Kill the Cybie (SISOCRAN.WAD)

KILL THE CYBIE

by Esa Repo aka "Espi"

Espi made a deathmatch map in 2002 called Narcosis. Apparently he had enough people request that he turn it into a single-player level that he did so, so in 2003 we received a file by the name of SISOCRAN, which of course is Narcosis spelled backwards. Its official title is Kill the Cybie and it's a single-level for ZDoom on account of it uses a script to end the level after, you know, you Kill the Cybie. For some reason I had built in my head that this was going to be something goofy like Jim Flynn's Surrounded!, which is also a single map that requires you to slay a Cyberdemon. I was pleasantly surprised. In my defense, it's not like Repo doesn't have strange little levels like Barons o' Fun and The One Level With All the Teleporters.

SISOCRAN doesn't really have a story. Espi states your goal in the .TXT and there's a self-aware end text once you finish the map that assumes a posture of being ridiculous. This level is based around an octagonal, castle-like structure with something like an altar in its center. Maybe Doomguy is wandering around after taking a time portal to pre-Hell on Earth Europe. Possibly he was delivered to this very location because 1) demons and 2) chronoscans indicate that there is a powerful energy weapon like the BFG nearby, which would be a great way to kickstart a campaign of carnage. Perhaps the demons are guarding it in an attempt to keep it away from you, as the Bruiser Brothers at the gate can attest to.

In one of the sneakier features that I've seen in port-agnostic levels, Kill the Cybie uses slopes. It only uses them for visuals on features: the ceilings, window frames, an obelisk, and a dilapidated wall, so if you load this in a port that won't render them then the most obvious weird things that you'll see are some curiously chunky window frames. In any case, this is a gorgeous-looking keep. Espi as a texture and environmental artist continues to knock it out of the park. The mossy stone textures make for a great aesthetic and there are a few textures with ruined detailing on the southeast and northeast walls, one part transitioning into the collapsing battlement mentioned earlier, which through a bit of cheeky environmental storytelling appears to be a poor soul who blew himself up using the nearby rocket launcher.

Kill the Cybie has a very open layout and it's been liberally sprinkled with 160 or so monsters. There are powerups tucked away into the recesses of the level but you can pretty much go anywhere from the get go. The Cyberdemon that you must kill spawns in the center of the map once you've grabbed the BFG on the side opposite from the start. I started to think, huh, this could have been a fun level for demo runners except the end of level script only works in the ZDoom family. I took a peek at the DSDA to see if anyone had recorded a demo for it, and someone did! In PrBoom?? In 2006, RjY recorded a demo for SISOCRAN, crafting a BEX patch that ends the level once the Cyberdemon is killed. That's, uh, pretty cool!

The open layout makes the combat kind of challenging as you're open to attack from almost every part of whichever semicircle you happen to be in. This reminds me of 40oz's fascination with deathmatch layouts doubling as single-player madness leading to Motornerve, dovetailing with his love of Perdition's Gate, as well as those super slaughter H2H levels in the middle of H2H-XMAS. There's one teleport ambush that triggers alongside the appearance of the Cyberdemon, but it's a big one, dumping a lot of cacodemons in the yard behind Cybie as well as a pretty good trickle of enemies at the ends of the great wall. Depending on how you've managed your health and armor (I was admittedly pretty sloppy on my playthrough), attrition may prove to be your undoing, far more so than any of the Cyberdemon's rockets.

SISOCRAN is way cooler than I was expecting, which is generally the case with all of these less-documented items from his back catalogue. Would it have been awesome to get an Eternal Doom III castle level with this aesthetic? Hell yes it would have! Oh well; I guess that I'll just have to wait for the sweet embrace of Oblivion. I don't think that Kill the Cybie is going to rock your world, but it'll be fun while it lasts.

I'M A DEMON SLAYER

A PWAD PLAYER

WHEN MONSTERS TRY ME

I KILL THE CYBIE