Plutosis

No saving, UV, continuous (but I pretty much died at least once every single map, so like pistol start 1.5)

Port: GLBoom+ 2.5.1.4 -complevel 4

Total IGT: 0:36:38

Personal Difficulty Evaluation: 0.9 (1 = Plutonia, 2 = Ancient Aliens)

Personal Rating: 6.9 (Round up to like 4 stars)

A short mapset with Plutonia aesthetic and design. All maps contain less than 100 kills, but the traps are actually pretty nasty. I would say the difficulty is above average of Plutonia, with not too much resource to work around.

The most deadly parts are Arch-vile traps. Most of these traps have the player surrounded by many directions, so maybe you need to pick between hitting by Arch-vile and hitting by something else. Even though some of them you can quickly escape to the previous room, mostly it's a long way, so it's not very easy to perform.

The gaps for the player to jump are a little bit to wide in my opinion. There's one jump on Map04, I have to use SR50 to make it. Probably you can make it with SR40, but it is pretty precise. Also, there's a trap on Map04 that the floor doesn't correctly raise and you can drop down there and stuck. With these, 0.1 is subtracted from the rating.

4 maps = 4 stars

...

I just wanted to say that. It's more like 3.5/5. 

Compared to Plutonia, Plutosis is quieter and more ruminative, with a lot of silence and trekking through empty spaces en route to the next (often devious) trap. Despite the lowered bombast, these small maps (average monster count = 63) feel just as harsh. The scarce health gives you a much slimmer margin for error. Hitscanners lurk and think you owe them money. Memfis's archviles are deathly afraid of rejection, appearing only when they have you fenced-in for awkward small talk.

I found a lot of the traps cool because they set up interactions you can employ specific 'moves' against. Instead of just generalized tactical tests like "can you fight two revenants on a bridge?" or "can you quickly read a mixed-species reveal and react with good target prioritization?" -- which there is still plenty of -- you're sometimes rewarded by noticing that an arachnotron can be weaponized to distract an archvile you're given tenuous cover from, or something like that. 

The layouts try to be clever and interlace in smart ways (it's that sort of thing where your first visit to a room might be on ground level and involve battling monsters on ledges, and your second visit might use those ledges as part of a completely different path). Scale and objective placement seem misjudged, though, so I don't think that worked amazingly. Did a lot of silent backtracking over spacious expanses because I got to a key door/switch way over on one side before I had the key. Those sorts of lulls would have played out smoother in a mapset with a stronger focus on incidental combat or aesthetics. 

Oh yeah, in one map there is a

Solid set of old school Plutonia maps. Some cool ideas to be found here, although I think the maps could have benefited from slightly more generous health offerings.