#phobos anomaly

As this, the last level of Doom Episode 1 opens, the player walks through a door to find herself looking down upon a room filled with enemies and explosive barrels. The enemies rush around the barrels, which the player is given quite a while to shoot, setting up a drawn-out moment of frantic excitement. As the barrels and enemies are detonated, the player is instilled with a feeling of intense power at the simplicity of her killings. She walks over the bodies of the enemies that have plagued her for the last 7 levels and turns a literal corner to exit the room. This corner-turn is the last twist in what has been, over the entirety of the episode, an increasingly twisted and convoluted path—from here to the end of the level is essentially a straight line. This symbolic completion of the first 7 levels allows the player to step into what is going to be an entirely new narrative space, although some mood setting will still have to be done. Stairs are descended, a door opened, and the next, mood-setting chunk of the level is entered. Enemies rush the player from rooms to either side, making her (or at least me) jump a bit. Her power-surge is set aside for the time being, and replaced with that familiar feeling of danger that colors the rest of the game. Exploring the rooms, she finds ammo and buffs in excess, which by now are known to be a warning of things to come. This, as well as the back-and-forth flow of navigating these rooms, sets a suspenseful and preparatory mood. When she leaves these rooms, she sees a long hallway, preceded and exaggerated by a very small, candle-lit room. This dramatic preamble concludes with a red-walled elevator, one which capitalizes on the player’s inability to look up, creating the highest apex of suspenseful build-up for the Barons. The Baron fight itself has a certain narrative flow, dictated by the star-shaped arena in which the fight takes place. The player generally benefits in the fight from being far away from the Barons, due to the necessity of dodging their ranged attacks. This, along with the ammo and buff rewards placed in the points of the stars, causes the player to back herself into these tight corners. An inevitable rising tension comes with the Barons’ approach, followed by the player’s dramatic escape into a different section of the star. This becomes an organically generated cycle of repeating narrative arcs. The Barons are downed, and the walls of the star fall in what becomes the next narrative chunk of the level: a symbolic reinforcement of the victory. But it’s a slightly more complicated feeling of victory, since the opening of the walls and release of the player to the outdoors embodies not just freedom, but also the desolation and loneliness suggested by the mountainous backdrop. When the player finishes revelling in her new empowerment, she presses a button to slowly raise a staircase to the level exit. Here her control is removed in a way analogous to the controlled cutscenes at the end of Super Mario Bros, and a similar effect is achieved. The player is forced to lose control and watch a symbolic display of victory and completion; this makes for a very satisfying moment. In the final scene of the level, the player is pulled through the exit portal into somewhere dark and foreign, where their serene moment is suddenly interrupted by horrible, bloody death. A text conclusion pops up, and feeds the player their narrative resolution of Episode 1. The tie-in to the next episode is made, and the game tries to sell the full Doom game to the player. The overall narrative of the level moves linearly through these 5 sections: 1) Symbolic conclusion of maps 1 through 7 2) Mood setting—preparation, suspense 3) Baron fight: tense action in continuous cycles 4) Release, victory, satisfaction. Opening up, and removal of control 5) Narrative twist, cliff-hanger, tie-in to the next episode