Greymood (GRMOOD.WAD)

GREYMOOD

by "MysteriousHaruko"

Misty has had a healthy community career over the past seven or so years, working to co-host the Pigeon Speedmapping Sessions and contributing to a variety of community projects. She's also had a smattering of solo releases, including but not limited to the 2022 Cacoward HM Caffeine Injection. Greymood is her first public offering, a MAP01 replacement for Doom II published back in 2017 which now feels like a long, long time ago. There must have been some prior shared maps as rd alludes to an improvement over prior works (and the DoomWiki mentions Think about it), but Greymood was the first to find its way to the /idgames archives.

Greymood doesn't have a plot or any sort of framing narrative. The main purpose of the PWAD was for the author to express her depression through the lends of PWADcraft. This was accomplished mostly by way of the color scheme, which is weighted toward earthy and especially neutral tones, these being chiefly brown, gray, and white, not to forget about the black of darkness. As far as the setting goes, it's a nondescript fortress in a frozen locale, with something like ice or snow carpeting the unroofed outdoor areas. Maybe Doomguy has been dispatched to a new uprising of demonic activity in one of the wintery regions of Earth.

I did a double take when I saw an initial monster count of just over 300. Don't despair, though! Misty made sure that most of the action of this level consisted of action where the bodycount piles up relatively quickly. It may be a little slow at first as you pistol-whip the first ring of zombies and then dispatch a trio of mancubi with the combat shotgun but before too long you're given a rocket launcher and a bunch of explosives to cut loose with. Just, uh, don't go up the western area's stairs without snagging your shiny new weapon and ammo unless you want to struggle. The rocket-fed slaughter of the west wing is a feelgood fight, even the two sneaky arch-viles that are released later on.

The eastern wing has a great psychedelic look with the alternating gray water and molten lava textures, looking off-kilter in the tunnel that links the stairwell to the eastern chamber. Putting an arch-vile in that room is a bit of a gamble on the player since there's no telling how many rockets that they'll have over from the previous area. Like, I made it work with my handful plus the whole plasma gun surplus, but I can easily imagine this turning into an ammo sink. It's the second to last of the "major" encounters, though, as long as you don't count the Plutonia-esque revenants on pillars ambush that occurs when you grab the red key in the middle of the "Realm"-like starting area.

The other double take I had was when I heard the dulcet tones of John Romero kick in. This is a boss shooter level! But it gives you the BFG, a ton of cells, and two invulnerability spheres to figure out how to best the best. It's a fun slaughter, with two Cyberdemon overlords that I barely even noticed, as you drop immediately into a mosh pit and may spend time just clearing out the insanity before you notice the single piston lift. The ending sequence isn't exactly laborious but more... belabored? I don't have to wonder how a player can miss one (and thus subsequently the rest) of the switches because I did that, and even when you flip them all it's not like there's a big neon sign pointing you to where you need to go next. You just have to accept that the teleporter that puts you back on the ledge that you initially jumped down from serves a definite purpose.

Because the tones are purposefully brown and off-white, what few colors you see stand out in stark contrast. It's enough to wonder if there's some sort of emotional meta-narrative in how the colors are deployed. Like, the starting area has the set's only colored light fixtures, two pairs of orange strips, and cascading deep blue water in a visible but inaccessible area. From here you step out and down a more or less townhouse-style staircase and into the majority of the level's action. It's more or less neutral until you reach the east wing, where the lava flat and gray water are clearly at war with each other, but the player is very clearly stepping across the lava, with the "planks" of neutral liquid working as a buffer between the player and a traditionally damaging flat. From there it's through the off-balance tunnel before you can battle your way back into another room with cool, blue cascading water.

There's always a danger of reading too deeply into a work of art where the answer could be as simple as thinking that it might look a little too drab and depressing for players, but I believe that the .TXT's statement of attempting to "express my depressive feeling through grey, brown and white textures" opens the conversation on what colors were chosen and why. Like, whether there's any significance as to the unbalanced color walls happening after you pass the first evil eye decoration or the fact that there are two of them looking at the player from within the easternmost sanctum. Could the color of the decorations be just as significant, with green spanning the armor in the starting area, the eyes, and the invul spheres, and blue matching soul spheres? Certainly people have scoffed and will continue to scoff at the idea symbolism in Doom WADs, but it's far from unlikely. Rather, I suspect that any meaning that authors invest into their work will tend toward being highly personalized and thus opaque to the player. 

I liked Greymood. It's one of those levels where 300 monsters goes by quickly, which is always a treat. The gray water / molten lava shows that the author is not afraid of indulging in unusual visuals and I like its sort of washed out Plutonia aesthetic. I don't know when I'll be playing one of Misty's levels next but I'm convinced that I'm going to have a good time with it, whenever it is.

WALKING INTO REALMS OF LIGHT

THERE WILL BE NO DEATH TONIGHT