Halls of Eternal and Unending Torment

A fascinatingly amateurish map. Everything feels a little bit off in some way. Outdoor spaces are flat and oversized, with the player able to see and approach most monsters either from far outside their trigger range or from behind. The entire map has this boxy flat feel. If I weren't playing in VQuake and the inside didn't have rooms over rooms, this would feel right at home as an early user doom map.

On the inside all the proportions are off. Doors and stairways are undersized; the player can barely fit through most doorways and the hallways are littered with closed off doors about 2/3rds of the player height. Things are even worse for the monsters, frequently getting stuck or unable to path under the small doors and through the cramped corridors. Rooms are boxy, underdetailed, with very little texture variety. There's just enough there to have a sense of what the space is meant to be, but not enough to feel convincing in any way.

As the years march on, when I think back on my childhood home, or any of the schools I went to, they increasingly feel like this map. The general layout and shape of things is still there but the details get fuzzier and fuzzier. What colour were the walls? Did they have a skirting board? I'm sure there was a shelf here or there, but I couldn't tell you what shape it was, the colour, the books on it. I wonder if one day my memories will end up a little like this, the shape of something familiar with all the details blasted away by the sands of time. If I made a myhouse.wad or myschool.bsp, how different from this might it end up?

There is some sense that this might be deliberate. Getting to the roof and finishing the final encounter triggers a 'congratulation, you are winner' - an at this point decades old reference to the infamously broken Big Rigs: Over the road racing. I'm not sure if this tips the hand of the devloper, revealing a winking irony to the whole thing, or if I'm just reading way too much into it.

Is this a good map in any conventional sense? No. Would I recommend playing it? Also no. But would I recommend watching a video playthough? Still no. Ah, but would I recommend reading this excellent blog post about it? Still, sadly no. It does compel me though. It puts that little itch in my brain that makes me want to track down the author just to ask what the fuck compelled them to make this map in this way.

I should also say that for all my confusion, I can (fairly condfidently) assume this probably isn't deliberate. This is a map from the 'New Faces' section and I don't want to give the impression I'm some dickhead laughing at someone's first map. I am authentically interested by it, by its output, by whatever creative process led to it, by the emotions and experience it creates. It doesn't play well in any conventional sense, but there's more to making a map than that and this map stands out as one of the most memorable of the bunch.