TOWER OF LIES
by "scwiba"
scwiba got his start in the 1 Monster project, kicking off a career of gimmick-dedicated mapsets. He was awfully quiet for the following nine or so years until 2016, with the Cacoward-winning Absolutely Killed. In the year prior in 2015, however, he published this level, Tower of Lies. It's a MAP01 replacement for Doom II to be played in a limit-removing port. Not hearing anything about it beyond its author just about disowning it, I wasn't sure what to expect. On its face, this is a regular ol' climb through a demon-infested tower. It's still deeply invested in being a gimmick level, though, even if figuring it as such involves a deep reading of its level design with respect to its name. It's all in the name, isn't it?
You're a tortured soul in Hell who wants to escape. Reminds me of the plot of one of my recent plays (The Living End). There's rumor of a tower in Hell that resembles the Tower of Babel in how it stretches toward another plane of existence, except rather than Heaven the one in question is the mortal world. If you want to earn your ticket out, then you're going to have to infiltrate and, if necessary, fight your way up through the structure. It isn't really in the business of demons to let souls OUT of Hell, and if you're Doomguy and they have you at a disadvantage then they almost certainly want to keep you there.
The first thing that I thought of when I read the plot and looked at the level was Sverre Kvernmo's Black Tower. The concepts are superficially similar as BLACKTWR involves you fighting your way into and then battling up through it, eventually confronting a Cyberdemon. There are some key differences, of course. For one, Kvernmo has you battle your way back down through the tower once you've assassinated its Cyberdemon lord. In LIES, the top of the tower is your end goal, after which you are free to teleport off to your ultimate reward. More importantly, Kvernmo's tower is a series of octagonal floors that keep the player within their bounds. scwiba is very deliberate in establishing the bounds of the tower and then moving the player in and out of it, partly I think to make things architecturally interesting for the player but also I think as a way to serve the level's name.
The bounds of the tower exist in a 1024 x 1024 grid. This isn't a 1024 level, but if you realize the size of the tower while you play through its very atmospheric opener, then you might be fooled into thinking that scwiba has structured its action to take place within the bounds of the tower's foundation. Lie! Well, not exactly a lie, just an assumption that the player is allowed to make and which is definitively subverted over the course of the level. The player is free to move outside of the tower's bounds at multiple points, often engaging in combat. In fact, the player's movement through the level both begins in and ends outside of the 1024 unit tower structure.
The primary reason why this level is the Tower of Lies is because each segment of the tower is geographically isolated in the void, physically linked by teleporters, and only visually linked through copies of its level geometry. If you never consulted the automap then you could be firmly under the illusion that you are playing through one enormous megastructure. It's a series of painstaking visual cheats with some clever sequences like the player bearing witness to powerups rising up to the next floor on a platform. In reality, that's not the same blue armor that you saw lifted into the ceiling. That's not the same staircase that you saw through the metal bars. It's all a Tower of Lies.
The title is what makes this meta. Everything that scwiba does in the previous paragraph is pretty much what I'd expect from a cool-looking limit-removing level with the same setting. Except, the author deliberately calls attention to the artifice that they engage in. I wonder if part of the reason that scwiba downplayed Tower of Lies the last time I brought it up is because in retrospect it may seem like it isn't much of a gimmick to be proud of or draw attention to. Yeah, yeah, big level uses visual cheats to fake a single, multi-story structure. Next, I suppose that you'll tell me that professional wrestling isn't real. However: both the design of these kinds of levels and the physical storytelling in professional wrestling are performances for the benefit of their audiences.
The player's journey through the tower and its environment is a parade of mini-maps, each with its own flavor of gameplay. The opening of this level is a long, atmospheric journey up to and around the tower, eventually climbing down through a hole and into a crypt. scwiba is courting horror games, here. It's no secret that you're going to have to fight monsters, and if you're playing in a port that displays the ratio, then you know just how many. The long journey up to the tower and through the crypt builds suspense until the player, shotgun in hand, confronts the first few enemies in the subsequent dungeon. Not to spoil anything, but the author picked pretty much the best monster to use for the jump-scare.
Some of the other fight concepts are pretty simple. The first post-crypt fight consists of Berserk punching spectres and then spectres and demons. Another battle is a cool "arch-viles teleport in and start rezzing corpses that in all honesty should have been obvious to you that they weren't just sprites" moment. Once you get above ground, it gets understandably more difficult to justify encounters outside of the tower confines, but scwiba got one good one in with a two-front top and bottom staircase battle that consists mostly of imps. It's also sneakily a way to encourage the player to blow all of their rockets before arriving at the arch-vile resurrection farm.
The penultimate floor is another one of scwiba's little S.T.R.A.I.N. MAP10 homages. It's a little kinder, though. The player starts out looking at the combat shotgun and a couple of boxes of shells but the door to it closes in their face. They are instead routed through the side-rooms of the tower, picking up ammo and powerups in preparation for the final showdown. The next bit teleports you into the room that you've been chasing, but SURPRISE! It's time for an "ascent" rather than Hell Revealed's "The Descent" (MAP31). The spicy arch-vile on the elevator climb felt like a bit much, especially if you didn't find, idk, the big cell secret in the library.
The rest of the level's fights are mostly fun, pitched battles. The player has to handle a ton of cacodemons on the ground floor, which can get a little silly with how high they end up floating. I also enjoyed the library battle. The finale is a true blue slaughterfest that can quickly get congested, with the player obligated to use the plasma gun when things get too dense to swiftly dispatch the weaker monsters. I was worried about the revenant snipers on the outside but I think that there's so much going on that it's difficult for the rockets to land as long as you can keep moving. In terms of combat, LIES's nadir is an early segment that occurs ostensibly inside a narrow passage on the perimeter of the tower. It's not very long, but isn't all that engaging. I feel like it's a meta-commentary on 1024 considering that almost all of it is outside of the imaginary boundary of the 1024 grid.
There is one more aspect of LIES that I'm obligated to talk about, and that's the ending. That platform at the end of the tower? That's not your trip out of Hell. It's a one-way ticket to a brutal Baron burial. This level has a "Phobos Anomaly" finish. This is another layer of lies on top of the rest of the tower. It's a payoff of the story set up in the .TXT, as you are led by "rumors" to believe that the tower takes you out of Hell. I also feel that sector type 11 exits are fairly rare outside of levels leveraging E1M8, maybe because it's such a downbeat way to end a map, so while it's not a lie on scwiba's part, my belief in a regular exit is a lie that I told myself, an unconscious assumption founded on familiarity with PWAD design conventions.
And that's the core of it. scwiba is almost entirely blameless in crafting a Tower of Lies, because they are all lies that players indulge in on their own behalves. Some of these are assumptions, and some of these are fairly transparent, as with the structure of the level when revealed with virtually any usage of the automap after the first floor. Does this irrevocably break your immersion? Or do you tell yourself that, yeah, it may not be the area that I just came from, but it looks like it is and that's what it's supposed to be, so I'm going to play along with the visual narrative? Are you even conscious of making this judgment at all, or is the "lie" of this presentation so ingrained in your thought process that it's automatic?
Tower of Lies is a fun and cool-looking Doom II level. On top of that, it prompts players to ask just a little bit more about their own gameplay experiences in ways that can be expanded significantly beyond the scope of Doom or even games in general. Of course, you don't have to make existential observations on things that you generally take for granted. A perfectly fine map for Doom II is still right there, just waiting to be played.
TELL ME LIES
TELL ME SWEET LITTLE LIES
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