Bloodworks (BLUDWRKS.WAD)

BLOODWORKS

by Bob "brad_tilf" Larkin

Bob Larkin is the webmaster of the Doom Wad Station, one of the oldest hubs of Doom diaspora still knocking around the internet. He also has his own bibliography of PWADs! Back before I wrote any reviews I think that I had randomly picked his Endgame project to try out. I was... deeply confused. If you ask him what his best WAD is, though, he'll almost certainly say Bloodworks, and probably give a shoutout to Mitnal. BLUDWRKS is a MAP03 replacement for Doom II. I think that the source port recommendation basically boils down to "limit-removing". The GL ports of the day didn't know what to do with the software renderer tricks, I guess, but times have changed and this looks pretty much as it was originally intended in GZDoom as well as ZDoom.

You're a soldier against Hell and your squadron got wiped out. You were taken along with your dead comrades and wake up among their bodies in some sort of abattoir. Once you come to, you scout out your position and secure some weapons. You quickly realize between the sounds of machinery and the sanguine sloshing below that this is some kind of processing facility that the demons use to extract blood. Like, I always just sort of assumed that blood was a de facto nightmare fluid in Stygian topography. Apparently they have an entire industry based around bleeding the souls of the damned and then mulching the bodies for, idk, demon kibble. Who knew! It stinks to high heaven but you need to fight your way through the Bloodworks in order to escape.

This is a very short and dense map. The big selling point of BLUDWRKS as a limit-removing level is that a lot of painstaking work has been done to create faux catwalks and other bits of three-dimensional geometry that you can walk under. This is the sort of midtexture work that was groundbreaking in Memento Mori II and Requiem but looks slightly tacky nowadays as the iconic STEP texture bridges look more like ladders on their sides or really stiff rope bridges. It looks kind of dorky now, but it was pretty much the best you could hope for in vanilla because any attempt at making them look more solid or capable of supporting weight pushed vanilla closer to crashing. Hence, Bob's warning that "Vanilla Doom2 will most likely crash."

The three-, four-, and five-cell catwalks that you will tread on look way more functional than the classic STEP platforms. This gives Bloodworks more of the industrial vibe that it strives for. Larkin is very intentional about how you move through the midtexture bridges so as to preserve the coveted illusion of room-over-room. There's only one place where you get to test a catwalk and Larkin's routing is deliberate in making it so that the ONLY way that you can move forward is to jump off of it, where you then trigger the line that lowers the invisible sector. The way to get back on to the catwalk is unfortunately kind of clumsy as you have to take a teleporter to a landing pad back at its north end.

This isn't the only clumsy bit of level design, but I can appreciate at least one of the other bits because it's some sort of DoomCute storytelling. In order to progress once you reach the northern-central room, you basically climb up to an access panel and flip a switch behind it, killing the power to the room and thus the security system, which is represented by a barred-off pillar that sports a blur sphere, looking like a holographic eye. When you approach the "eye" you alert the rest of the base that you're trying to sneak out, which opens--among other things--the blood settling pond room. The lift that simulates the climb up to the access panel is a one-time deal, which would be a potential soft-lock in limit-removing ports, but I think that in ZDoom and Legacy--the two ports it was tested in--you could jump on the marble pillar and make it back up. To put things in perspective, PrBoom-Plus appears to play BLUDWRKS back perfectly. At least, it did everything it had to when I tested it out with IDDQD.

Larkin's combat is a tactical slog but I wouldn't exactly describe it as difficult. Player mobility early on is highly limited and some of the monster placement, like the Baron on the second floor of the starting room, seems placed specifically to keep you from camping doorways. There is more than enough room in the alcove directly across from him to lead his green shit to one side or the other as you slowly whittle down the army of imps and lost souls. This level has a TON of lost souls, by the way. The first ones are kind of cool since they pass through the overhead catwalk and actually seem, well, ghosty. They quickly lose their appeal as a good portion of this map, if played safe, will likely consist of diligently grinding down the lost souls with the chainsaw that Larkin has thoughtfully provided at the start.

I think that the most dangerous this level gets is in the security room. The Baron alcove, which you can trigger early by pushing into the northeast corner of the bars before lowering them, and the door going to the pond room--which is chock full o' Doom II trash enemies--opening up as you approach the partial invisibility combine with the dark lighting, cramped confines, and blur sphere to raise the stakes ever so slightly in Hell's favor. Otherwise, the blood pool door is the quintessential fatal funnel for demonflesh. The most threat that you'll have inside the room will be getting potentially sucker punched by imp fireballs. (The southeast one of these is broke and the imp inside is hermetically sealed, unable to do anything.)

Bloodworks is the next logical step up from the sort of bridges and platforms that Iikka Keränen utilized in works like Dystopia 3 as far as the makeup of the flat surfaces that you traverse. Iikka still has a leg up on polishing these features, though, with bespoke midtextures like slanted braces and supports. Larkin has a few fun things, to be sure, like the hole in the wall in the catwalk crossroads or the numerous "raining blood" textures (reinforced by a watery ambient sound achieved through the use of crushers). I think that the falling fluids could have stood to be a bit more goopy, though. They look more like the red static of a forcefield to me. Also, I got no idea what's going on with that final room, the one you need to hit a timed switch for. It looks like the exact moment that Larkin gave up on the careful artifice that dominated the rest of the map.

BLUDWRKS is still worth checking out as it's a fairly unique experience as long as you're okay with cramped, industrial levels. I know that the raining blood sound was apparently off-putting to players but it didn't bother me. If the sheer volume of monsters sounds off-putting then give it a go on HNTR as it cuts 40% of the monsters out as well as removing all of the Barons of Hell.

THAT DOESN'T WORK FOR ME,

BLOOD BROTHER