Soulcage (SOULCAGE.WAD)

SOULCAGE

by Mike Alfredson aka "Use3D"

Use3D has been a supporting player in the Doom community for ages. He is recognizable in the honor rolls for the first three levels of the Community Chest series, Doom the Way id Did and its Ultimate expansion, and even Back to Saturn X's Episode 2. The first episode release of his Nilla Doom is a perennial contender for underrated WAD lists. He started building his solo megaWAD as early as 1997 and has released various rejects from the whole, most recently a spate in 2019. I don't think that Soulcage is one of these, though. As Mike's very first level, this MAP13 replacement was crafted in 1995. It looks as though Alfredson had independently released it, perhaps on a personal website, around the same time as his Hell Pit and Deep Core 1 back in 2004. It finally made its way to /idgames about fifteen years later.

Mike has very little contextual information to offer about Soulcage apart from disparaging it for being, in his eyes at least, "ugly". Alfredson is ostensibly his own worst critic, perhaps part of the reason why the full version of Nilla Doom has yet to materialize. By my own reckoning I have merely dabbled in the '95 era of PWADcraft but feel comfortable in saying that this cooks pretty hard. The one glaring fault is an untextured wall found in an early Hell knight alcove. Aesthetically the level has no unified style, instead functioning as one of those hodgepodge maps with individually distinct areas as you move from section to section. Some of the monster sconces and things have an air of the surreal with scrolling wall textures that suggest the bending of reality.

Soulcage may lack a unified aesthetic but it is thematically sound. Virtually every section features monsters that are separated from the player by some kind of barrier that they are nonetheless capable of attacking through. This could be something as simple as the fairly mundane imp cages glimpsed in the starting area but also includes another early room where a half-height wall splits you off from a mob of zombies. The player enjoys softer but similarly restrictive hazards as Alfredson has splashed severe, 20% damage floors throughout the map. Granted, there’s a rad suit or two to make use of as well as a few invul spheres that go hand in hand with Cyberdemon encounters.

The restriction doesn't just apply to toxic terrain. The inauspicious opening starts the player out in a closet, presaging the constriction and cramped playing spaces that you must maneuver through, even as early as the sewer that immediately follows. Modern design philosophy is more weighted toward keeping the player from getting hung up on level geometry in order to facilitate smoother player movement and making the monsters the primary obstacles. I find it to be perfectly fair here, though, and in other slower-paced PWADs that echo Doom's dungeon crawler roots. Your mileage may vary if you drop down into the southwestern portion and eat a surprise Cyberdemon rocket before you can secure the invul sphere.

That's one of the accessibility issues with this classically-styled gameplay, I suppose. Occasionally you're thrust into a save-or-die situation and must react to the best of your abilities. And then, err, reload as the case may be. Some of the discussion around difficulty centers around whether or not encounters or situations are "fair", the extent of which will obviously depend on the experience and skill of the players involved. In this sense, an encounter that is unfair has nothing to do with whether players can eventually triumph. The concern is whether they feel as though they had a chance without any prior knowledge. It's a very real concern when considering your target audience as an author.

Soulcage doesn't have a lot of these types of situations (not that your average dungeon crawler map made extensive use of them). The zombie pen battle feels like it's set up to push you into an alcove filled with beefy monsters in order to find cover. The room was so dark, though, that I had no idea that the side-chamber was there until after I'd dealt with the former humans. The outdoor yard to the northwest has a decidedly modern feel to its star encounter as a platform-bound Cyberdemon provides suppression fire during a hefty teleporter invasion. What got me here was a teleporter that leaves you worshipping at an arachnotron-guarded altar and shotgun guys in boiling blood at your sides.

This was not a required jaunt, but teleporters figure fairly heavily into the level's progression. The layout is actually broken into three isolated areas that are only linked together via telepads. The arrangement may leave the player doubly confused as you can find the blue and yellow keys before ever seeing their associated doors, which are found at the other end of teleporters. The optional transporters fulfill functions like taking you to a secret area or returning you from the sawtooth drop into the southwestern cistern. The previously-mentioned warp to the arachnotron isn't necessarily a trap as it allows you turn the passage over the nearby damage floor into a one-way trip. That isn't quite how it worked out for me, however.

If you've been keeping tally then you may have figured out that there are no less than two Cyberdemons in this level. Alfredson is a very generous dungeon master, however, and supplies abound. There are several invul spheres as well as BFGs to be found as well as megaspheres and even a rad suit. You don't even need to blow ammo on the second Cybie as a teleporter in that leg of the map exists mainly as a means to telefrag it. Players can afford to be a little reckless and all the super-thin wall arrangements and cages make it just as hard for the monsters to chase them. Anyone who fears Doom II's stranger creatures has little to fear here. The sole appearing arch-vile is a sitting duck in its Soulcage enclosure.

This is a pretty good 1995 map in the slower-paced style. I had a lot of fun poking around and unravelling the layout and its surprise encounters. If you are at all enamored of the ponderous but punchy pacing found early in the community's history then you absolutely ought to give Soulcage a shot.

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