006 - "Sheer Poison" (shpo1.wad) - for doom.exe

find prboom+ combatible demos for Sheer Poison here!

(music: POGCHAMP.MID)

the map:

Made in 2015. Trying to cast "doomguy" as a flawed character instead of a joke superhero by putting him in a shellshock situation, where superiors take credit for his work and apologize for his strange behaviour by putting him in quarantine for the rest of his life and telling him that none of his exploits ever happened. In an induced coma the damaged marine goes on some more dreamy, metaphysical adventures. "Sheer Poison" makes you use the pistol for its first extended encounter, which earned it some ire on release, but anyone who played beyond that point really seemed to like it; Doomworld has a yearly feature called the Cacoawards where a small committee picks a number of outstanding wads&mods of the year and I'm happy to have received one for this work! The map is big, with several major areas to explore or ignore, all made in the relatively primitive WinDEU 5.24. There's a light story involving different levels of doomguy's consciousness talking to each other, encouraging himself when he thinks his way through a mental block or chastising himself for missing the chance. This is related to the player very hazily, all open to interpretation and all done with badly-drawn textures. If you do everything right (which means doing a completionist sweep of the map, finding all three keys and not accidentally slipping fully into oblivion) then you get to blow up Elon Musk's brain. Let's say he was a UAC science guy at the time, or something. I don't wanna gloat but I feel like I anticipated the Musk pile-on by a number of years. o:) If you approach this level without the impulse to entertain its weirdness, its irritating combat and its puzzle level status then you will get almost nothing out of it; come in with the Eternal Doom mind-set and you'll do fine. The last map I made in an editor other than GZDoom Builder or Doom Builder X!

Read the Cacoaward review of this map here!

Read KMX's review of this map here!

the music:

Chaotic and highly chromatic cartoon prog with some fairly foreboding chords, an overall oppressive atmosphere which sometimes lapses into a jazzy nonsense groove. Needless to say it is not _precisely_ Doom-friendly. If I have a criticism of it it's that it loops too soon so there's more chaos than groove - this is a long level (vdgg's great max demo playthrough takes over half an hour) so I should've milked the tune for a little more variation and mood instead of putting it on repeat so quickly!


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