The DWmegawad Club plays: Reverie

MAP04

A lot more lateral thinking and exploring needed in this map than the last. Got stuck for a bit with the timed elevator to reach the yellow key, but worked it out after a while. At least there were plenty of rad suits around for those of us who end up running in circles for a while in all the green stuff.

Missed the 'gimme' SSG early on until quite late in the map. Finding it earlier would certainly have made the early HKs less tiresome, and probably saved ammo too.

Only found one of the secrets (the early berserk), but managed to 'bump' the RL off its podium, so I got the benefit of two.

Map 4 : Divine Judgment

This level is a real difficulty leap , and a big maze compared to the three first maps. You must explorate a large castle of bricks flooded with slime. This level reminds me a lot of Hell Revealed 2's levels for some reasons , maybe because the layout is very squarish and the brown and metal textures are widely used. I liked the mine with water and the way we obtain the blue key. This is a difficult level if you play for the first time. I've nothing against maps with low ammo but the lack of ammo is here very blatant , or at least you must know where the rare boxes of shells or bullet boxes are otherwise you run out of ammo very quickly. The weapons' locations are pretty weird , the SSG in the slime and the rocket launcher on a gray "pedestal" seem to be secrets but they are almost mandatory for the progression. At least, we can move quite easily in this level thanks to plenty radsuits but a little more ammunition would not have been refused, entire areas contain neither health nor ammunition and it's quite frustrating.

04 - this is where Reverie officially begins in my mind. The previous levels are short, not particularly memorable, and look like valkiriforce creations more than anything. But this... It's a "proper length" map with a strong mood (that music!), and here you can finally see the author trying to become someone else and doing a very convincing and easily recognizable Jens Nielsen impression. Highlights include the starting sequence full of triggers (very oldschool), the soulsphere room, and the red key trap that punishes you for trying to escape. I'm not sure if such a strict ammo balance was necessary, but it definitely increased the tension. For some reason I dislike the final area, maybe not enough contrast there.

Map04 "Divine Judgment" [UV pistol-start] - 100% kills, 42% secret

Well, that was a doozy and a step in difficulty. After rather peculiar start, we get straight into some nasty business in the largest map so far, with some nice visuals. Although largely brown and filled with nukage, it does take break from it with a water-run cavern. 

While enemies are still mostly weak hitscanners, some hellknigths and cacodemons are mixed in. The traps are getting particularly nasty, with memorable being the red key one.  

map04: Divine Judgement
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

A small difficulty ramp up with a few nastier traps than on the first 3 maps. A large and tricky set of secrets to discover on this map. It took me a better part of an hour to uvmax it. I finished off all the enemies with only 2 secrets found and spent most of the time hunting down the remaining elusive secrets. I was reluctant to use the rad suits until I'd picked up all 3 keycards. In retrospect this was unnecessary as ample rad suits are provided.

MAP03 - “The Cup of Wrath”
What happened here? It seems like some principles of making an interesting level, with variation in rooms and combining rooms into interesting areas was just casually disregarded? Instead we have a string of repeated bridges and circular rooms. This level feels retro but for the wrong reasons. As others say, I presume it must be deliberate, although it's not quite such an obviously iconoclastic map as say Map24 of Doom 2 Reloaded, (which if anyone recalls is basically just one long labyrinthine corridor).

I initially thought with the metal walkway that this map was going to be a remake of "The Gantlet", but the rest of the  map is quite different (and less interesting to be brutally honest) and the textfile also rebuts this. I guess the author took pity on those of us who failed at finding the secrets in map02 though with the cliché first door behind you trick. Not that that's out of place in an old-school wad.

I will complement the author on being kind enough to colour code the double-sided teleporters early on - if you're going to do multiple sided teleports than I think this is good practice, and I quite like the spiral staircase under the walkway and then across it. But otherwise this is not a level that hugely impresses me.

MAP04: Divine Judgement

UV/Pistol start/No saves

Deaths: 0

I liked this one, a bit non-linear and perfectly reminiscent to the 90's style: switches behind the start point, brown, obscure secrets, brown, and basically the whole atmosphere, and brown. Others pointed out the tightness of ammo, it got a bit hairy at some moments, but if you find the early berserk you'll be fine. Aside from the many chaingunners and shotgunners, it's not problematic, this is where the wad ramps up in difficulty, and the inclusion of more beasts won't necessarily opaque the threat that comes from the hitscan fuckers. Oh, agree with Memfis about the music, strong and fitting, probably one of my favourites in the set. 

From now on I'll be posting my demos directly instead of explaining the secrets, these are no deaths nor saves runs after re-learning my routes (the tally in spoilers corresponds to my very first run of the day). Here are maps 01-04:

MAP04 - “Divine Judgment”

a map with a surprisingly complex architecture comes right after the linear, simple map03. it's a puzzle of a map in the spirit of eternal doom, and it can kill you for failing to solve its puzzles, because there's little ammo, and you have to find it. starts with a bit of corridor puzzles that could have been left out, imo. the monotonous, droning music was well suited, as the map resembled quake with its brown walls. then i held my ground with a shotgun against several cacos and imps on the metal-grilled stairs, but ran out of ammo when facing the first baron. baron vs shotgun, we had enough of this last month. so i went left and downstairs from the start, only to be trolled with the ssg on a pedestal, while i got lowered into slime with just some bullets left. 

so i thought valkiri wouldn't make such a dumb map, and started it new. fought the cacos again valiantly and fell off the stairs... and found the ssg below. oh yeah. still, i had to guard my ammo closely. found the rocket launcher and another secret at the yellow key, leading to a gallery of sergeants (which i had sniped earlier) by listening to closing sounds. and the chaingunners spawning in my way at the red key were neat, but i didn't think of running away. i had collected some stuff at this point, so the slime was the greatest danger to health. the radsuits were all used already by my running around with no clue. it took me about 20 minutes to finish this map, but with 100% kills and secrets, which i found satisfying.

MAP04 - “Divine Judgment”

The first sizeable map that you can really bite into. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the largely brown aesthetic here, especially coming off playing The Darkening. The layout was cool, and gameplay is a nice mix of traps and well-placed hitscan turrets to pressure the player. Not sure how I feel about that meme-tier RL though. Had 3 rockets to kill a Hell Knight with, and then a box near the exit after everything is dead. The dark caves were an interesting shift from the brown rooms.

MAP04: Divine Judgement

Eternity Engine, UV-Max, Pistol Starts, Saveless

Featuring a jump in both size and difficulty, this non-linear map stands in contrast to Reverie's previous offerings. It ramps up the traps while maintaining a strict ammo balance. Without the Super Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, or Berserk Pack, the map does tend to feel grindy though. The non-linearity lends itself to a puzzle-map as well. Combining that with the decent 'brown' aesthetic and moody midi, we have a rather memorable map. Unfortunately, the Rocket Launcher is rather useless, and the placement of ammo near the 'exit' does seem like awkward balance for continuous play...

map03 fda

i actually enjoyed this, despite agreeing with others that its quite linear. my only real complaint is the only 'good' strat i found for the BK trap was to sort of hide and cheese it from below, which felt a bit lame? what did everyone else do?

map04 fda

quite a sloggy ssg map here - good atmospheric start and good midi but quickly descends into some of my least favourite doom things: nukage, walkways above nukage, and fighting enemies while on walkways around nukeage (so basically nukage then). even if its 5dmg it still annoys me to fall off and have to get back up again.

MAP04: Divine Judgement

37:53 | 100% Kills | 66% Items | 71% Secrets

A sprawling adventure appears! Doomguy used SSG! It's super effective! Sadly, this Doomguy did not find the SSG (or RL) until secret-hunting after clearing all the baddies out. The backpacks were nice to get, though. Otherwise it was all shotgun/chaingun action, plus the occasional chainsawing of a pinkie to conserve. Ammo was pretty tight; I would alternate between guns as my shells or bullets began running low. And the pace was frenetic from the get-go. I was running for my life early on, and at one point was down to 9% health, sneaking around corners and trying to snipe monsters before I could get got. Fun times. Those secrets tho! I am seriously having Metal Mansion PTSD flashbacks over here. I missed two. One was the start area berserk (I hate you for not letting me go back into the starting area once leaving it, VF) and the other? No clue. But I got the near-invisible switch installed inside the back of a pillar! >:( And lot of "hit a switch and run around the corner and up the stairs and through the door"-style secrets (or, in the case of the yellow key, mandatory progression!) which I absolutely loathe, because as a pure keyboarder those are just so difficult. I do have to confess I loved the teleporter secret near the yellow key, once I figured it out: hit the switch, run up the stairs, sit on the YK wall so it stays lowered, open the door and get back to the YK wall, then dash back out and down the hall to the teleporter. Just a bunch of shotguns for all that work, but I have a feeling I'll need the shells later on!

MAP03: The Cup of Wrath

100% kills, 2/2 secrets

Agree with the consensus that this map is very oddly linear, to the point of literally being room-hallway-room-hallway in one A->B path, without the minimap even trying to hide it. Weak secrets (why a pointless minimap?) and the only potentially interesting fight was the blue key ambush which I promptly cheesed by running back upstairs and abusing the fast door that monsters can't open.

MAP04: DIVINE JUDGEMENT|99% KILLS|

What a great map and what a spike up in quality for Reverie. If there ever were a true start for this mapset, I'd have to put it here. It's a really fun 90s themed labyrinth with crazy-hard secrets, winding paths, backtracking, and weird layouts. Normally, I'd hate something like this. But Reverie does it right. Nothing is too annoying or too hard to figure out, it just takes a bit of map-checking and puzzling over things. 

The look of the map is pretty neat, consisting of this brown-metal aesthetic with a super neat detour to some strangely Alien Vendetta-esque caverns. The final set of rooms is great too. Other than that, you're gonna be dealing with narrow passageways, nukage, and hidden switches. 

Difficulty wasn't something I ended up agreeing with everyone else. Granted, this could've been just because I wanted to explore around a bit and found a few handy things, not to mention I went in with the pretext of scarce ammo and conserved quite a bit. Even then, I still didn't think there were too many trouble spots sans a trap or two. Admittedly though, it was harder than the other maps thus far.

All in all, it's a pretty dang nice map. Well, nice enough to where I was able to write this much about it, anyway. I can only hope the level of quality goes up from here!

MAP04: I Love the start with that sequence to open the door and so get into the level. There are quite some Memento Mori feels here, and in many other places too. It's the first map that actually delivers something, the progression gets more engaging and I liked that many secrets send you to areas that you can see but you can't go there. I think that the standout encounter happens at the first cages with the cacodemons, and then the map sort of stays on the same line.

6 hours ago, Magnusblitz said:

MAP03: The Cup of Wrath

100% kills, 2/2 secrets

 

Weak secrets (why a pointless minimap?) 

Yeah why one would need a mini map on such a minimalistic map was amusing  ; )

MAP04 Divine Judgment

So here's where I think Reverie actually begins. We've got a medium-sized layout, some actually pretty hard secrets, and quite a few hell knights mixed with the hitscanner/imp crowds, making it both fun and frustrating, depending on the terrain and all that. Yeah, not a fan of the nukage in this map, but it's a necessity for secrets. Don't miss one particular switch in the main nukage pond. And then there's the yellow key matter, which can be tough to figure out the first time, but it not only allows you to get the key, there's another window of the exact same sector that leads to a secret area (too bad nothing of MAJOR importance was in that secret though). Breathholding music track too. I should mention, a nice break from the rockin' music tracks of the previous maps (and remember UR MAP05?, both that map and MAP01's music track sound very similar).

MAP03: The Cup of  Wrath

UV Pistol start,  1/2 secrets

Ammo was quite limited for the first part of the map, you are supplied with a chainsaw soon enough but have little other options to tackle the monsters. The blue key trap almost got me killed but I managed to abuse the tiny line of sight blockers to get the chaingunners stop firing on me. The linearity makes this feel more like a filler map than anything else.

MAP04: Divine Judgement

UV Pistol start, 5/7 secrets

Definitely a step up from last level in terms of fun and difficulty. There are some really well made and tricky secrets here. The yellow key took me embarrassingly long to figure out. I am not terribly fond of not being able to backtrack to the starting room for the berserk secret.

MAP04: Divine Judgment

I'd like to join the consensus that this is the point at which the WAD really gets going, the three preceding maps feeling in retrospect like an extended introduction before this map at last delivers some exploratory meat for the player to get their teeth into.  The musical intensity of those first three maps gets dialed back, too, with their distorted guitars giving way here to synths that throb and drift to lend an eerie, menacing atmosphere to the proceedings.  I think @gaspe's Memento Mori comparison is quite apt, as the extensive brick textures place the level in that nebulous but delightful not-quite-city, not-quite-castle thematic space.  Normally I'm not a fan of such extensive nukage but here, with the generous provision of radiation suit, it's just one more angle with which the map keeps up the pressure on the player without feeling punishing or tedious; it's an impetus to keep moving, not a health tax.

MAP05: Substance

UV/Pistol start/No saves

Deaths: 0

A bit shorter and more compact than map 04, still very brown and some parts with lava. While combat is straightforward and low pressure, it managed at one point to leave me under 20% health, I think it was at last section, a couple of max-damage green fireballs hit me. Not sure about this last section, the caged hell knights are barely not notable, and the secret rocket launcher seemed pointless from a pistol start perspective (some continuous players might appreciate it, but it's still useless if you have already killed everything). On the other side, the midi gave me TNT vibes, it reminded me to map 07's midi (which I'm listening right now and it is a little bit similar at the beginning). Anyway, nice map.

map05: Substance
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

Not a lot to say about this map. The secrets were fairly straightforward and the monsters fairly routine. The most dangerous area is the large stronghold before the exit. Providing a rocket launcher at the end of the map though where it gets little or no use is rather lame though.

MAP05

Not a fan of either the 'big loop' that includes the blue key – it's just a lot of straight ahead fights in relatively drab locations – or of the final battle, in this map.

They're both the type of combat that is found throughout almost all of this map, and it is not an especially dynamic type, to my mind. You're basically almost always constrained in narrow or otherwise obstructed areas. I'm sure this is quite deliberately a theme, testing your ability to dodge in such situations, but for my tastes it is not an especially fun time, especially given the relatively high HK count to grind through.

Looks-wise, the map is fine, if very square and a bit short on light variation.

Map 05 : Substance

A very fun medium sized level ! It's an another brown themed level but this one is narrower so it gives you a significant advantage with the super shotgun. Health and ammo are pretty limited but killing zombie troops with the SSG is a real pleasure. The architecture is a bit monotonous in my opinion , the aesthetic of this level is easily forgettable but valkiriforce put some cool little details. I liked the metal horizontal bars used on the ceiling for instance. Secrets were generally not very hard to find , the soulsphere's secret was creative and fun.

However I agree with Capellan , the layout is always very square. I would like the maps to be a little more "curved" , I know this is a vanilla wad but the limitations are not too restrictive to oblige making only square rooms.

05 - one of these levels where the music is so cool that it's hard to even pay attention to anything else. Seriously, putting jazzy motives in Doom midis is the coolest thing you can do (just ask Bobby Prince), and everything is so catchy here... Nice Memento Mori feel, but some parts seem a bit disconnected maybe.

Map04 "Substance" [UV pistol-start] - 97% kills, 33% secret

I really start to feel Reverie really loves its chaingunners. Although I figure it is more about trying to not hurry enemy introductions. This time we meet lovely meatball delmon and associates, who unfortunately gets dispatched pretty easily. 

Certainly shorter than previous level, I was actually quite bit surprised when it ended.  Can't say I liked it as much as previous map, it felt bit light on substance - it didn't have anything particularly memorable. 

Gotta agree tho, music is pretty nice. 

2 hours ago, Memfis said:

05 - one of these levels where the music is so cool that it's hard to even pay attention to anything else. Seriously, putting jazzy motives in Doom midis is the coolest thing you can do (just ask Bobby Prince), and everything is so catchy here... Nice Memento Mori feel, but some parts seem a bit disconnected maybe.

sounds like an upbeat version of a requiem midi to me, iirc map11 there. excellent. i was rocking my chair while playing.

MAP05 - “Substance”

you start again where you left the last map, a continuity technique i approve of. it's a tech complex scattered over a rocky surface, with one accessible loop and one locked part. once you have completed the first loop and got the key you land right at the locked gate. a bit square and underdetailed tbh, but: i loved this map for its oldschool feel. it could have been in tnt. especially the secret purple teleporter. also the music! beautiful! 

former humans of all kinds are the most numerous enemy. gameplay doesn't drag on as most enemies go down quick (there's nothing heavier than a knight, save for a lone baron near the end). only the caged knights don't add much and only take time to kill. there's a soulsphere in this final area, however i was in a much better state now than with all those hitscanners before. the rocket launcher is a gift to the continuous player, i guess, as it's pretty useless right before the exit. 

MAP05 Substance

There's a nice, subtle balance between the medium-sized maps and the shorter ones. And Reverie's maps are honestly not that long (nope, not even MAP31 is long). The previous map was of medium size, but this one is considerably shorter, and plays quite well too. That first secret can be reached in at least two different ways, by falling in the gully or by hidden teleporter. You can even straferun across the gully, which I did multiple times because I wanted to. The perimeter areas are quite well-designed, as is the green/gray area near the end, with a couple of mostly easy secrets and gameplay.

17 minutes ago, NuMetalManiak said:

MAP05 Substance

 

That first secret can be reached in at least two different ways, by falling in the gully or by hidden teleporter. 

haha. and i thought i'm so cool for noticing that crack in the rock... while falling into the gully would obviously only cost health and get me back to the starting point  :p

MAP04: Divine Judgment

99% kills, 4/7 secrets

I can see why people say "this is where it gets going" since this is a marked improvement in complexity and design from the first three. Quite a lot to do here and an interesting level to traverse, requiring some thinking. Didn't find all the secrets either, so clearly more to do. I do wish I had found the SSG and RL earlier, as some of the combat is a bit grindy with just the single shotty and chaingun, but overall it wasn't bad. Chaingunner bridge ambush near the red key was probably the best bit of combat. Probably one of my least favorite color schemes too with all that boring brown, but the layout makes up for it.

Might as well play ahead since the rest of the thread is apparently on Aussie time...

MAP05: Substance

100% kills, 2/3 kills

Despite the name I feel this map was lacking in it. My thoughts largely echo @Capellan's, a lot of the combat is "plot monsters in front of the player in a square room or hallway" design which gets a bit rote after awhile, and the final area largely feels like mop-up work. Level is also very square, more than it needs to be, and manages to have a bit of a constricted feel considering how short the sky-floor distance is in some areas.