I felt un-welcome immediately! My
back was soaked in cold sweat, my nerves wrecked and tortured by the fear
that was growing stronger and stronger within me. Not only that, but the
paranoia had already set in! Welcome to the small world of Crestfallen!
One thing which I really love in
this day and age of Doom editing, is the unwritten understanding which
exists amongst designers that a level must have a certain amount of
atmosphere and mood to be worth anything. Designers all around the world are
thrilled with Doom's ability to create any environment possible; especially
the sinister and evil. Crestfallen hits the spot and delivers a gaming
experience rarely seen in wads today with a tremendously scary and dark
atmosphere. Although not perfect it really keeps you on the edge all the
time. There's absolutely no chance to relax and taking a pause won't do you
any good just like charging brainlessly into one of the transporters will
almost certainly get you killed. Monsters are never where you last saw them
and attacks from behind which delivers a constantly health threatening
situation. Legions of monsters aren't waiting for you but those few which
Crestfallen hold will almost certainly do their best to kill you and along
with a tight and often very narrow architecture those few become very
challenging indeed. Its a very non-linear level which the absent keys takes
care of: You can play Crestfallen in many ways which is very rare these
days.
Crestfallen reminds me of a very
small arena which you are let into. In order to win your freedom you must
fight your way through these few corridors with a challenge factor depending
much on how you choose to play the wad. I'm not sure whether or not Martin
intended it to be and feel like this, but the small size of the map, its
metal textures/flats and its darkness gives you that un-welcome feeling of
"we will hunt you down and kill you!" and "you can't
win!" which an arena has. All we need is a furious, madly cheering crowd
of futuristic looking half-insane people and the illusion is complete.
The size is the map's weakness. Its
tolerable weakness that is, because it is not really that relevant, however
I just feel that the idea and concept and the shear quality which
Crestfallen exhibits deserves something bigger. It's just over to fast. But
it is a matter of taste thus it won't influence the score. The score is in
the higher scale because of good texture alignment, monster placement,
shading, lighting, ammo balance and a high level of originality.
