Tower of Sorrow

Tower of sorrow is a really strong concept, pushed to a little bit longer than it ought.

There was a trend, I want to say in the mid/late 2010s, in big budget games to have THE DREAM SEQUENCE. If you've played one of them, this will seem like an immediately familiar description. Imagine our burly shooter man hero, on a quest to unlock a memory or delve through their own, or some else's psyche. This takes the form of THE VOID. Pieces of broken geometry, plucked from our experiences in the main game fly into place as we traverse THE VOID. Probably this is accompanied by fragments of audio, surfaced memories of people we've met along the way. Probably you played this in a far cry game.

Anyway, this map is the good version of that. The world has come undone. Whether this is a literal physical undoing, or some deeper spiritual malaise is left entirely unstated. What is clear is that all that's left is us, the fascists and the fragments of concrete and metal left to drift in the remaining void.

The problem with many of those big budget dream sequences is that they're obvious. They're dream sequences, but with none of the ambiguity or chaos that an actual dream or mind would present. They're basic video game emotions that you're told exactly how you ought to interpret by the game. The strength of Quake as a whole has always been its strength of emotion, revelling in its dark and brooding angst. It didn't tell you directly what you ought to feel though, it crafted it through looks and sounds; the oppressive atmosphere and overbearing monsters. This too is the strength of this map's presentation.

The void itself is this wonderful shade of boiled piss yellow, present at all times in the background. In the far distance, the silhouettes of more pieces of this shattered reality float out of reach. The music meanwhile has an aetherial quality. The faint ambient mix of high pitched pipes and soft humming reminds me, oddly, of Mario 64's infinite stair music. It makes me want to climb, to ascend this sickly dead world, to escape from a place that I assume smells at all times of sweat and boiled turnips.

The map struture, then, facilitates exactly this. You are always moving up. The traversable terrain is made up of a handful of repeating segments that you ascend vertically, seperated from each other by short stretches of horizontal platforming. The conceit of the combat then is that you're looping over the same structures repeatedly but filled with different selections of enemies, powerups, weapons and so on. Constantly remixing itself even as the environments repeat. In practice it can't quite always live up to the strength of this premise though. The spaces are a little too simple, even with the changes, to avoid feeling repetitious after a while. Sometimes this repetition works in the map's favour. The first segment of the map is a series of left hand turns as you make your way up and around the edges of a large tower. Each turn has a couple of different enemy types, hitting a rhythm where you know to expect something as you round each corner, but not exactly what. Elsewhere, especially towards the end, it feels a little stretched out and perfunctory. The rhythm becomes routine and the routine ends up a little monotonous.

Still, I would highly reccomend this map. Its appeals to emotion, to a gone away world and something lost are strong.

It also has this really wonderful animated finish flag at the end, and an optional combatless speedrun of the map as an ascending kill plane follows you up. Pretty neat.