of negative space and shadowing and such than it is the texture selection, which is decisively, vividly, unrepentantly green, with only a proportionately slight amount of black iron bracing, nickel-rust circuitry via the few tech elements, and assorted other trimmings. Far more topographical in flavor than expressly architectural, the few structures that dominate the landscape all seem to have a certain funerary air to them--there is the much-vaunted 'Maelstrom' itself (probably THE signature Sunlust screenshot, if there is such a thing), which is decidedly pyramidal in aspect; the inverse colonnade of upright sarcophagi along the climb up the BK hill; the brooding mausoleum and nearby 'arch of mourning' (ala the earthly Taj Mahal) that act as gateways to the level's two exits; the cyclopean burial chamber where the secret final battle takes places (which features a pyramidal vaulted ceiling and a number of energy conduits directed upwards, leading me to surmise that this structure is directly underneath and presumably the source of the Maelstrom); and of course the level hub itself is framed as a grouping of cairns, each teleporting you to a different potential grave.

Indeed, the hub concept explored earlier on in 'Dying on Cue' returns here in an expanded, Hexen-lite sort of form, although if you ignore the level's wealth of optional content and just head for the 'normal' exit it essentially plays out as the standard Sunlust forking bilinear path, like so many levels before. Nevertheless, the giddiness of a Stage Select choice is unhindered, and in contrast to some of the other recent maps here I get the impression that the two main paths (BK and YK) are pretty comparable to one another in difficulty and about equally viable as starting points, as opposed to having a 'correct' route and an 'abandon all hope ye who enter here' route. Also very refreshing not to feel compelled to pacifist-troll my way into a comfortable foothold in the level for a change, incidentally, though of course there's still a lot of scope for that kind of play if the mood takes you (e.g. my handling of the imp pit along the YK route). Getting the two main keys is not necessarily the end, though....the RK floating serenely over the hub couldn't be more conspicuous, and the exit mausoleum does its best to tantalize you with the promise of further horrific adventures. Those of strong body, strong will, and strong mind (well, maybe not so much that third one...) can choose to revisit both of the earlier paths, using the key from the counterpart of each to unlock additional battles, completion of which allows access to the level's true exit in the titan crypt below the maelstrom. The way material payoff is balanced in this extended quest is actually one of the strangest, most off-type design decisions in Sunlust: while you'll more or less break even on ammo/powerups in each of the optional fights, the 'true' reward for completing the whole map is that the secret exit is not a death exit like the standard one, which translates to a much stronger starting situation in the ruthless opening of map 29.....if you're playing with carryovers.....which you likely aren't doing if you're the sort to willingly undertake this quest in the first place, instead of taking the easy way out. Yeah, so....weird. Really weird, in fact. But I don't have a problem with it, I think the quality of the optional fights is its own reward, and I imagine most players who enjoyed the map enough to want to see/do everything in it will agree.

Fights! Variety is the spice of life, so they say. Apparently, it's also the secret sauce of death, as variety is precisely what 'Maelstrom' offers us. That is, variety within the context of the greater Sunlust idiom, of course. Again, essentially 100% of the combat takes place within discrete setpiece encounters (although there appears to be some limited but significant potential for bleedover between 1-3 fights in the first part of the YK path), but no two of these are much alike in this case. Over the course of a full playthrough, one will confront an exceptional example of most types of core encounter in the Sunlust warchest: an 'advancing horde/hold the breach' battle (noble clan + cyber artillery at the start of BK path), a potential 'do less with more' austerity segment (top of the hill on the BK path), a 'nowhere to run' claustrophobia segment (optional battle in the trench on the BK hill), an infighting/projectile-hell attrition scenario (imp pit with obese overseers on YK path), a line-of-sight 'smart sacrifice' bonanza (mirrored arch-vile + commando ambush later on same path), a frantic, doubledecker two-front 'pincers' scenario (optional underground fight on YK path), and more. If all I've done here is provide a laundry list, it's because I would be writing this post for the next month if I tried to go into intimate detail about each of them, and as we know I'm already about 3-4 months behind the plot at this point. Suffice to say that I found each of these segments enjoyable, whereas some of the maps have a sort of intellectually/strategically compelling but not particularly visceral or euphoric 'pay your dues' sort of warmup period before a cool marquee fight, this one is top-shelf throughout.

What I will single out, though, is the final hidden battle, which makes a brilliant topper to the 'Best Of' compilation that is the rest of the map precisely because there's nothing else in the game quite like it. If I had to pick my single favorite setpiece in Sunlust, this is probably it (eat your vile black heart out map 29 Scary-Go-Round!), I reckon. It's one simple, massive arena used for three completely different fights (the first one prescribed, the other two in the order of the player's choice) over long distances against some most formidable hordes of powerful enemies, where the sheer scale of the battlespace combines with the withering power of your enemies to create a battle dynamic unlike that dominating in most of Sunlust; whereas in much of the game the true killer is often a scarcity of breathing room and destructive implements--in a sense, scenarios that are dangerous because your enemies initially hold practically every advantage save for raw speed, here there are veritable acres of battleground to use, and a much more liberal approach to supply distribution (although the ammo balance is nuanced enough that you WILL need to make some really bold feints and runs to keep stocked up on cells); you might say that here Doomguy is in his element, with the demonic host finally falling back on a primeval strategy of overwhelming numbers and raw offensive power to win the day. The pacing of the fights here thus has a different, more protracted cadence--a meeting of two supernaturally potent forces, if you will, rather than the underdog/oppressor flavor of earlier on--where you need to manage your enemies as armies rather than as individuals, and where you need to stay in constant motion not so much in order to dodge immediate death as to be constantly shaping the ebb and flow of the hordes. It's amazing how differently each of the three waves needs to be handled given how simple/symmetrical the battleground is, and delightful how much the order and timing of the waves (which you have a lot of control over, if you've the nerve) can impact the way each plays. For example, take the way I eventually won against the nasty multi-vile clusterfuck, largely because by that time the battlefield was so blanketed in corpses that many of them spent more time playing medic than actively attacking me (which in turn left me with a nasty living hurricane of demonflesh to pick apart at the end). IIRC the stylistic reference KMX used for this segment in his OneManDoom review of this level was Darkwave0000, and I think the comparison fits the bill nicely; this sort of epic scale, relative freedom of movement, and longform impromptu orchestration of a massively powerful enemy force is his stock in trade these days, and it just so happens is probably my own personal favorite spin on 'true' slaughter gameplay.

Superb. A true classic in the making.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 29 -- Go Fuck Yourself - 104% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 7 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)





no u





Also: !!!SPINAL CRUSH!!! Or is it !!!FINAL CRASH!!!....? I can never tell. It has become traditional over the years for a megaWAD's penultimate map to be not only the culmination of said WAD's gameplay character, but also its most expansive and, more often than not, its most difficult. 'Go Fuck Yourself' doesn't quuuiiiite fit that mold, being a fairly concise, no-nonsense affair that doesn't reach for any really novel progression elements or the wealth of optional content that earlier set highlights featured (the lowering/raising floor in the main hub is pretty cool, though), but it's certainly nasty enough to fit the part, a veritable gutpunch/nutkick to leave you primed for the grand finale.

While the level's selection of encounters remains challenging throughout, I reckon the real driving force behind just how stressful it feels is simply the pistol-start. For non-Divine players, success in Sunlust (at least on blind runs) is often predicated on momentum (how much hi-test ammo you can scrimp, how many bonus sphere items you can squirrel away for later emergency use, etc.), and 'Go Fuck Yourself' promptly tells you to go fuck yourself by placing you into a very bad position from the outset that it is difficult to escape from in decent shape, meaning you have to actually master later encounters to some degree rather than simply tanking your way through them. I believe I've mentioned before, but having reached this point in Sunlust I was growing weary of careful, pacifistic, miserly slow-balling starts (which Ribbiks in particular tends to favor), but this map commits to the concept to such a degree that it's kind of endearing, and the degree of care and contortionism you need to exercise in the early going is on a new level of lateral thinking. I shocked myself by panicking into the correct solution for avoiding incineration in the initial 4-vile grid attack, and was feeling quite euphoric after gradually overcoming the cyberdemon and his initial cohorts with guile (euphoria which promptly faded when I died like a dog immediately after bringing the walls down for the first time, but I digress). The neat thing is, though, that as has so often been the case in other clutch moments throughout Sunlust, the hard way is not necessarily the only way for those with sharp insight and nerves of steel. It seems possible to neatly telefrag the first cyberdemon via the deceptively useful port-station off of the main hub, for instance (which would involve the tricky maneuver of hitting the skullswitch right under his nose at the start, granted), and I'm left to wonder what other neat tricks the level may conceal.

Overcoming the early oppression leaves you with the traditional forking sequence of setpieces to overcome before taking on the final horde, which ironically enough is arguably the level's easiest encounter (a certain ninjatei-master cyberdemon aside). Both forks play with the idea of monster-floods into highly inhospitable environments, the western path involving several waves of arch-viles and a sextet of cyberdemons rumbling over a battlefield that is comprised mostly of toxic fluid, and the eastern posing what has become the single most famous encounter in the whole mapset, that being the 'heart of fire' circle-dance fight. The former is either a careful game of resource management or an all-out offensive blitz if you can find the secret V-sphere (marvel at how I manage to fuck up not once but twice despite immediately spotting this secret), while the latter as has been said previously in the thread requires a certain sense of rhythm and timing, not only to intuit how to stay behind the fluidly shifting cover-shield fleetingly blocking the viles' LoS but also to know when to break out the BFG to power through the final push of HKs bringing up the rear behind the initial deluge of imps. This segment at least came surprisingly easily to me, though I suspect I might've had some unusually favorable RNG on my side (e.g. the HKs trickling out slower than they otherwise might have, thus making the last few rotations easier to power through). There is a slight damper on the end of this encounter (perhaps intentional, in the gentlemanly spirit of cordially inviting one to go and fuck oneself, but nevertheless is a valid point of criticism, I feel) in that the crusher which eventually disposes of the viles at the center seems far too small and thus rather inefficient for completing its intended function (especially once there's only 2 or 3 left, they often hang around the edge and thus avoid it entirely), but nevertheless this is a brilliantly imaginative encounter that, like the map 19 steeple setup before it, is sure to be referenced repeatedly in future WADs.

Aesthetics are the least memorable aspect of the level, interestingly, perhaps an expression of its all-business nature. There are a handful of memorable scenes--the radiant vile-core with its oscillating neon shielding looks as cool as it plays, and the glowering yellow neon/dark metal macrotecture beyond the playable bounds is an ominous hint at the endgame setting--but for the most part its construction is more about function than form, with a muted tan/brown composite pipework texture scheme with a vaguely Quake-like look that's mostly notable for looking more like an older Ribbiks map (e.g. the Stardate 20X6 period) than like something contemporary to Sunlust, though the actual room shapes and interconnection of areas suggests otherwise.

Solid map with a couple of really cool ideas, though I personally feel it's blown out of the water by maps 27-28 before it, and by the true finale which it precedes.

[baja blast rd.]

It's been a long road, but we're almost there. Soon you'll have time to comment on TVR! and other DWMC sets, that Italo buttfuckfest, [supersmallprint]my newer speedmaps[/supersmallprint], again.

Re the music choices, watching these post-map19* FDAs has taught me that my list was all wrong, particularly with the tracks I hadn't listened to in-game. Map20's track actually fits extremely well, and it grew on me. I didn't like map27's track that much, but I think it fits map26 and map27 better than map26's track, simply because it's better. Map21's track is strong but not top two. Also, I liked map14's track to begin with, but it grew on me even more -- now I think it's in the top three.


*I don't really care about spoiling my own first playthrough experience, because preknowledge always helps me have a lot more fun with these arena-centric levels. Free-flowing levels centered around exploration and dynamic traps are different in that regard.

[Ribbiks]

Demon of the Well said:

'advancing horde/hold the breach'
'do less with more'
'nowhere to run'
infighting/projectile-hell attrition
line-of-sight
'smart sacrifice' bonanza
'pincers' scenario

I have a textfile somewhere with similar listings :). it's pretty much the exact descriptors I have in mind when planning out what I want a fight to be (can't speak for danne, who made the majority of m28, but I imagine he works similarly). Always nice to hear this stuff articulated by players though, a nice contrast to "oh yeah, another fight with lots of monsters" :p

Demon of the Well said:

for the most part its construction is more about function than form, with a muted tan/brown composite pipework texture scheme with a vaguely Quake-like look that's mostly notable for looking more like an older Ribbiks map (e.g. the Stardate 20X6 period) than like something contemporary to Sunlust, though the actual room shapes and interconnection of areas suggests otherwise.

Solid map with a couple of really cool ideas, though I personally feel it's blown out of the water by maps 27-28 before it, and by the true finale which it precedes.

this map was another fairly early one, we tended to make smaller stuffs until the last months of development where we shifted to cranking out the beastlier ones. Probably made not too long after sd20x6, actually.


re not fitting m29 slot: my only preconceptions while clip/clevving through a new wad:

m01: will be pleasantly surprised if this isn't a tech-base.
..
m21: is this a tyson map?
...
m26/28: probably the most grandiose map in the set is here
...
m29: hopefully the most dickish/harsh map is here. come @ me, bro.
m30: let's see what cool IoS alternative the authors thought of-- oh. it's an IoS, nvm.
m31: I hope this has a strange/wacky/surreal theme
m32: why is this always an egyptian map?

Not sure what collection of wads populated these ideas, but that's all I really had in mind when ironing out mapslots with danne (incidentally, m32 was also originally slated to be egyptian -.-).

[Demon of the Well]

rdwpa: You're developing more of an appreciation for larger, more exploratory levels, then? Cool, cool. All things being equal, they're probably my favorite kind, though it's of course ideal (and not at all guaranteed) that they have suitable injections of hyperviolence now and again, be it via setpieces or a generally high monster density (ideally with lots of smaller bodies) or the like.

Ribbiks: Aw MAN! You should have wheedled Danne into keeping m32 as Egyptian, that's one of my favorite niche themes, cliche or no.

Map 30 -- God Machine - 117% Kills / 60% Secrets - FDA, ~20 deaths (complevel -1, uses saves)
Deathcount on the FDA is estimated here. Wish I could say it's just because I don't really have the time to watch the whole long-ass thing again and count (which is not untrue!), but I reckon I also don't quite have the heart for it, I really got my ass kicked in this one. I distinctly remember dying 3 times in the weird Baron-herd fight in the second half of the level (which is embarrassing in itself, I essentially won it the first time and then totally threw it away doing something stupid and unnecessary), and 3 times versus the final huge clusterfuck, which makes 6, but there's no telling how many times I died in the BFG fight in the first half of the level, suffice to say it's gotta be "more than 10." Further time spent with the map after this first playthrough salved my bruised ego a little bit when I discovered that the secret switch overlooking said BFG fight malfunctions in complevel -1 (Disclaimer: it works just fine in the WAD's official prescribed complevel, that being 9); hitting it is supposed to insta-kill the three cyber-turrets, apparently via a non-standard telefrag, but in -cl -1 it does nothing (though it will port in the candle if the related cyb is already dead and thus not occupying the landing zone)....good thing I didn't discover the secret cyber-annex on that run, no telling how (or even IF) I'd have gotten out of that one without functional actor-actor telefrags! Anyway, I discovered the switch pretty early on, and if it had worked properly I reckon I could've pulled out a victory a bit sooner than I did. I suppose that's what I get for using a nonstandard complevel, though, and since the fight is clearly balanced to be beatable even without that secret, I guess I can't justify rationalizing away too much of my crappy play. ;) Oh, and on the topic of dysfunction, there are also some blatantly stuck 'siamese nobles' up on the YK platform regardless of emulation/simulation settings. Surely that can't be intentional....?

Anyway, all this talk about My Struggle (TM) aside, don't think I'm salty here, I'm not. I really thought the map was cool, it both accomplished the main thing I want a map 30 to accomplish (which is to be a memorable spectacle and totally change the mood or emotional cadence of the game), while offering quality action to boot, including some more of that full-on macro-slaughter that I'd been craving. I'm a rare player these days in that I don't object to the Icon of Sin (or the IoS being in map 30, to be more precise)--in fact, I try to look at this tradition optimistically, viewing every iteration as a chance at some kind of public redemption--but I also don't object to map 30s that simply toss that convention out the window, especially when they do it with as much style as this.

'God Machine' has enough atmosphere to crush a decent-sized planetoid into dust via barometric pressure alone, as Lustguy explores the inky bowels of a titanic necromantic-mechanical Machine slumbering deep within the dead planet. With the apparent power to defy both death and the ravages of eternity itself, its mind-bending melding of super-science and the very blackest of magic allowing it to absorb and rechannel the very essence of life itself, like a tremendous metal parasite. Demonologist earlier made the inevitable Sunder comparison here, and I found myself tempted to do the same (shades of 'The Furnace', 'Metal Descendants', 'The Zealous Machine', and on and on), given the dwarfing scale and cold, alien geometry of this endlessly foreboding environment. I reckon both Danne and Ribbiks probably get tired of constantly hearing this comparison--Insane_Gazebo is (sadly) long gone at this point, and these two (and others) have long since taken up the torch he carried and forged their own distinct paths with it--but I hope they understand that it's generally meant as a compliment and not as an accusation of pastiche. Apart from Sunder, I was actually most reminded here of the titular 'Machine for Pigs' from the second Amnesia game, with the key difference that since this is Doom and not an on-rails movie-game, and so we actually get to freely traverse and explore its tenebrous inner reaches to our morbid little hearts' content (provided we're strong enough to survive, that is). Again, I could prattle on for pages about all of the fascinating aesthetic details I see here, but since I'm strapped for time, I just want to point out the motif of the opening shot, which crops up from certain angles in other parts of the level later on: you can see the radiant neon teleporter into the heart of the Machine in the very distance, steeped in shadow but clear as day; if you stop to look around, though, you'll eventually notice that the aperture through which it is visible has the aspect of a yawning mouth, the massive metal mouldings and braces that surround it taking on the aspect of a huge face in the gloom, a timeless metal rictus of rage, pain, or perhaps...lust?

A map of two halves, of course the most notable aspect of the gameplay in this final offering is its heavy slant towards ominous dead-air periods of exploration and traversal used to space out the setpiece fights, before giving way to the merciless kama-sutra/kali-yuga slaughterfest in the isolated final area. I can see how some sensibilities might find this juxtaposition of game styles to be hamfisted and unnatural, but I think it works brilliantly--as I said earlier on in the playthrough, Sunlust is more to me than just the aerobic/athletic aspect of its fights, and I believe it would've been remiss to ignore its atmospheric side and capacity to establish setting here at the end. Not objecting to long maps, I also don't take issue to it more or less being two separate maps joined together (and that only by an implied narrative/thematic connection), though I reckon it would've gone over just as well with me if it had been a map 29-30 combo as well. Fights themselves are relatively few in number but the authors make them count where they occur. Crucial to an endgame map, a few of them take on a unique flavor not encountered elsewhere by virtue of the clever resurrection gimmick, and those that don't use this concept tend to make up for it either in scale (e.g. the final slaughter core) or in pure savagery--even with a functional secret switch, I personally believe the BFG fight is one of the very hardest in the entire mapset, probably only matched by the lunacy of the crypt fight in map 20.

The later area, as in the hidden conclusion to map 28 earlier, does a good job of reusing its fairly simple geometry for a number of different encounters (note again the concept of using stationary arch-viles as a form of 'soft' but potentially deadly boundary-control to preclude indefinite circle-strafing), including a fascinating ground-air dynamic between the final gigantic legion of knights, revenants, and cyberdemons and the eerily beautiful 'river' of pain elementals/lost souls that flows interminably from the southern aperture. Nice capper, too, can't believe I pulled that one off (I was terrified that cyberdemons were eventually going to enter the fray!). I will say that some of the initial area-clearing probably did feel a mite extraneous (which perhaps wouldn't be the case if this part of the level were a standalone map)--I think I was least enamoured with the door-based fights between the main arena and its side areas, these felt more like tedious, hamfisted time/resource taxes shoehorned in at the last moment (perhaps to redress an untowardly 'soft' balance? ;) ) than legitimate encounters--but for the most part it's good fun, a fitting conclusion to a legendary journey, which sees Lustguy, now uncontested as the most powerful being in the galaxy, subsumed into the flow of life-energy at the core of the Machine, a vibrant new sun in an exhausted, waning cosm. But does his victory signify an eternal slumber for a terrible force not meant to be held in transient hands, or will it usher in a true reawakening, the birth of the final end? As of yet, at least, none can say.

Thus ends Sunlust, a parable of ascension in 32 chapters.

************

I reckon I've written (and reiterated) so much up to this point that there's not much of an overarching analysis left to make. A very focused project, Sunlust knows exactly what it wants to be, and most of the time it clearly fulfills its mission statement, adequately at the very least, often brilliantly. A visual tour de force and a sparkling showcase of high-choreography setpiece battle concepts, it's a monument to the seemingly boundless longevity and versatility of Doom, and the relatively simple game and world elements from which it is constituted. It also does a fine job with implying a narrative and establishing setting (something that certain sectors of the community seem to feel that "slaughtermaps" can't possibly ever do), not half bad from a couple of guys who go out of their way to mock the notion of an overt 'story' to the proceedings. I did feel that some of the maps felt somewhat interchangeable, not only thematically but also in terms of content and pacing; there is certainly variety in gameplay to be had over the course of the mapset, but perhaps not quite as much as one might expect given the colorful welter of different visual themes, and in that sense I can't quite say that the set seems to be entirely free of 'filler' (though even the filler here is generally entertaining at least). For such an ambitious and complete work, it's also impressive just how relatively quickly Sunlust was conceived, produced, and completed (in a community culture where most of us are accustomed to megaWADs that aren't CPs taking years and years to finish), but that being the case it's also sometimes surprising how easy it is to tell which of the maps are older works and which are newer, despite the relatively concise dev time. All things considered, though, in Sunlust a very strong sense of identity has met a very a strong execution of concept, and so I truly do believe it when I say that this WAD is destined to join the pantheon of capital-C 'Classics' going forward--your Memento Moris, Alien Vendettas, Hell Revealeds, etc. Strange bedfellows, some might say....(perhaps the authors amongst them?), but, well....just wait and see.

My top 5 maps from the set, as usual in no particular order:
Map 28 -- Maelstrom
Map 14 -- Troglobite
Map 16 -- Lost Antiques
Map 18 -- Mu Cephei
Map 30 -- God Machine

Naturally, I can often judge how much I liked a mapset by how hard it is to make that list, and I had a really rough time of it this go-round. I was also aching to include 'Emerald Spire', 'Entering Aquatic Desert', 'The Womb', and 'Ruins of Skania' amongst others, almost to the point where you could swap anything up there out for any of them. Despite my 'no particular order' blurb, though, I do reckon 'Maelstrom' comes out on top as the uncontested single favorite for me here, though.