An Infernal Place (INFERNAL.WAD)

AN INFERNAL PLACE

by Pablo Dictter

Pablo was a boundless fountain of youthful energy around 2000. He made a ton of very small levels, the earliest of which are ferreted away in his personal archive. Some were never uploaded to /idgames, instead appearing on Doom WAD Station. An Infernal Place is a slightly weirder situation; it was originally released as an E1M1 replacement on DWS, where it is still available as such. The version on /idgames is v1.1, a Doom II conversion with a few alterations. Nowadays we typically think of maps as either stolidly for one game type or the other but it's not all that unusual when you consider how many 1994 authors converted some of their PWADs to Doom II. This review is for the original publication of An Infernal Place, timestamped 03/04/01. It is purportedly meant for play in a Boom-compatible port.

This was apparently part of one of Pablo's grand aspirations, a project with the title Good V/S Evil. There isn't much indication of what the story was, how big it was going to be, or what kind of themes you could have expected. Apart from what we have in INFERNAL, at least. The setting appears to be a stretch of dark brick Deimos-style techbase that is deep in the throes of Satanic corruption. You know, malevolent red glowing fissures in the walls suspiciously shaped like crosses; pulsating organic growth bursting out of the floor; that sort of stuff. You fight your way through a tiny microcosm of suffering and then exit via a teleporter.

Dictter was a fairly one-dimensional author at this point in his career. He made short levels with a linear progression path that guided you through some of the most thoroughly-greebled corridors that you've ever seen. In its OG Doom incarnation, this level is functionally similar to Pablo's Warehouse, which was timestamped two months earlier in the same year. The main aesthetic difference is the color scheme: dark brick here, green marble and metal there. INFERNAL makes even less sense since there is no justification as to why another set of similarly-winding corridors are littered with storage crates. The one "outdoor" area has no apparent real-world purpose, instead sporting a nightmarish metal construct that exists solely to contain a key.

The combat is pure corridor shooter with a heavy focus on shotgun play. Ammo is very tight to begin with but you start to build up shotgun shells once you massacre some zombies and the plasma gun appears in the outer yard. As a spacious locale it offers the most potential as a combat scene but opposition is, to say the least, sparse. It's amusing to see a level so short using all three keys, especially since you have zero chance of getting lost in the limited square footage. I suppose that locked doors offer a better indication of what you need in order to open them and, should you find the key first, leave no question as to what it affects.

The remnants of the project involve a few sound changes and a baffling nerf of your starting pistol ammo to 30 bullets instead of the bountiful 50. Pablo decided to change the pain and dud "use" sounds. I'm not a fan of the use noise because there is far too much thoughtfulness in the delivery of the "HMMMM" that seems at odds with the intended atmosphere per the choice of a moody Hexen track.  I thought that the loud, groaning platform sound would be neat as a supernatural stinger and it does herald important changes but it loses its edge by the time that you finish your jaunt through the base. The lack of any scenery in Hexen's cloudy, red sky - and the decaying nature of the sole outdoor area with no backing landscape - suggests that this particular segment of tech facility is floating in the void.

Pablo sure could make a corridor back in 2001. He also did a fairly good job of stringing them together into short levels. If you like bite-sized, low-impact Doom adventures then you could do a lot worse than the minute or so that it takes to clear INFERNAL.

HMMM. LOOKS LIKE I HAVE THE ZOM.