#map jam

Or a village sieged by neon green acid underneath a purple sky, two of Halloween's signature colors.

Or even a map set inside and around a gigantic jack-o-lantern.

Jam 3's maps are kind of just... regular Quake maps, to some degree. I guess they're sometimes a little darker than usual, but after playing over half of them, there aren't very many that evoke the feeling of Halloween specifically. That's not entirely the Jam's fault, I guess. Until Doom 3, I'd say Quake 1 was the game that felt like it bore the most of iD's horror sensibilities -- its mixture of gothic, sci-fi and cosmic horror gave it a very strange tone, which lends itself very well to spooky maps.

Ironically, one of the very first maps I picked in the Jam was something called "Hall-o-Win" which both demonstrates my point and also acts as maximum catharsis: it's mostly just a series of very long hallways with power-ups at the end and a lot of monsters along the way. A slaughter map in other words, though it does gradually start asking you for more strategy than "blast everything and never stop moving."

But a theme in a lot of these maps is less Halloween and more just, like, complex mazes. It's probably the pressure of a deadline talking, but a lot of these maps seem to orbit around a single central room that must be scaled, solved, and traversed. Take "Blackvenom Retreat," the greenish map seen at the top of the post. Most of the map is in one central lake area, with three big cubist structures sitting above the water. It plays out like climbing a construction site, as you go up ladders and leap between buildings in search of crystals to power whatever this thing does.

Or "Abbeytoir", a candle lit mansion that feels more like it fell out of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin with its endless hallways and side rooms that all confusingly loop back in on each other. It's not a very big map, but combined with how dark it is, how similar a lot of the rooms look, and how everything has at least 3-5 exits, as I opened up most of the doors near the end of the map I completely lost my ability to navigate when everything blurred into endless stairs, hallways, and switches.

And then there's "Us," a conceptually haunting map where the map creator's body has been disassembled and scattered amongst Quake's brushes. A texture for his head and hair unwrap along the skyline, you'll find nipples you can push like buttons, and floating eyes that watch your every step. "Strange" is putting it mildly, but it too is mainly one big room where the puzzle is to climb up ramps and platforms in order to reach the exit.

But there is one map I unexpectedly fell in love with -- "Approach of the Second Sun." This map is good enough it practically feels like it's own whole separate game.

The story is that a second, dark sun is approaching our reality, casting its curse on the land. This provides the map with its unique visual style, where the fog is used to invert the light. Effectively, the closer something is to you, the darker it gets. As objects get further away, they fade into the white fog, making for a game of low visibility and eerie silhouettes. The map uses this in its favor, as you spend most of it navigating a ritual site littered with statues, with the twist being that not everything you encounter is actually a statue.

There are tells, of course. Living monsters have subtle idle animations, so if you pay attention closely, you can pick out what's inanimate and what's alive. But the map also knows this, and plays with that expectation sometimes, bringing certain statues to life when you least expect it. It makes you jumpy and paranoid every time you turn a corner and see the outline of a monster and wait for a worst case scenario that doesn't always happen. It's masterclass stuff, and the map is big enough that it took me almost an hour to ultimately solve (like a lot of the other maps, it is a little easy to get lost).